Diane Ragsdale has been on a tear. She wrote an e-book, In the Intersection, she runs an excellent blog, Jumper, and she has given a talk called Living in the Struggle. The talk is a full length academic talk, so it is a bit of a #longread, but it's absolutely worth it. In the talk, she discusses some of the trends among major regional theatres toward safer programming and more assured revenue streams, she calls this a move toward "commercialism." This concern is long standing in the not-for-profit arts community and Ragsdale is far from the only one concerned with the trends in American regional theatre. Todd London has also written a passionate article on the subject called, What Price Idealism, that pleas for regional theatres to return to their innovative roots and reject the creeping commercialism of partnering with for profit groups to take work to Broadway. Both London and Ragsdale have done great work here, but I have to take issue with the idea that what regional theatres are doing qualifies as commercialism and with the underlying assumption that the for-profit world has nothing to teach the regions.
If you want to start a philosophical argument about the nature of theatre, just utter the words "Theatres should act more like businesses." Many not-for-profit practitioners bristle at the very idea that our cultural enterprise has anything in common with pure profit maximizing institutions, many of which are rapacious and conscienceless. Truth be told, not-for-profit theatres are unique and they should not act completely like businesses, because that would be a betrayal of their fundamental mission. But many of these arguments cherry pick by highlighting the worst aspects of business and of poorly run businesses and conflate regional theatres' revenue maximization strategies with "acting like a business" or engaging in commerce.
As it happens, I agree that many regional theatres are making poor strategic decisions in favor of short-term revenue production, but this isn't because they are acting like businesses, it's because they are acting like bad businesses. The Economist has done a masterful job covering the stagnation in Japan over the past twenty years. This article, from 2011, has the same theme as this one, from 2004. Japan has not dealt with businesses that have no serious future, but they do not have the courage to let these businesses fail. They limp along, without innovating or producing much of value, or living up to their original promise, and they continue to exist because it would be painful for the national psyche to let them fail en masse. Corporate innovation is not a strong suit for Japanese businesses, which prefer the assiduous pursuit of goals, not dreaming up new ideas of how to achieve those goals or of new goals. Bad companies make bad assumptions about revenue projections. Companies go south by growing big too quickly. Bad companies limp along for years by nursing existing revenue streams and failing to innovate new products and new business models. This should all sound very familiar to those with experience in the land of not-for-profit theatres of a certain size (usually big). Human beings are notoriously bad at identifying sunk costs (I love this extract calling the sunk cost effect a "maladaptive economic practice" - scientists are the best).
To call this collective set of revenue maximizing behavior "commercialism" is to ignore the positive examples of great companies in the private sector that don't do any of that. Google enables its employees to have side projects (and Apple has toyed with the idea too). Can you imagine what would happen if every regional theatre started acting like that business? IBM is a technology firm that has existed from over one hundred years (this Economist piece is a good overview). It has reinvented itself several times over. How many theatres have the nerve to identify the changes necessary in what they consider their core product and to entirely reinvent themselves? How many theatres have the emphasis on design that Apple has? Or that can focus relentlessly on improving the process of production the way that Toyota has? Toyota has a ton of things to teach the theatre world (empowering every employee on the line to stop it and point out a flaw and requiring, REQUIRING, its employees to regularly suggest improvements to the process, to name just two awesome ideas).
In the end, I do not believe that theatres emphasizing safe shows over riskier material, theatres that seek the widest audience, that they know, are becoming too much like businesses, too commercial. They are making a huge mistake because they are becoming too much like bad businesses. How many theatres are truly laser focused on maximizing their resources to put on the best show possible, which is their product after all? How many of the have the courage to abandon any pretence of relying on fickle ticket revenue and shift budgets accordingly? How many theatres get smaller in a responsible and orderly fashion? How many theatres have given up specializing in their own marketing and let others with more experience handle that service? Inditex is a firm that does not spend a single dime on advertising and yet Zara has gone from being a Spanish brand to being a global one. What does that tell us about marketing?
I agree that not-for-profit theatres are not for-profit enterprises. They should not be as ruthless about maximizing profit or as focused on quarterly shareholder value. But there are a lot of best practices in the business world that could make a real difference in not-for-profit theatre and we owe it to our staffs, to our patrons, and to our communities to find them and apply them.
