Burn Down the House?

A theater artist calls for a revolution in how theater is made and financed

Ghost light in a darkened theater, WildWood Arts Center, Little Rock, Arkansas. Photo by Ellwood Jon, CC BY-SA 3.0

---

Everyone in my social media circle who is affiliated with theater is passing around and debating this piece by Monica Byrne in The Washington Post calling for an outright revolution in the way theater is made in America. “Revolution” is a word that gets tossed around lightly, but in this case I don’t think it’s an inaccurate descriptor. Byrne is basically saying that we should burn down the not-for-profit regional theater model that has been dominant for decades, and let scrappy groups of artists make art in its ruins.

I admit: I can’t quite see how that would work, but I’m very sympathetic to the vision. Like the entire rest of the not-for-profit sector of our economy—higher education, most famously—the theater world has gotten top-heavy with administrative overhead and over-invested in physical infrastructure, the latter in part being a reflection of the interests of the administrative leadership over those of the artists. Costs have risen due to inflation and other factors, and at the same time earned revenue has fallen as audience sizes still haven’t bounced back since Covid (though it is worth noting that the crisis in aggregate attendance began years before Covid). As a result theaters are cutting back or even closing all across the country. Something’s gotta give. It’s instinctively appealing to me to think that what should give is the stuff that ultimately doesn’t really matter: the administration and the buildings.

And the vision of how theater might get made in the aftermath is instinctively appealing to me as well: that artists would produce their own work, forming ad-hoc or lasting partnerships with each other to bring particular productions together, renting their own space, and marketing their own shows. That’s basically the way indie film has always worked. It’s also how any number of companies that don’t own buildings work now—including Red Bull Theater, which I’m on the board of. We’re a mission-driven organization (focused on plays of heightened language with particular emphasis on the Jacobeans), and we’re led by an artist who is the founder and a theater director. While we have a professional staff, it’s a pretty small one. We don’t have a building, so any time we want to put on a show we have to rent space. We also do other things, like regular readings of mostly obscure plays, classical acting classes, and a Shakespeare in the schools program. We are very well-regarded among the classically-trained community of actors, but we don’t have a regular company. Apart from the fact that we think in terms of “seasons” (which is something I periodically argue we might want to stop doing), I think this is pretty much what Byrne is talking about. And I know plenty of other companies in New York, like Bedlam or Fiasco, that work more or less similarly.

Red Bull is somewhere in the middle of the theatrical food chain in New York. We’re not a big established institution with a three-theater complex and attached restaurant/cafe (we’re also not sponsored by the energy drink company; we’re named after a Jacobean-era theater)—but we also aren’t a group of non-equity actors a show in a community garden without a permit. Nonetheless, let me tell you: it’s a very hand-to-mouth existence here in our ecological niche. It always was, but it’s worse now for all the reasons that it’s worse for everyone: our earned revenue is also down, and our costs are also up. The gap needs to be filled somehow, every year for every production, and every year it’s a challenge—a challenge we manage to meet, but still a challenge!

If I understand what Byrne is saying, it’s basically that if instead of trying to save the apex predators of the not-for-profit theater ecosystem—the Publics and Guthries and Steppenwolfs and so forth—we simply let them die off, then all sorts of ecological niches would open up for the struggling artists below them on the food chain. But is that true? Byrne’s mantra is “fund artists directly,” but who does she imagine is doing that funding, and how is the money getting to artists?

The obvious answer is the various and manifold foundations, those weird permanent pots of money that Americans invented, that, along with for-profit corporations, provide so much money to the top tier of the non-profit theater world. The thing about foundations, though, is that they are simultaneously unaccountable and risk-averse. The money comes from individual private sources, but whether those benefactors are living or deceased the larger foundations are generally run by professional staff. That staff’s primary interest is preserving their own sinecures, and after that winning prestige points in comparison with their peers. How do those incentives align with supporting a vibrant arts community? If the concern is in part that regional theaters have become conservative gate-keepers beholden to the prejudices of wealthy donors, why would cutting out the middleman and relying directly on foundations improve things? I don’t see why they would—and they might even get worse, among other reasons because foundations are perfectly capable of deciding that the arts aren’t cool right now and that therefore they’re going to refocus on health care, or climate change, or criminal justice reform, or whatever.

If, instead, Byrne is imagining that the government will be doing the funding, well, good luck with that. The arts are always a tough sell when put in direct competition with other social priorities, and on top of that governments are exceedingly reluctant to anger constituents by funding a work of art that someone decides is offensive, or merely bad. And because taste varies, and art needs to take risks to be any good, the odds of offending someone are quite high. So in America today, I think even if you could get direct government funding for artists through a local or state legislative session, that money would be run through a bureaucratic process that would be as stifling to true artistic creativity as the foundation gantlet that not-for-profits run now, if not more so.

That leaves traditional aristocratic patronage of the kind that powered the Renaissance. There are obvious risks and downsides to this approach, but I wouldn’t knock it too quickly: I know any number of small theater companies who have been kept alive pretty much that way: by a single, idiosyncratic rich person who decided to fund a single artist’s unique vision. Maybe that’s because they are on a common artistic wavelength, or maybe it’s because the artist has charmed the patron on a personal level. Either way, with patronage, suddenly the artist has the freedom to pursue that vision. The problem isn’t just that the freedom might be somewhat illusory (you do have to keep that rich patron happy, and that might involve serious compromise to the integrity of your vision); it’s also that most wealthy individuals are not particularly committed to the arts, most artists don’t know wealthy individuals, and the odds of the stars aligning just right so that patron and artist find each other are just really low. And while one could imagine the equivalent of dating services to match potential donors with artists (you don’t have to imagine them actually; they exist), I would expect the same winner-take-all dynamics to obtain there as in the actual online dating marketplace.

Of course, there’s still crowdfunding: not relying on a single rich patron but on an affinity group willing, collectively, to fund artistic creation. I know both filmmakers and theater-makers who have had a lot of success with that approach, but people should be clear about what that model requires: that artists be exceptionally good marketers to fund their art. In a post some months ago, Ted Gioia quoted musicians he knows griping that it’s no longer possible to “break in” to the music business by playing gigs or getting on the radio; the main way to break in is to build a following on Tik Tok, which, regardless of what you think of the worth doing that in the abstract, is just a whole different set of skills from being a musician. I think the same is true of building a crowdfunding base. Why assume that great artists will have that talent as well?

This is always the problem with “the gatekeepers are bad, so let’s get rid of them” as a strategy for liberation. Yes, the gatekeepers may be bad—but money doesn’t grow on trees, so you still need a mechanism for getting it into the hands of artists. That mechanism inevitably involves another set of gatekeepers, whether human or algorithmic.

Unless, of course, someone with a big enough pot of money chooses to embrace true randomness. The most intriguing suggestion in Byrne’s piece was when she suggested that big regional theaters be reformed “into direct granting agencies and public resources somewhat like libraries, offering artists and companies production slots on a lottery basis.” That “on a lottery basis” is the intriguing part: the idea, I assume, would be that The Cleveland Playhouse would, instead of programming a season, let anyone apply for a grant of money and a programming slot, and then simply choose at random from all qualified applicants (you’d need some kind of application process, to prevent fraud if nothing else). This would indeed represent true democratization of access, the true elimination of the gatekeeper function: anyone could put on a show. But would an institution ever go for this?

I suppose they could, but I don’t imagine the experiment would last, because the odds would be that most of what was produced by this means would be terrible, simply because making good art, to say nothing of great art, is really hard, and the prospect of free money would attract an enormous volume of applicants. One season of terrible offerings, and the program would be ended—or, if it wasn't, donors would abandon the institution en masse. And why wouldn’t they? Handing out grants by lottery would basically be admitting that the people running the institution have no idea how to choose what art to program, implicitly that they have no idea what art is any good. Why would you donate to an organization that admitted such a thing? And if you’re imagining the government would take over these spaces and open them up on a lottery basis, well, once again: good luck with that. Governments are cutting funding for libraries these days, not boosting it.

Lastly, let me throw a one more monkey wrench into the mix. This isn’t true in New York, but in most of the country these large regional theaters are the only unionized employers of theater artists. Kill off—or democratize access to—those theaters, and you’ve basically eliminated the possibility of making a career as a theater artist in most of the country and getting the benefits—health care, pension, etc.—that union members are entitled to. What would the end of that prospect do to the theater community in these cities? I worry that it would decapitate them. Even if most artists in Milwaukee or Salt Lake City can’t reasonably expect to qualify to get into the union, knowing that the chance is zero would, I think, be powerful encouragement for anyone with talent to decamp for New York or Los Angeles, the earlier the better. That incentive is already powerful, of course, and if you found a reliable enough way to “fund artists directly” maybe union membership becomes less important as a goal. Nonetheless, I think it’s a point worth considering.

So what is to be done? As I noted above, something does have to give. The current model quite plainly is not sustainable, and I believe too much in the importance of live theater to be insouciant about the question. But while the disease is plain for all to see, I really don’t know the cure.