Opinion | Nonprofit regional theaters need a total transformation

Monica Byrne is a novelist, playwright and screenwriter.

In just the past few months, major regional theaters in Chicago and Los Angeles have suspended performances until at least next year, while New York’s famed Public Theater canceled its beloved Under the Radar festival and laid off 19 percent of its staff.

These losses and many others have inspired renewed calls for the government to save America’s nonprofit professional theaters. What strikes me about these calls isn’t that they’ve been sounded time and again to no avail. It’s that there are still people who believe that these institutions — struggling in cities big and small across the country — should be rescued in their current form.

That’s not to say the government shouldn’t fund the arts. Of course it should, especially in times of profound crisis such as these. Art is a vital national concern: It gives us meaning. It’s the food of the soul. And we’re going to need well-fed souls in the years ahead.

But too many theaters have ceased to serve this function. The closings, cancellations and plummeting ticket sales — only worsened by the pandemic — attest to that. Theater leaders should read the writing on the wall instead of continuing to beat on a closed door.

American theater will always exist; only its forms will change. And the dominant nonprofit model is neither necessary nor even traditional. It’s a recent invention. In the early 1960s, the Ford Foundation began funding regional theaters with a dual mission: to make theater available to audiences outside New York and to provide artistic homes for playwrights, directors, actors and designers. A few years later, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) stepped in to boost funding. In 1965, there were 56 nonprofit theaters; by 2000, there were 340 — six times as many.

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These theaters became the major — virtually only — route for theater artists to make a living outside Broadway or academia. The handful of artistic directors who ran them became the de facto curators of theatrical culture in most of America.

Well into the new century, these theaters continued to expand, encouraged by wealthy donors and boards. In 2006, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis moved into a grand, $125 million complex. Four years later, Arena Stage opened its 200,000-square-foot, $135 million Mead Center in Southwest D.C. As recently as 2021, the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago completed a $73 million “urban theater campus.” Smaller theaters followed suit, with the same assumption: that physical size provided stability.

Meanwhile, however, an insidious feedback loop was taking hold. The bigger theaters got, the more assets they had to maintain, the more administrators they had to pay, the more capital campaigns they had to launch, the more debt they had to take on and the more seats they had to fill to break even. But as the NEA noted in a 2008 report, ticket sales were declining. Size no longer meant stability, but liability.

When the bubbles began bursting, artists were the first to take the hit. As pandemic lockdowns closed theaters temporarily, most companies prioritized saving their buildings and their administrators’ salaries over funding their artists.

Among the artists I know, this was heartbreaking but not surprising. Artists are treated as an afterthought by the leaders of the field — mere assets to be secured, like a prop or a gel. A recent review in American Theatre sourced predictions for the field entirely from administrators, executives, donors, fundraisers and audience members. Artists themselves weren’t even mentioned — how they envision the future of theater, how they’re surviving, or even whether they’re surviving.

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Now, those same theaters are closing buildings, canceling seasons or holding emergency fundraisers — without questioning whether the economic model itself is just or sustainable. It’s neither.

For theater as we know it to have any future at all, a new economic model must take its place, founded on a simple principle: Fund artists directly. Then let the artists produce their own work, rent their own venues and pay their own collaborators.

This would be revolutionary. Consider that, during the covid-19 pandemic, when spaces were largely closed down, Milwaukee Rep, a midsize professional nonprofit theater, paid its artistic director $273,843 (out of a budget of $8 million), while the Public paid its director $888,676 (out of a budget of $37 million).

To put these numbers in perspective, I come from a background where we regularly put on plays for $10,000 to $15,000. We frequently sold out our runs — all three of my first plays in Durham, N.C., sold out, or nearly so. We always paid everyone something. Double that budget to $30,000, and we could have paid well. Extrapolate that into the millions, and hundreds of artists could have been writing and producing their own work — and paying their collaborators directly during quarantine.

That would have been just in one city, during one year — at a time when we were desperate for art that radically responded to our current moment.

It’s true that scaling down would mean prioritizing certain kinds of theater over others. But this is the case in every era: Some aesthetics thrive while others die out. Instead of a world in which you pay astronomical prices to see another tired revival from the mezzanine, imagine there are a dozen theater cells in your area, performing new work in backyards and parks and city squares and empty storefronts. Art that is fresh, fluid, immediate, accessible and affordable — to make and to see — all because we collectively decided to fund the artists directly. That’s the future I want. I can live without million-dollar rotating sets.

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Is there any place for existing nonprofit theaters in this model? Sure. Reshape them into direct granting agencies and public resources somewhat like libraries, offering artists and companies production slots on a lottery basis. It does mean that audience members and funders, large and small, public and private, will need to understand that bigger doesn’t mean better; adaptable means better, and adaptable usually means smaller. It would also mean that existing artistic directors understand that not only are they not the ordained curators of culture, but they are useful to the art form only insofar as they serve artists — the creators of the form.

The professional nonprofit model is killing the form it was supposed to sustain.

But theater will survive and could even bloom into a renaissance — if we start funding theater artists directly. The writing on the wall has always been clear: Artists are the ones who find new ways forward in times of change. That’s our job. We innovate. Let us.

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