BLOG: LORT House Down 2: Financial Boogaloo

This Is Halloween Before we get started, I need to correct a wrong that I created last week. In my discussion of how much I love Halloween, I failed to remind you all that the Barebones Halloween show is back for its 21st year! If you've never seen it before, you should. If you have seen it before, you should help them build it. There. Wrong righted. On with the show! Sometimes the System Is On Your Side Congratulations, all you hard-working artists out there! As almost all arts have taught us already, you are starving, but you are passionate and proud. And now the IRS will have to recognize that you are also a legitimate business, even if you haven't made much more than your bus fare on your art. So, keep on starving, but now you may starve a little less. If you'd like to keep fighting for a bigger piece of the pie, though, may I suggest dipping your toes into the political waters? Sure, you can help out organizations like Minnesota Citizens for the Arts as they lobby on your behalf, but let's think bigger. Instead of trying to sway the powers that be, why not become the powers that be? That's what a bunch of artists and arts supporters in Australia are doing, by cobbling together the worlds first Arts Party. No, it's not like the art parties you went to in college where you got drunk and stoned and tried to hit on a girl in a black beret who kept talking about "deconstruction"; it's the world's first honest-to-god political party whose platform is built on arts-related issues. Maybe we ought to try that here in Minnesota. We couldn't do any worse than the Pirate Party. Another Death in the Family A while back, we lamented the death of San Jose Repertory Theatre, and I noted how the list of LORT theaters in America had dropped from 74 to 73. LORT itself has chosen to remain optimistic in the face of cold, hard mathematics, as it still declares 74 members on its home page, even though their list of member companies shows a roll call of 73. I had said in this previous article that the number might soon drop to 72, but, as it happens, Philadelphia Theater Company which was also on the brink of financial ruin at the time, was saved by a $2.5 million injection of cash from the rich people whose name was on the new theater space that sank them into debt. As it turns out, my prediction that the LORT number would drop was correct; I just had the company wrong. While I wasn't looking, Georgia Shakespeare went and collapsed under its own mountain of debt. The company has been in debt for a while. In 2011 it put on an ambitious $500,000 fundraising campaign to retire its debt, but, as it turns out there were more IOUs out there than anyone outside of the company realized. Richard Garner, the founder and artistic director of Georgia Shakespeare, gave an honest breakdown of the company's troubles, and cited two major factors: decreasing audience and a lack of donors for day-to-day operations. So, What's Really the Problem? We've lost two more bones out of the LORT skeleton this year. Can we draw any conclusions from this? Obviously, the individual circumstances surrounding the demise of Georgia Shakespeare and demise of San Jose Rep are varied: different regions, different programming focus, different cities, different markets, but the two major daggers in their hearts were those decreasing audiences and donations. We've known for a while that America's attendance at the arts has been dropping. The financial crisis beginning in 2008 caused a fundamental disturbance in individual, foundational and government giving to the arts. Wealthy Americans (like the ones who swooped in and saved Philadelphia Theater Company) are giving less; and when they do, they usually want to donate to sexy capital campaigns that put their names on fancy new buildings, while ignoring the daily cost of operating those fancy new buildings. Even when a large theater is successful and financially solvent, it has to pull off complicated, calculated behind-the-scenes machinations usually reserved for Fortune 500 companies just to keep the patrons and donors from getting spooked and running for the exits. (Heck, we even do it with our smaller, more local institutions.) We in the theater world love to rhapsodize the "magic" of theater, uphold the beauty of the script and put up theatre about theatre; but the magic of theater may not be something that the rest of the world just automatically gets, and we'll have to accept the fact that the theater world will have to fundamentally change how it approaches the normal world if it expects to survive. How do we do that? Hell if I know; but if you put a gun to my head, I would say "Please don't point that gun at my head," then I would blubber and cry, and then I'd finally say that we should all stop chasing after the same aging, shrinking, fearful subscriber bases that have kept the regional theater system barely afloat for too long. Maybe it's time we started actually going after the audiences we assume we've "lost". I don't know the details of how you accomplish that (other than my long-standing battle cry of "make new work that's relevant to the interests of the current generation"--it's an unwieldy battle cry, I know), but that's why organizations like the Wallace Foundation put big money into big research to figure that out. Or maybe it's about radically rethinking outdated models, as is happening in the current debate over AEA's 99-Seat Plan for Los Angeles. Think Local, Think Small Or maybe the biggest thing I can advocate for is creating a strong arts community at the grassroots level that is creative, diverse and nimble enough to generate new models while avoiding the pitfalls of the dreaded Edifice Complex. Our own Springboard for the Arts is known across the country for its creative experimentation in hooking up artists and audiences. Bedlam Theatre is putting together a technical theater training series to help increase our general know-how. The Minnesota Theater Alliance has put up the new Arts Market to facilitate peer-to-peer resource sharing. The Southern Theater is experimenting with a new membership model. Huge Theater has been working tirelessly (and successfully) to reshape how we think about improv theater. The small theater community in Minneapolis has a new affordable space on the way. And you, our great, generous (and incredibly handsome, I might add) readers, have crowd-funded an upgrade to Minnesota Playlist that will make it a fantastic new resource for artists and audiences alike. I know that I bring a lot of doom and gloom into the conversation whenever I start delving into the national theater scene (mostly because the national theater scene is kind of a mess), which is why I'm always glad to bring the conversation home. I think here in the Twin Cities we have some things brewing that could give us a fighting chance at creating the next model (or models) that will replace the rusty regional theater model that failed San Jose Rep and Georgia Shakespeare. The answer's somewhere in there. Let's get cracking.