CHICAGO _ The coronavirus crisis is upending how the nonprofit arts in Chicago and beyond do business, possibly with an impact lasting far beyond the current crisis.
Last week I wrote about the move to calendar year planning, conveying numerous advantages (to my mind).
Now here comes another interesting idea _ announcing seasons of shows without dates.
In recent days, theater companies as varied as the Goodman Theatre, Chicago Shakespeare Theater and Congo Square Theatre have announced seasonal slates without specifying when the shows actually will be staged or even in which order. It was Writers Theatre in Glencoe that began the trend some weeks ago.
Why no dates? Well, that's pretty obvious. Theaters have no idea when city and state regulations, which currently limit capacity to 50 people in a Chicago theater, will permit performances to resume.
They further have no idea when a variety of other stakeholders, from artists' unions to boards of directors to audience members to social-media activists, will deem it safe to resume live performances. (A modest prediction: There will not be one clear moment when all of these ideologically varied parties provide their blessing, even if we're post-vaccine. It will be contentious and confusing and widely and uncivilly debated. And different locations will have different standards. It will be quite a ride.)
But that is a mounting worry for the future. Here is the opportunity.
Theaters announce seasons because they want to sell multiple tickets at once to their core supporters. Those are the folks we once knew as subscribers but who now are often called "members" or "friends," or some such simile that conveys flexibility and accessibility without torpedoing the historic income stream, which very few theaters can afford to do.
Traditionally, these theaters have tried to put four or five shows into a "season." And since they have to avoid religious holidays and unpopular times of the year, this has led them to some pretty inflexible scenarios.
The big problem comes when one of those shows turns out to be a fat, old hit. Most theaters then talk about extending, but, invariably, they come up against the problem of tickets already being sold to the next show in the season. By selling an advance ticket to a subscriber, they've already made a contract with an audience member who has made a plan. And since no business can afford to annoy its best customers, theaters are loath to change the schedule.
They might be able to squeeze in another week or two, but then they either have to close or undergo the typically prohibitive cost of moving a show to another theater.
But if you've not mentioned any actual dates _ presto, you can move that next show back an entire month, artists' schedules permitting, or even flip the order of shows, or move up that political play to match the issues of the moment. That way, your hit show could play for twice the length of a production that fails to find an audience. Assuming that your planning is nimble and you're able to react fast.
(You know, like a tech company.)
And, paradoxically, that might well be good for the less popular shows, since they would be better financially protected by their more popular siblings in the season. This might actually lead to more daring programing. And, of course, to more jobs for artists.
Obviously, commercial theater mostly operates this way: shows typically will play as long as they can find an audience and then close. But non-profit theaters and opera companies generally have not followed suit because their historical model relies on offering a season of shows to a recurring group of several hundred (or thousand) supporters. And, granted, even without dates, you'd have to schedule enough performances to deliver seats for these members, or, better yet, let them bring friends to the shows that work.
Prior to our current situation, none of these theaters would have dared to sell seasons without dates. They all would have assumed that no one would buy them. And they might well have been right.
But audiences that care about the arts have been willing to show huge amounts of flexibility in the pandemic _ those who love and care for Chicago theater have been buying virtual performances and propagandic conversations, forgiving theaters who could not offer all they promised, tolerating the delayed arrival of their shows, and turning their purchases into donations.
I think that new audience flexibility could become permanent, especially if theaters are smart. These old sedentary models are failing in many of the goals that people care about now, including diversity and inclusion.
Who needs advance dates anymore? Better by far to create a broad arts blueprint and then "Yes, and ... " whatever life throws our way. The best theater is responsive in the moment.
We need the arts back before we completely forget how to live together. And, right now, the future is near impossible to read.
