In his four years as US president, Abraham Lincoln was said to have attended Washington’s National Theatre more than a hundred times. He was a devotee of Shakespeare, once writing to an actor: “I think nothing equals Macbeth – it is wonderful.” Lincoln was watching a show when he was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre in Washington in 1865, seeding the sarcastic joke: “Other than that, how was the play, Mrs Lincoln?”
The play’s the thing that’s now in danger. America’s love affair with the stage – embodied by Lincoln and fellow presidential theatregoers such as Bill Clinton – is on the rocks. From coast to coast, the regional theatre movement is facing the biggest crisis in its 75-year history.
An estimated 25% to 30% of audiences have not returned since the shutdown enforced by the coronavirus pandemic between March 2020 and late 2021. Older people have apparently lost the theatergoing habit or been spooked by reports of rising downtown crime. Younger people are commuting less and working from home, where Netflix and other streaming temptations are just a click away.
At the same time mounting productions, running buildings and pay wages are getting more expensive. Federal government aid that kept many theaters alive during the pandemic is mostly exhausted. Donor patience and pockets are wearing thin. As a result, some regional theaters have been forced to curtail their season or close entirely.
“It is without question the hardest time to be producing theater in my lifetime and I think going back well before that as well,” says Christopher Moses, artistic director of the Alliance Theater in Atlanta. “All of the theater leaders that I’ve talked to have not quite seen a situation like this. It’s a really precarious time.”
Several companies have perished in Chicago, a theater hub that rivals Washington for No 2 status behind New York. Book-It Repertory Theater in Seattle, New Ohio Theatre in New York, Southern Repertory Theatre in New Orleans, Triad Stage in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Unexpected Stage Company in Maryland are among other casualties in recent months.
It seems no one is immune. In Chicago, the Lookingglass Theater has cut staff and discontinued work until next spring. In Philadelphia, the Arden Theater Company, which gave 503 performances in the season before the pandemic, expects to trim that to 363 next season. The ACT Contemporary Theater in Seattle has truncated the length of each show’s run by a week. In New Haven, Connecticut, the Long Wharf Theatre left its home to embrace an “itinerant” model.
In Los Angeles, the Center Theatre Group has “paused” programming in one of its theaters, the Mark Taper Forum, while the Geffen Playhouse will no longer host performances on Tuesdays. The California Shakespeare Theater (Cal Shakes) is not mounting any productions this year. And New York’s Public Theater, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Dallas Theater Center have all reduced head counts.
The malaise has caught the attention of newspapers such as the Washington Post (“Theater is in freefall”) and New York Times (“There is less theater in America these days. Fewer venues. Fewer productions. Fewer performances”). In a survey of 72 top-tier regional theaters, the Times found that they expect to produce 20% fewer productions next season than in the last full season before the pandemic.
Theatres are searching for solutions that will bring in cash without compromising artistic integrity. In Atlanta, Alliance has expanded education programmes and enhanced corporate fundraising to avoid dependence on ticket sales alone. The theatre remains committed to continue producing new work.
Moses adds: “There are bright spots and reasons to be hopeful about the future. It goes back to renewing the promise of the regional theater movement and recentering the city or community in which you find yourself at the heart of your work. If you become essential to that city, there will be means of supporting you.”
The crisis has also bred solidarity between theaters in the form of coproductions that allow a sharing of ideas and resources. Moses comments: “In many ways the field is closer than ever, which is wonderful, so while we are all feeling this pain and burden, we are all also sharing it and collectively trying to figure out innovative ways to address these vexing problems.”
One example is in Maryland, where Olney Theatre Center and Round House Theatre coproduced Fela!, a musical about Nigerian musician and activist Fela Kuti. The show has been a popular hit and earned a week’s extension.
Round House, based in Bethesda, has already enjoyed its best selling season ever thanks to The Tempest, adapted and directed by Aaron Posner and Teller (of Penn & Teller fame) and incorporating music and magic tricks. But sales for most of the rest of its shows were down compared to before the pandemic.
Ryan Rilette, the 340-seat theater’s artistic director, says: “We’re all trying to figure out what the post-pandemic model for theatre will be and we’re all dealing with less revenue and more expense. It’s not that the pandemic created bigger problems; it exacerbated and sped up a lot of patterns that had been in existence for a long time.”
Among those patterns is the decline of the subscription model by which loyal audience members pay in advance to see most or all the productions in a given season. Subscriptions are popular with baby boomers and older patrons but less attractive to younger, more spontaneous ticket buyers. Round House’s subscriber base is down 40% from pre-pandemic levels.
Rilette continues: “They’re the people that make up most of the donor base of American theater and they were the most susceptible to Covid. They’re the people that stayed home and didn’t go back early and, the longer you stay home and get out of the habit of going, the harder and more scary it is to go back in.”
The decline of regional newspapers – and theater critics – has also played a part, he says. “We’ve all seen for a long time that arts journalism is going down. There’s far less coverage in papers. What we’re also starting to see right now, even in a city like DC where we’ve got the Washington Post and they still have a theater criticism department, is the reviews aren’t moving tickets the way they used to.
“If you have an audience base who go to the theater all the time, they’re going to look for the theater reviews. If you’re a single ticket buyer who doesn’t subscribe to a newspaper and tends to read things online, it is very hard for us to even get you to see that we got a great review. It’s about finding ways to geo-target people and get it in front of them on social media.”
The convergence of factors means that non-profit theaters are ever more dependent on individual donors, but they cannot be tapped indefinitely. Rilette adds: “Not only is it a harder and more complicated and more expensive process to cultivate new donors, but the longtime legacy donors are getting burnt out. They’re getting donor fatigue.
“In the DC area, for instance, it’s the same people that donate to the majority of the theaters. When we are all in a situation where we are saying, ‘Hey, we need help and we’re going to need help for another three to five years before we can figure out what the right model is and how this is all going to work,’ they get tired to a point where they say, ‘I’m done, I’ve given enough.’”
On the expense side, with US unemployment below 4% for the longest stretch in half a century, theater, like other industries, is facing higher recruitment and retention costs. Many workers in the theater industry took stock during the pandemic and successfully made the case that they were being overworked and underpaid.
Rilette says: “There are far fewer people who are willing to do part-time jobs at the box office, in the cafe and particularly in production. All of us are spending way more to get people – if we can even find people. In the DC community alone, we’re all at a point where we’re paying more at this point than we ever thought was possible for unskilled labour and we still can’t get people to take these jobs.”
Round House, which is helped by state funding, has created a task force to navigate a way forward. Rilette continues: “I’m confident that no one has yet figured out the right model or right way out of this morass, but we are all as a field actively working on not just trying to keep going and keep great shows in the mix and everything else, but also to figure out what is the way in which we’re going to survive for the long term.
“I don’t see right now in the DC world any of us going away any time soon or even having to make major changes any time soon. But as I look at all of these things, I fear that we are all two shows tanking away from being in a position where we do have to start laying off staff and so there’s a lot of stress right now. It’s definitely hard to sleep.”
Across the nation, the numbers are moving in the wrong direction. Just over 4% of American adults, or 11.4 million people, attended a play in 2022, down from 9.4% in 2017, according to surveys by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and US Census Bureau. The rate for attending musicals was 10.3% in 2022, or 25.9 million people, a dip of six percentage points from the 2017 level.
The NEA estimates that the nation’s roughly 8,000 active non-profit theaters suffered a 22.6% decline in gross receipts between 2019 and 2022. Every week brings news of one or more winking out of existence.
Paul Tetreault, director of Ford’s Theatre in Washington, predicts: “There will be some theaters that will go away. I don’t think it’s going to be the smallest theaters because they tend to be very nimble and they can shut down programming and put up programming and come back.
“It will not be the largest theaters because they have resources and enough assets and levers to pull to make adjustments. But I do think those midsize theaters that really rely on the box office to make it work or have rent payments that are tricky. Those are the theaters that worry me.”
Ford’s makes the most of its tragic association with Lincoln through education programmes, exhibitions, merchandise and tours, providing shelter against the current storm. Its upcoming season includes the world premiere of Something Moving: A Meditation on Maynard by Pearl Cleage – part of series devoted to Bipoc (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) playwrights – as well as the musical Little Shop of Horrors and the family favourite A Christmas Carol.
Tetreault comments: “People have to get rid of the fat if they have any on their staffs or team or expenses and tighten their belt. People have to be creative. People have to rethink their programming.
“None of us like to say, ‘Oh, we’re just going to programme blockbusters,’ but the reality is, if you can programme blockbusters and get yourself out of this situation we’re in, which I believe is temporary, then maybe you can actually live another day and, after all, isn’t that what’s important?”
He adds: “We have to programme more popular. We have to programme more commercial, as it were, simply to get through this stretch that we’re in. That’s what we’re doing in terms of this year looking at producing Little Shop of Horrors instead of a world premiere musical that no one’s ever heard of.
“I always say – and good Lord, I’ve been saying my whole career for over 30 years – it’s all about balance. If you unbalance the offerings and unbalance the product, you throw audiences off and you have the opportunity to lose them.”
The balancing act is complex. If New York’s Broadway, where a dozen shows closed in January, is any guide, the climate is tough for penetrating plays and nuanced musicals. Many theaters are seeking to shake up the canon and give space to new, diverse voices after the 2020 racial reckoning that included demands for reform by a coalition known as We See You, White American Theater.
Speaking from Staunton, Virginia, Amy Wratchford, president of an arts management consultancy, says: “What I’m hearing is that there are two trains running simultaneously that people want to go see. It’s the big flashy feel-good musicals and it’s well written, challenging work.
“But it’s only the well written, challenging work for theaters and communities that either were already doing that or brought their audiences along. What I’m seeing is people are craving that kind of catharsis at the theater – the communal event. Theater is the only one that can get you that; you can’t get that from sitting in your living room with Netflix. They want that communal and emotional connection but they want it from the people they trust.”
Wratchford, who has led non-profit theaters in Georgia and Virginia, insists that community is all important to theater’s future. “Getting back to, why do we exist? What impact do we have on our community? How can we embed ourselves in the community and truly serve the community that we’re in rather than sitting around the conference room table with our arms crossed saying, ‘why don’t they appreciate us?’
“It’s been a frustrating time to watch during the pandemic that some theaters took that opportunity to connect to their community and say, ‘We’re not going to make it without you guys, let’s stay in contact’, doing everything they could to show that they are in and of their community. Whereas others – for good reason – paused and turned inwardly and there was all the work that’s happened over the past couple of years around the racial justice reckoning and the acknowledgement that we as an industry have been behind in representation and equity from top to bottom.
“But what we’ve seen is that some theaters have made tremendous progress internally but they didn’t bring their community along and so then they come back and they’re like, ‘OK, we’re going to do this work,’ and the community is like, ‘Oh wait, you’re not who I remember you to be.’ So that’s an issue.”
Robert Schenkkan, a playwright who has had productions of his work postponed during the current crisis, agrees that theaters should look outward so that their buildings, often sitting in the middle of their communities, do not sit empty and idle for most of the hours of the day.
He says: “Theaters who appear to be weathering or navigating this in a way that shows some hope are those that have re-examined their relationship to the community and come to the non-startling conclusion that they’re not as involved as they need to be, as they must be, as they can be. The idea then is, how do we get people into this building every day? What can we offer the community to get them in here?
“Because if they have the experience that maybe they didn’t come here for but get excitement and sense of community out of that, they’ll come back and they will want to be a part of this institution. That’s a critical pivot for a lot of these theaters and to me it’s the only way I can see theater navigating this difficult moment.”
