Thinking Out Loud in Public

Yesterday, I wrote about the birth of the star system prior to 1870, when notable actors would travel from resident stock company to resident stock company throughout the country, performing with the company actors for a few days and then moving on.

Today, I need to double back to talk about real estate for a moment, because it is crucial to the story of what happened in 1896. To do so, I am reliant on the invaluable work, once again, of Alfred L Bernheim’s 1932 classic (reissued in 1964) The Business of the Theatre: An Economic History of the American Theatre, 1750-1932. Just a few words about this book. Bernheim was hired by the Actors' Equity Association to write a historical description addressing the question of “how is the theatre run?,” i.e., “the economic factors involved in the business of conducting the enterprise known as ‘the theatre.'” Bernheim endeavored to “analyze the theatre industry as it might the steel industry or the automobile industry or the shoe-string industry, if any of those had been its subject.” The book, which is well worth reading, unfortunately is no longer in print but is available to read online at the Internet Archive to those who are interested, and used copies can be found occasionally online. According to my mentor, Calvin Pritner, the book was standard in graduate theater programs when it was reissued in 1964, but that is no longer the case.

Rather than try to synthesize and paraphrase Bernheim’s discussion of the ownership of theater buildings in the 19th century, I intend to string together a series of quotations from the book. It is another example of how different the business model of theater, commercial and noncommercial, became in the 20th century until this very minute. From this point on, unless otherwise indicated, all quotations are of Bernheim.

If I were going to provide a tl;dr summary of what follows, it would be this:

“During this century and a half each company was a self-contained unit, entirely independent of every other company; entirely independent of every form of outside control and influence, except, of course, that of the taste of the theatregoing public. Each company consisted of a group of relatively permanent actors with a repertoire of standard English plays, which later on was gradually augmented by the addition of contemporary successes from abroad—from Germany and France, as well as from England. The settings, costumes and properties necessary to mount these plays were part of the equipment of each company, and were used repeatedly with necessary alterations and additions as new types of plays were added to the repertoire. Each company controlled, either through ownership or by lease, the theatre in which it played; and as time wore on and the theatre buildings took on a more permanent character, the relationship between a company and a given theatre became closer and closer. The companies continued to travel for part of each season among a limited number of cities, but more and more they remained at their home theatres and were identified with them.”

But let’s be clear: these theater buildings were not the elaborate palaces associated with Broadway or large regional theaters.

“The buildings were flimsy wooden affairs, erected apparently without any idea of permanency. They were burned with discouraging frequency. There is a tradition that one was blown down in a wind storm…It was not until the building of the Southwark Theatre in Philadelphia in 1766 that there was any serious attempt to make a playhouse durable…”

Often, paying off the cost of the theater building was built into the budget for the first season, and often the cost was financed by the manager himself. “Since the company controlled the theatre, there was no division of receipts between the house and the company. Total gross receipts went to the company out of which, however, had to come rental or the cost of erecting the theatre. For instance, the first permanent theater in America was founded by Lewis Hallam in 1752:

…the profits of Hallam’s company were distributed in eighteen shares. Each of the twelve adult actors, including Hallam, got one. Hallam himself received two additional shares—one for his services as manager and one for the services of his three children. The four remaining shares were assigned to the property.

“Later,” Bernheim adds, “it became common for citizens of a community to aid with subscriptions, in return for which they were entitled to seats for the performances….Still later, when theatres were being erected of a more enduring nature, and when, as a result, they acquired a capital value, they were frequently financed by stock issues, often through public subscription, and were leased to managers for a money rental sufficient to yield a moderate return on the capital expended.”

But the central thing to keep in mind was that the theater company either owned or had a long-term lease of their venue, and the entire endeavor was independently financed:

“…up to about the close of the Civil War, there was no separation of control between the theatre and the company that used it. Whether a company owned its theatre, or leased it, or had the use of it for some consideration, it managed and controlled it in every instance. The theatre [building] was never an independently operated venture as it is nowadays.”

Further:

The manager conducted his enterprise as an individual, or, if he had one or more associates, as often was the case, then as a partnership. All the funds that were needed were supplied by the manager, or managers. There was no outside money in the theatre—no angel to back a show: no speculator in theatrical real estate. No one thought of borrowing money for the theatre, and no one thought of lending it. All the necessary equipment, costumes, properties, sets and effects were bought outright. They could not be rented. There were no theatrical supply houses. The theatre was run on a cash basis.”

Crucially, “The manager was in almost every instance an actor himself, and he was in complete control over every phase of the company’s activity. He was not responsible to any outside interest, for there was never any outside capital invested in the company which might claim a share in management or look for a share of profits.” Indeed. “A theatre owner was not deemed a theatrical manager unless he also actually managed a company and produced plays.”

In other words, resident stock companies were artist owned, artist financed, and artist operated, and thus answered only to the audience. This is one of the things that changed in 1870, and was completely destroyed in 1896.

In Part 4 of this series, I will take a side road and, well, interview myself to explain the purpose of this series. And at long last, Part 5 will bring us to 1870.

As I wrote in The Rooted Stage: Beginnings, part 1 of this series, the first century of the American theater was dominated by the resident stock company which had the following characteristics:

• rooted in a single place
• in a single theater
• using a consistent group of actors
• performed a variety of plays
• independent (i.e., the capital invested in the company came from those within the company itself)
• organized as a cooperative

But all of that changed around 1870, and again in 1896. (Ooh, 1896! Another teaser.) So what happened in 1870?

Not so fast. It didn’t happen all at once–poof! There were several intermediate steps that were based on decisions that seemed pragmatic at the time, but that eventually would lead to the collapse of the resident stock companies entirely. That resident stock companies were locally-owned and self-contained were a mirror of American society in general. As historian Robert Wiebe wrote, “the entire nation at this time was composed of ‘island communities,’ each self-contained, self-sufficient, and loosely connected to other communities. Local autonomy was still the ‘heart of democracy…'”

In the introduction to The Cambridge History of American Theatre (Volume 2) co-editor Christopher Bigsby makes an important connection between Wiebe’s idea of “island communities” and resident stock companies:

In its decentralization, the stock company was fully consistent with Wiebe’s model. Under the stock system, every local community with a theatre constituted an independent producing center, and, in fact, each individual company, in its organization, working relationships, and functional independence, was the theatrical equivalent of Wiebe’s “island community.” Accordingly, actors in stock companies normally led stable, settled lives and enjoyed working conditions comparable to workers in other fields.

Actors performed three nights a week, for instance, until the latter half of the 19th century–how humane is that! But those performances were demanding, to say the least. As Douglas MacDermott outlines in The Cambridge History of American Theatre (Volume 1), a typical performance included:

a five-act main piece and a two-or three-act farce or musical afterpiece, with songs and dances by members of the company between plays and sometimes between acts. A provincial company would have a repertory of at least two dozen main pieces and half as many afterpieces, any combination of which could be performed on a day’s notice. The main pieces included three to six Tudor and Stuart plays, as many as eight others had been written between 1700 and 1750, and ten or more were recent London successes. The afterpieces were normally all of current authorship. Provincial companies did not, except in rare cases of local authorship, introduce new plays."

It was the overlap of plays in the repertory, especially those of Shakespeare, that made the first step toward the rupture of 1870 possible. In the early part of the 19th century, well-known actors, usually from England, began to tour the US. They would contract to perform a set number of plays from their repertoire with the members of the local stock company. Shakespeare was a particular draw. Indeed, as Lawrence Levine writes in Highbrow/Lowbrow, the famed American actor-manager Joseph Jefferson “held Shakespeare responsible for the star system that prevailed for so much of the nineteenth century since “his tragedies almost without exception contain one great character on whom the interest of the play turns, and upon whom the attention of the audience is centered.”

In the paragraph above, I bolded the first step toward 1870: the birth of the star system. It was a very attractive option for resident stock companies, who could provide their audiences with some variety while also charging higher ticket prices and packing the house. Thus, the star actor made an excellent living, and the company members made more than they’d usually make while he was visiting. A win-win. “From the 1820s on,” Bigsby writes, “it became common for a traveling star to be attached to a local stock company for at least part of a season, and increasingly American audiences came to demand nothing less than a star in every performance.” The process, as described by Bigsby and co-editor Donald Wilmeth, was simple:

“A star often arrived the day before the first performance and rehearsed with the company the morning before playing each role. Having played all of his or her roles at least once, the star departed for the next engagement while the company played without a star until the next one arrived.”

The ease of touring was enhanced with the expansion of the railroad system in the US, and soon The Road was seen as being paved with gold by foreign and US stars alike. Famous actors like William Charles Macready, Edwin Forrest, Edwin Booth, Charlotte Cushman, Matilda Heron, and Julia Dean were stars of the first magnitude who made their fortunes touring.

But soon a problem developed for the local companies. Whereas prior to the star system, an actor in a resident stock company had the opportunity to play a great many roles in rotation and gradually, as they developed their craft, take on larger and more challenging roles. But with the arrival of the star system, this process was truncated, and the best local actors, frustrated in their ambitions, eventually began heading for the major theater towns in order to have a chance at playing more challenging roles and thus becoming stars themselves. The actors of the resident companies who stayed behind, on the other hand, soon became mere backdrops for star turns. But the money was good. For a while.

Predictably, as the stars realized their drawing power, they began demanding a larger and larger percentage of the house, which meant the company remembers saw smaller and smaller profits themselves. However, there seemed to be no other options: audience expectations had been changed. Jack Poggi:

“Tired of the same old faces in the stock companies, audiences came to expect an unbroken succession of new personalities. The managers, realizing that they could not make much money without a star, and that with a famous star they could make a great deal, began competing for the services of the most popular actors by paying higher and higher percentages of the receipts. The biggest stars often demanded so much that the management lost money, even with a full house and increased prices. The only recourse was to cut expenses; the salaries of the local actors were reduced (impelling the better ones to set off in search of stardom, leaving the worse behind), and budgets for scenery and costumes were cut. These economies made for further deterioration of the local company and greater dependence on visiting stars.”

As the quality of the resident company actors deteriorated, the stars began to bring along a co-star, so that they were more fully in control of the quality of their performances. And as the railroad expanded, the stars could travel in comfort, making an excellent living.

Meanwhile, the stock companies began to totter.

Next: Part 3: 1870 [Finally!]

“Meanwhile, back in the Year One…” – Jethro Tull, Skating Away on the Thin Ice of a New Day

So how did the theater get where it is today? And how could it be different? These are the two questions that form the foundation for this series.

The importance of the first question is described by Alfred L. Bernheim, whose book The Business of the Theatre, published in 1932, is considered definitive by many. “To understand the theatre of today,” Bernheim writes, “one must go back and study the developments from which the theatre of today has evolved. Hence we must examine the theatre of yesterday and trace the evolution of present practices and customs.”

The second question–And how could it be different?– is my own, and reflects my own dissatisfaction with the economic environment in which theater is created today, one that is increasingly desperate, dysfunctional, and financially unsustainable for the artists who make it. And so as we examine previous forms that American theater has taken, it benefits us to keep an eye out for practices that were abandoned for historical reasons but that might be restored to our practice today.

The Starting Point

Jack Poggi, in his excellent book Theater in America: The Impact of Economic Forces, 1870-1967, is pretty blunt:

“Before 1870 most plays in America were performed by resident stock companies, groups that used the same actors and the same theater for a series of different productions. These companies were self- sufficient units, content for the most part to remain in one place and capable of producing old and new plays with the same nucleus of actors, augmented usually by a visiting star.”

Those characteristics are important to reiterate. Resident stock companies are:

• rooted in a single place
• in a single theater
• using a consistent group of actors (occasionally augmented by a visiting star)
• performed a variety of plays

Folks, a reminder: that was the original vision of the regional theater in the middle of the 20th century that was considered so innovative that Joseph Wesley Ziegler, an early Executive Director of the Theatre Communications Group (TCG) subtitled his history of the regional theater movement as the “revolutionary stage.” Well, he was right: the regional theater had its roots in the theater that arose around the American Revolution!

In addition to the dominance of the resident stock company in Early American theater, and (again) similar to the ideas advocated by the regional theater movement one hundred years later, the system was decentralized:

“Every community with a theater was a producing center. A new play might appear in Boston, Baltimore, Charleston, or San Francisco, as well as in New York. It is true that New York was already the leading theatrical city, but only because it had more and better stock companies and because most stars began their tours there.”

So rooted, decentralized, and, perhaps most importantly, independent.

Again, Poggi:

“Each local manager was virtually independent. He owned or leased the theater building, hired and fired actors, chose each play or booked a star in a particular play, cast the actors and directed the play— at least to the extent that direction existed in those days (and to the extent that he could wrest control from a visiting star, who was usually his own director).”

Be careful, though– the word “manager” didn’t have the same meaning that it has today. Bernheim writes, “The manager was in almost every instance an actor himself, and he was in complete control over every phase of the company’s activity. He was not responsible to any outside interest, for there was never any outside capital invested in the company which might claim a share in management or look for a share of profits.”

OK, so a manager was an early entrepreneur? Sort of, with one major difference. Again, Bernheim:

“In its internal financial aspects, the company was generally organized on a cooperative basis. It was not until after the Revolution that the system of paying regular salaries to actors became prevalent. Up to that time it was customary for all members of the company to get a pro-rata share of whatever surplus there might be at the end of a season after all costs, including living expenses, had been met.”

In other words, the artists in one of these companies had skin in the game–they benefitted from the artistic decisions made during the course of a season. They felt each success and failure in their pocketbook.

So let’s add that to our list of characteristics of resident stock companies:

• Independent – the capital invested in the company came from those within the company
• Organized as a cooperative

If you’ve studied your theater history, you’ll recognize this as the dominant model for European theater companies from the Elizabethan Era through the 19th century. And it serves as the basis for my own ideas described in Building a Sustainable Theater. So what happened in 1870 that Poggi hinted at?

Alan Jacobs responds to Ross Douthat’s NYTimes question as to whether we can make pop culture great again with a blunt “Nope. Absolutely not.” His reason for this dour assessment is the “algorithmic culture,” which cannot be replaced by a more fragmented, individualized culture. Douthat sort of feels the same, bemoaning a film scene that is “completely fragmented, with forms of creativity that are all intensely niche, like the podcast-splintered marketplace of news consumption.” He looks at “Barbenheimer” as an example of two great pieces of film art being created at the same time and capturing the attention of the general public. Couldn’t that happen more?, he sighs.

Again, Jacobs brings the hammer down: “Great works of art can still be made,” Jacobs writes, “but if they are great their social status will be marginal at best; anyone capable of appreciating them will be hard put to find them. (It’s not impossible, mind you; but it’s not easy.) And many people who could in time make great work will be deterred and, reasonably enough, give up before they get started and work instead for hedge funds.” Bleak.

Jacobs’s suggestion echoes that of critic Lionel Trilling, who said, in a 1974 Commentary forum entitled “Culture at the Present Time,” when pressed by Norman Podhoretz’s question as to what the critic ought to do during a “bad time” like the 1970s, responds “You become historical-minded.” Podhoretz was outraged: he wanted Trilling to say critics ought to go on the attack; but Trilling was right, as is Jacobs, who says, “I’d bet a large sum of money that if you were to spend a year breaking bread with the dead, immersing yourself in the great works of the past, then at the end of that year the truth of my assessment would be obvious to you.” He then goes on to give us the good news, which is that there’s never been a better time to do this, considering all the online resources available to access the classics of past culture.

And there is a big part of me that enthusiastically agrees. Because the fact is that I just can’t find much to celebrate in popular culture these days, nor in my own area of expertise, the theater. Broadway is a bigger wasteland than it usually is, and the regional theaters across America are either collapsing or trying to remain afloat by becoming a pale reflection of Broadway. That four of the offerings of a season at the heavily-subsidized Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis are Dial M for Murder, ART, Little Shop of Horrors, and The Mousetrap is a clear indication that you’ve reached rock bottom. So personally I’ve followed Jacobs’s inclinations, revisiting the classics of theater, novels, philosophy, music, poetry, and visual art. And it’s been great, and that’s great for me as an arts consumer, but as Jacobs himself admits, it is pretty awful for the artists. And ultimately what is bad for the artists is bad for our culture, and what is bad for the culture is bad for our society. Heck, we have Trump because pop culture invented the wretched genre of “reality TV,” without which Trump would likely be sleeping under a bridge right now.

But I am reminded of the words of Margo Jones, arguably the founder of the regional theater movement, who argued in her inspiring 1965 book Theatre-in-the-Round that a commitment to the now is vitally important to the health of the theater:

I believe it is imperative in creating new resident professional companies to take a violent stand about the choice of plays. Personally I believe in the production of classics and new scripts, with emphasis on new scripts. Our theatre can never be stronger than the quality of its plays. We must, therefore, have a great number of good plays. The classics have proved their value through­out the history of the theatre, and I believe we should draw on them as great literature and great theatre. But if we produce only classics, we are in no way reflecting our own age. Our theatres must not only be professional, they must be contemporary as well. The most excellent seasons in New York are those which bring forth exciting new play-writing talent.

She goes on:

Too many people are saying, “I’ll do a new play if I can find a good one.” Certainly you must find a good one, but this attitude is not good enough. The plays can be found if you look hard enough. And if you take the vio­lent stand I have spoken about, you will feel obligated to search and search and search until the scripts are dis­covered. I have a belief that there is great writing in America today and that much of it has not yet been un­earthed.

In other words, quit being so damn passive. Is it hard to find great contemporary art in our fragmented, algorithmic culture? Sure. So what? Stop being like baby birds in the nest with their beaks wide open crying out for some Mama Bird to bring the worm of great art back and shove it down their little throats. Do some damn work! And when you find it, celebrate it–tell your friends, write on your blog. That’s what social media ought to be good for–telling the world. Yes, sure, read Eliot and Auden and Mann and Dostoevsky, AND look for today’s incarnations and bring them to the attention of the world.

Jones:

Great theatres have always had their playwrights. Shakespeare, Lope de Vega, Moliere, Ibsen—all these were men around whom theatrical companies were functioning. The Moscow Art Theatre had Chekhov; the Abbey Theatre had Yeats, Synge and O’Casey; the Provincetown had O’Neill; the Group had Odets. We must have our new play­wrights, and we will not have them unless we give them many outlets to see their plays produced. This is the best way in which they can learn to write better plays.

Great theaters were not created by doing productions of middle-brow hits of the past. And a great culture isn’t created that way either.

That said, young artists need to listen to Jacobs and spend considerable time “breaking bread with the dead.” Playwright Tony Kushner put it well back in 1997 when he said:

I travel around the country doing lectures…and I am generally tremendously impressed with the students I meet and talk with, and generally unimpressed with what they know, and among these impressive and impressively undereducated students the worst, I am sorry to say, are the arts majors. And it isn’t simply that they seem remarkably non-conversant with the pillars of Western thought, with the political struggles of the day, with what has been written up in the morning’s paper–these arts majors know shockingly little about the arts.

Forget literature. How many theater majors do you know who could tell you, at the drop of a hat, which plays are by Aeschylus, which by Sophocles and which by Euripides? Or the dates of any of those writers? How many undergraduate playwriting majors, for instance, know even a single sentence of ancient Greek, just to have the sound of it in their ears and the feel of it in their mouths? How many really know what iambic pentameter is? How about alexandrines? How about who wrote what in alexandrines? How many know the names of a single Chinese playwright, or play? Or of more than one or two African playwrights? How many have read Heiner Miller? Suzan-Lori Parks? How many have read more than one play by either of these writers? How many have never heard of them? How many know who Lessing was, or why we should care? How many have read, I mean really read and absorbed, The Poetics?_ The Short Organum_?

By not having even a nodding acquaintance with the tradition I refer to, I submit that my students are incapable of really understanding anything written for the stage in the West, and for that matter in much of the rest of the world, just as they are incapable of reading Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Marx, Kristeva, Judith Butler and a huge amount of literature and poetry. They have, in essence, been excluded from some of the best their civilization has produced, and are terribly susceptible, I would submit, to the worst it has to offer.

So yes, artists need to pry themselves away from Netflix and break bread with the dead. And then we consumers, and professors, and critics need to sing at the top of our voices whenever we find even a glimmer of greatness in a living artist.

Not that I think Ross Douthat would know a great work of art if it bit him in the ass…

No, I’m not talking about the freebies we give to family and friends who come to our show. I’m talking about the way book proposals use the term: “comparables,” books that are similar to what you’re writing, books that yours could be compared to.

Theater has been comping the wrong competition for over a century.

At first, theater saw movies as the competition, which made total sense because once the Theatrical Syndicate abandoned most theater buildings on “the road,” theater owners began scheduling movies into their now-empty spaces. When theater was competing with silent movies, we focused on the fact that live theater had actors who talked; when Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer arrived in 1927, that argument no longer worked. Movies could provide entertainment for a much lower cost than live theater, while telling stories in the same way theater did: actors pretending to be characters. Ever since then, we’ve been trying to catch up. We hitched our wagon to “liveness,” especially if there was a national star in the cast. That worked a little. Then we tried to sell prestige–theatergoers were among an elite. Except that theater needed to sell a lot of tickets to make ends meet, so we couldn’t be too elite. At the same time, commercial theater tried to keep up with the spectacle that film could provide. That was harder, because film had more money and better technology, and once green screens and CGI started to appear, theater was on the ropes. Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark was (or at least should have been) the last gasp of that competition. One wonders how many actors have to be injured before our quest for theatrical spectacle will be abandoned.

TV was movies squared.

If movies killed theater with spectacle, TV stole all the non-spectacle stories: situation comedies, doctor shows, soap operas, domestic dramas, legal dramas, cop shows. All to be consumed without having to leave the comfort of your home. Then TV started comping movies, and the race was on. Meanwhile, theater kept on comping both of them (hey! see Hugh Jackman In Person in Music Man!), and kept getting it’s ass handed to it. Finally, streaming services and the internet delivered the coup de grace. Everything everywhere all at once without getting out of your jammies. Game over.

Now what? Comping Local Restaurants

The thing is that theater never should have been comping movies, TV, or streaming services in the first place, because all of them are mass media whereas theater is a local medium. Local in the sense that, at any one time, only the people present in a particular town in a particular building at a specific time can participate. This is so obvious, and yet it is usually ignored. No matter how popular the live version of Wicked is, the Gershwin Theatre can only hold 15,464 people a week, compared to the $165M the movie version brought in on the first weekend. To make the comparison concrete, the live theater version would have to sell every ticket for $10,669 to match the movie box office take. That illustrates the difference between “local” and “mass,” and we should take it seriously.

So if film and TV are not appropriate comps for theater, then what is? Well, I would argue that something like a local restaurant might be a good starting place, at least as far as scale is concerned. It is something that requires people to leave home to partake of a unique experience in a particular town and a specific space that has a limited capacity. People are eating something that might be conceivably cooked at home, either by themselves or in a frozen or delivered version ala Hello Fresh. So what is the “value added” that can make a local restaurant viable? Why are people willing to leave the comfort of their own home to pay considerably more for food than they’d pay to make it at home? Yes, if it’s a fancy restaurant, it sometimes has something to do with celebrating a “special event,” as a commenter argued about theater in a previous post on Creative Insubordination entitled The Value of Liveness. But a restaurant would have a hard time making ends meet by relying on Valentine’s Day and anniversary celebrations. Sometimes, people just head out to their favorite pizza place, even though they could just as easily cook up a frozen pizza at home faster and more inexpensively.

The point I’m trying to make isn’t really about what makes people go to a local restaurant (although I think people in theater would do well to think hard about that topic), but rather that the scale of a local business like a restaurant matches that of a local business like a theater, and so could serve as a more appropriate comp than a mass medium like movies or TV. This involves a real transformation in the way that we think about theater, and of artists’s place in the theater, which might be more of a sticking point than we’d like to admit, because we’d have to abandon fantasies.

Nobody becomes a “star waiter” working at a local restaurant; in fact, the idea of becoming a waiter in order to acquire international fame and fortune is patently absurd (Hollywood “discovery” myths to the contrary). Sometimes a chef might make the jump to celebrity status, I guess, if they end up on the Food Channel or publishing a bestselling cookbook, but for the most part being a waiter or chef or cook is an end in itself, something you do because you like the work or need the money. Someone starting a restaurant may have a vision involving its atmosphere and decoration, the type and quality of the food served, the friendliness provided to regular customers (“your usual, Norm?") or any number of things that will give the restaurant a special identity. But the goal isn’t mass fame, it’s local appreciation. And that, ultimately, is the first transformation in our thinking that needs to occur in order for theater to thrive.

What is it that Biff begs from Willy near the end of Death of a Salesman? “Will you take that phoney dream and burn it before something happens?” There are better dreams to dream than fame and fortune, one that focuses on the day-to-day enjoyment of making something artistically nourishing for people you care about and who care about you.

As Apple famously said, Think Different.

I recently stumbled up a thirteen-year-old blog post by the always-insightful arts thinker Diane Ragdale, who tragically passed away less than a year ago. (You could do a lot worse than to spend time working through her ArtsJournal blog Jumper from beginning to end.) The post I’m looking at here is entitled “How to avoid a strip-mall future for the arts sector: Lessons from the boutique label, Pi”, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that just about every paragraph provides an insight that could instantly make our theater system better.

The first half of the essay is a summary–actually, more than a summary; an _analysis – of an article in the NY Times about the indie jazz label Pi Recordings, and I think we are best served by simply quoting her:

Here are a few keys to Pi’s success (which I gleaned from the article):

(1) Unlike many labels that flood the market with product (often as a hedge against the uncertainty of not knowing which will succeed or not), Pi releases a handful of albums per year and is highly selective in choosing which artists to get behind. Virtually everything it releases meets with critical acclaim. Because it has earned a reputation for consistently putting out great albums and has a very clear niche, it has a devoted (and growing) fan base.

(2) Given its limited release schedule, and the limited revenue potential of each of its releases (these are not mainstream artists), Pi keeps its overhead low. Its owners are pragmatic and disciplined. By staying small they have been able to maintain artistic integrity.

(3) Pi has a long courtship with an artist before it makes a commitment. Once in, however, Pi invests deeply in the development of its artists and ensures that each receives sufficient resources, attention, and support from the label. This is a critical factor in the label’s remarkable track record and reputation.

Pi’s strategies are serving both its artists and its customers.

To boil it down further:

1. Be selective
2. Keep overhead low
3. Commit to specific artists over time

Ragsdale then goes on to share her own brutally honest points about arts organizations today (I’m going to use bold to highlight my personal favorites):

It seems that more than a few overleveraged and underperforming professional nonprofit arts organizations need to both better differentiate themselves and hold themselves to higher artistic standards; to right-size their institutions and reduce fixed costs given the amount of income they can reasonably expect for the forseeable future; and to provide more time, attention, and resources to artists and to the development, production, and thoughtful promotion of artistic works.

And then there is a paragraph that ought to become the screensaver on every computer at Americans for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts (consider the whole paragraph bolded):

I’d much rather live in a community with a sustainable number of boutique arts organizations than one with a deluxe mall featuring four high-end department-stores (the “flagship” orchestra, theater, opera, and ballet companies) that suck up the majority of the resources and a bunch of strip malls made up of undercapitalized retail chains and mom-and-pop shops that either saw their best days in 1985 and haven’t been able to make improvements since, or were formed in recent years and (while perhaps promising) are struggling for attention, customers and capital.

I seriously fear that the strip mall nonprofit arts sector is our future.

Her diagnosis (back to my bolding):

We tend to think of a ˜sustainable state" for the arts and culture sector as being one in which existing arts organizations have achieved equilibrium and can crank along in perpetuity. This is wrongheaded: even if we could achieve a state in which all existing organizations could secure adequate resources to keep running year-after-year, the lack of creative destruction in the sector would eventually lead to its stultification (oh wait, we may be there now). This is one of the consequences of letting some institutions get ‘too big to fail’ (and too big is relative to the size of city you are in and the other arts organizations in your market): the majority of arts sector resources get sucked into the incumbents and rather than creative destruction (reinvention of those firms or their replacement by younger, more innovative ones) we end up with plain old destruction (losing the boutiques and watching the big organizations calcify).

As Ragsdale predicted, we are seeing the calcification of our “too big to fail” regional theaters even as we speak. For example, this year Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theatre has used its subsidy to produce Dial M for Murder, ART, Little Shop of Horrors, and the upcoming production of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap. Color me unimpressed.

There needs to be a whole lot of “creative destruction."

As Diane Ragsdale’s analysis of Pi Recordings suggests, if theater is going to not just survive but creatively thrive, it isn’t going be because of the Big Theaters, it’s going to be through the efforts of the Indies who are focused on high quality, developing artists, serving audiences, and staying small and focused. This has certainly been true historically. You can see these principles in action within the theaters that revolutionized the theater in the late 19th- the early-20th centuries: Andre Antoine’s Theatre Libre in Paris, J. T. Grein’s Independent Theatre Society in London, Otto Brahm’s Die Freie Buhne in Berlin, and the America’s entire Little Theater Movement that resisted the artistically barren commercial Broadway stage in the first decades of the 20th century. All were small, selective, and artist-focused.

And this is why former-NEA Chair Rocco Landesmann had it completely backwards when he suggested, at the Arena Stage’s “From Scarcity to Abundance” convening in January 2011, that because the supply of theater [in the major metropolises – after all, Landesmann was a New Yorker] had outstripped audience demand for it, therefore the NEA ought to stop giving grants to a bunch small, obscure theaters scattered across America and instead focus it’s largesse on a few major insitutions (e.g., Steppenwolf and the Guthrie, or the Arena for that matter). Ironically, it was Diane Ragsdale who was interviewing Landesmann when he said these words. Seven months later, it is clear she disagreed with his diagnosis: Ragsdale is putting her money on the pi’s.

It is also why we shouldn’t rely on organizations like the Professional Non-Profit Theatre Coalition, led by “a small leadership committee consisting of Arena Stage, Center Theatre Group, Pasadena Playhouse, The Public Theater, and Woolly Mammoth Theatre of Washington DC” who are asking Congress to provide –get this – $500M a year for five years to help regional theaters stay afloat (the entire annual allocation for the NEA currently stands at a grudging $207.5M). First of all, the geographical footprint of that “leadership committee” is breathtakingly narrow: two theaters from Washington DC, two from LA, and one from New York. I mean, come on. As importantly, the collective annual budgets for those five theaters? Between $60M and $77M (averaging $12-$15 each). This group is the theater’s fat boys pulling up to the table for a feast. Nevertheless, it’s all nothing but a pipe dream: we’ll be lucky if Trump, Musk, and Ravaswamy even allow the NEA to continue to exist after January 20.

No, this is not the group that is going to revive the theater. It’s going to be the scrappy boutique theaters that show the way. Theaters rooted in a community, run by visionary artists committed to figuring out what a vibrant theater looks like in the 21st century. Independent, and proud of it.