What is Theatre Anyway?

Nothing gets my blood more riled up than thinking about the state of theatre, or rather the state of the discussion of the state/future of theatre. In the grand scheme of things, I generally see three sources of discussion on this topic. It comes from marketing/PR/Audience development, artistic directors and institutional thinkers (TCG, American Theatre Wing, etc), and writer/directors. The marketing people are the least connected to the practice of theatre and their thinking is usually geared toward facile analysis of audience trends and metrics for measuring the success of theatre. While I believe that it is important to consider the stated desires of audiences and to track how they spend money, it is important to remember that most audience members have no idea what they want until you give it to them (call it the Steve Jobs corollary), so it makes for less than useful diagnostic and programmatic thinking. Institutional types are fascinating because they take for granted the infrastructure of not-for-profit existence, such as governance boards, development costs, grant writing, etc. It's hard to take their thinking seriously since it is constrained so thoroughly by existing conditions. Given the circumstances, it's like being asked to create a brand new totally revolutionary budget car - you can't do it. You still end up with at least two doors, a steering wheel, an engine, four wheels at the corners, etc. You can still do amazing things within the constraints and it can still be productive to re-visit what you can do (there is a world of difference between a Kia Rio and a Tata Nano after all). Unfortunately, non-profits have much less room for experimentation because experimentation requires failure. A distressing fact about the future of anything is that it involves quite a lot of failure to get there, which commercial producers know and institutional producers experience, but only at a cognitive distance, because failure as an institution is much more painful than failure as a company, for a multitude of reasons. And, if you ask a writer/director about theatre, the odds are very good that you are going to get a spiel about words, bodies in space, and/or stories, which is all very well in theory. 

What I rarely see are production professionals, whether production managers or TDs or other production supervisors, talking about the future. In lighting, there are companies looking to sell new products, for example, but no one is attempting to sell a different business model. This is distressing because, while theatre at its barest essence is bodies in space (and words are optional), major not for profit regional theatres are not theatre at its barest essence and that is where people make a living in theatre (albeit a meager one most of the time). So how can we talk about the future of theatre, if we consistently leave out of the discussion (either in content or as participants) the people who actually make theatre happen.

This is baffling considering that well over 80% of my job as an electrician directly relates to the product my theaters put on stage. How is that not relevant? Forever left out of the discussions of the state of theatre is the fact that artisans such as myself are absolutely necessary to the proper functioning of theatre. It is incredibly sad that playwrights and other creatives don't get their financial due. Hell, as an electrician, I am better off, purely as a theatre worker because I don't need another job, outside of theatre, to sustain myself. I even get some benefits (which cause my wages to stagnate, but hey, that's true for everyone). I think the truest fact about the state of not-for-profit theatre today is that too much of the entire structure of not-for-profit theatre is not dedicated to the act of theatrical production. Too many theatres in this country are arts advocacy groups with theatres attached.

TCG does outstanding work as an organization dedicated to understanding the state of not-for-profit theatre in practical terms. Their most recent Theatre Facts broke down the overall budget for all reporting theatres and it is a very interesting chart.

The first thing that strikes me is that it does not break down easily into accounting for the cost of a show (which tells you that the people reading this document didn't need to know what part of the budget goes to production, which is fascinating). A couple things stand out as well. First, theatres spent more on marketing than on physical production (11.8 to 7.9). It costs more to advertise shows than to build sets. Second, and this will surprise precisely no one who has had wrangle a stage into becoming a set, facilities (and insurance, etc) themselves cost more than all physical productions. In many ways, New York's commercial model makes the most sense: be a producing company or be a theater owning company. You can only do both well if you work at enormous economies of scale. Owning your own space, especially if that space needs constant work, is a huge burden. Third, a bare majority (54%) of expenses are related to personnel (theatre is and always has been labor intensive) It is the breakdown of the expenses that is scary. 18.5% of that 54% went to artistic, 13.9% to production, and a whopping 20% of personnel expenses go to the administrative side. Some of those artistic payments must be to designers and directors. If you were to fold those expenditures into a budget for "shows" and include only those relating to actually mounting productions, what does that amount to? A back of the envelope calculation leads to something like 33-39% of expenses actually making it to the stage. It's not surprising then that it feels like production is left out of all these discussions. This is reflected all too often in the physical situation of the theatre. How many of the theatre's employees actually work on the stage, or even near it? How many times have you been in a full staff meeting where it was obvious that you have no contact with over half of the theatre's employees? Is it any wonder that theaters lose their way?

There is a sense in the non-profit world that being like a business is a bad thing, or at least, an irrelevant thing to an arts group, but this is wrong. Arts groups need to be like more like businesses in at least one way: they must learn to focus relentlessly on the product. Marketing will not save you, if you have a bad product. Innovative audience engagement will not work, if you have a bad product on stage. I would argue that the subscription model is deeply flawed because it keeps theatres thinking about the season as the product, rather than each individual show. It is no longer tenable to think this way and every piece of news about single ticket sales proves this point over and over again. The season is not the product, but a product line and each product in the line has to be at a certain level of quality. And yet, production is consistently undervalued and underserved at the macro level. If you want to start thinking about the future of theatre, I would start with the show itself. Like the man said. "The play's the thing."