A new model for live theater?

Since the pandemic, regional theaters have been struggling, and the news from Center Stage in Baltimore last week was not great: Some layoffs and a cut in pay for the remaining staff. Center Stage underwent a $28 million renovation before reopening in 2017; it also saw a high turnover in board members in recent years. My Sun colleague Mary McCauley, in reporting on the layoffs, quotes Nicholas Cohen, executive director of Maryland Citizens for the Arts, who likened the news coming out of Center Stage to the “canary in the coal mine.” Said Cohen: “The mid-sized groups don’t have large donor bases and endowments, but they still have mortgages or rents and large staffs. The very small groups have such low overheads they can be nimble. But when you’re putting on a theater production and you have to build sets and make costumes and make a lighting design, that’s a heavy lift. It can’t be done by just a few people.”

My group, You Have No Idea, has taken the “nimble” approach, renting a theater for my plays and paying the artists to build sets, act and compose and perform original music. We did not have a grand plan when we started in 2022, but so far things have worked out well. What we’ve done fits, I think, with what playwright Monica Byrne suggested in an essay in The Washington Post last year:

“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.

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.

 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.

You can read Byrne’s entire essay here: Why theater (in its current form) does not deserve to be saved

I am not sure how this helps Center Stage, but it certainly opens up the possibility for more theater in more places, and it might mean, in time, more people in the seats watching live drama and comedy — as long as the company produces plays the public wants to see.