How does money effect the theater community? Where does it come from? What does it pay for? How does the theater industry, that "perpetual invalid," stay alive?
Can we find a grand economic narrative to explain why some theaters survive and others don't, as Michael Lewis does with baseball in
Moneyball? At the very least, can we use money to identify and explain counterintuitive behavior, like Steven Dubner and Steven Levitt do in
Freakonomics?
Or is it wrong to even ask these questions? People don't join the theater community for the money. Across the country, most of the highest profile theaters are explicitly designated as "not-for-profit" theater, meaning, in theory, that they are not motivated by the need to show profit at the end of each fiscal year. Theater supposedly provides benefits other than money and therefore does not operate according to market principles.
I'm not an economist—which means I may still have some credibility on the subject of economic predictions—so I'd like to give it a try.
Part 1
Let's start simple: This past year, the Playwrights Center held a panel called "Defining the Playwright," whose teaser begins with these words: "At a time when interdisciplinary art and devised work are becoming increasingly popular, where does the more traditional playwright fit into the ever-evolving theatrical landscape?" In the Workhaus Collective, a nine-member cooperative of people who define themselves as writers (of which I am a member), six of the nine writers have participated in ensemble developed work—some of which has been the highest profile work of their careers (
See Fissures, etc.). There is a growing sense, if you're a playwright, that the most exciting work is happening—and being supported by foundations and producers—in the arena of "ensemble-created work" (generally defined as collaborative, often very physical, and not text-dependent). Since, as a playwright, you may have gotten the sense that the producer, director, and actors didn't want you around anyway, would prefer if you were dead like Shakespeare, all the attention on ensemble-created work can feel like a depressing trend.
A look at the economics of the theater world suggests, however, that the lonesome, "traditional," playwright is not disappearing soon and probably will not disappear in the future.
Because. . . the largest single audience for live performance, by far, exists in schools and community theater. While the Theater Communications Group, the industry association of not-for-profit theaters around the country,
boasts of almost 500 members, the American Association of Community Theaters
reports 500 community theaters
in California alone. There are
more than 2000 high schools, 1300 middle schools, and 8000 elementary schools in California. Even if TCG undercounts the number of professional not-for-profit theaters in this country by half and only half the schools in California produce any kind of live performance
and no other community or school theater exists outside California, amateur theater would still be 85% of the total market for theater.
Amateur theater needs scripts, thrives on scripts, gobbles up scripts like scripts are hot buttered popcorn. Because amateur cooks need recipes they can follow in order to learn how to cook.
Ensemble-created work requires a kind of collaborative atmosphere where the members of the ensemble have a level of talent, or at least a similarity in training, that is impossible to find in amateur theater. Good, real ensemble-created work also requires time. It can take three years to make something worthwhile with an ensemble—and at least six intense months just to make the first draft. What high school student or local dentist/part-time actor has that kind of dedication, devotion and time?
Scripts give amateur theaters a place to start, an outline in which they can paint-by-numbers, a basic blueprint of a house they know can stand. All they need to do is put up the drywall. In fact, the 15 year old play publisher Playscripts is a great example of an entrepreneur exploiting a market inefficiency (in a sense similar to what is described in
Moneyball). While not-for-profit theaters appear to value small cast plays that often take place in an apartment in the New York City, Playscripts is largely built around providing the amateur market with large cast, accessible scripts—with their Chief Executive Officer himself specializing in writing plays that get produced thousands of times in high schools around the world.
I am not saying this is good or bad; I am saying that it is what it is and will continue to be because the economics demand it. Ensemble-created work will remain an experience largely for an esoteric audience, with a few exceptions that prove the rule.
The perpetual invalid
Analysis of the same market leads me to conclude that we can stop moaning about the death of theater.
On the amateur level, there is an abundance of people who want to perform, who will do it for nothing and with nothing. Making a movie requires equipment and editing expertise. Basically, making a play only requires that a person be able to follow a recipe (the script), and the only truly necessary ingredients are other people—who are also available in abundance. On the amateur level, producing theater is stunningly cheap—so cheap in fact that in many communities it has priced itself into an inviolable role in the market.
If you travel to a tiny town like New London, Minnesota, you will find a live theater but you will not find a movie theater. The market in the area is not large enough to justify investment in a movie theater. People will always be expected to drive to the largest towns in order to create a critical mass for mass market media. Live theater, however, does not need the same kind of exposure. Shows can be thrown onto a stage inexpensively by whoever is around, and then shown once or twice or however many times it takes for everyone in the area to see them, and then the same shows can disappear easily.
Theater can be, and often is, created with entirely volunteer labor and material costs—which makes it a remarkably cheap way for people to satisfy the eternal urge to tell stories with their neighbors. Amateur theater, being almost free, is economically viable and attractive forever.
How markets adjust
Professional theater, on the other hand, is wildly economically inefficient. It takes years and years of continued training to create great performers. Plus, they need to be physically present at every performance; you cannot simply film them and make money from their image in multiple places at the same time while they go earn more money elsewhere. Add real estate costs, equipment, additional labor like high-quality designers, stage managers, and crew to the reality that you have to invest all your money in a show up front—before you know whether anyone wants to buy your product—and you see that ticket prices, no matter how high, have no relationship to the actual cost of the event.
As a result, universities will continue to graduate idealistic young theater artists whose training and love for theater bears little resemblance to the kind of theater produced outside of universities.
Here's where the analysis of market forces gets fun:
There are some incredibly talented theater artists in the United States but the professional theater world, being an economic mess, cannot support most of them—especially the ones who create great but not necessarily populist work. Yet, their talent has value somewhere—in universities, where a college's mission and the steady supply of tuition money from students motivates them to hire talented, innovative theater artists.
Consequently, university theater departments are staffed by incredible theater makers who inspire their students to love a type of theater that, ironically, can only be financially supported by the universities the students will eventually leave—creating a larger and larger supply of talented theater artists to make work in a market that, regardless of demand, cannot support them financially—unless they're talented enough to secure a job with a university and perpetuate the cycle where what is taught (not-very-populist, maybe-even-ensemble-based theater) and what is watched (amateur theater) have less and less relationship to each other.
In Part Two, let's look at the economics of not-for-profit theater directly. Amateur theater creates both supply and demand in abundance. Academic theater has no trouble finding students and teachers to create esoteric, passionate theater making—and the tuition money to support it. What about professional live performance? Where does money come from for a thing that promises NOT to make any money in return? And why does the money go to the places that it does?
