RE: HTFA IV Priorities (Buildings and People)

(Note: Part I: Making a living can be found here.

Part II: Growth and Institutionalization can be found here.

Part III: Hiring Locally can be found here.

Please feel free to join in the conversation!)

My building has every convenience, it's gonna make life easy for me.

-- Talking Heads, Don't Worry About The Government.

Via Mike D. we get this interesting Chicago Tribune piece about the idea of acting ensembles. Here's a quote that rather nicely illustrates something I'd like to discuss:

The long-running practice of highly paid administrators sitting in new, multimillion-dollar facilities while actors are treated "like migrant farmworkers" has attracted some withering recent criticism from the monologuist Mike Daisey and others, who argue that status-obsessed regional theaters have failed their moral obligation to reflect their communities and provide their core artists with a living wage and a long-term commitment. Those who run theaters have responded that such an approach would limit artistic choices and does not reflect financial realities. (Emph. mine)

Let me just pause and say for the most part theater administrators are not particularly well paid. They might make more than the average artist, but I think it's important in having this conversation to try to walk away from the idea that administrators and artists are by necessity opposed to one another. In fact I think one of the virtues of Mike's piece is that it is not an attack on theater administrators, but rather on some of the choices they make and the system they help perpetuate.

Anyway. Let us look at the sentence in bold above. The response to the idea of having more permanent acting ensembles is that such an approach would "limit artistic choices" and "does not reflect financial realities". And thus, dear reader, we come to a question of priorities.

We come to priorities because in reality every single circumstance in some way limits artistic choices. The size of a budget limits artistic choices, the mission statement of your theater limits artistic choices (or it should, anyway, if you obey it), the size of the house you are playing in limits artistic choices.  When I was at the LCT Directors Lab, Andre Bishop spoke at length of the difficulty of programming the Beaumont. It's a tricky space, vast and cavernous with a wicked 3/4 thrust. Not every play he liked or artist he believed in was right for the Beaumont (this is one of the reasons behind the creation of LCT 3). In How Theater Failed America, Mike talks about administrators taking him on a tour of a new, larger house and then informing him he couldn't perform in it because they need to fill that space with ironclad, risk-free work.  

The point is that building a larger space is going to impact your programming and limit your artistic choices.  So it's not at the end of the day about the limitations, it's about what the organization is prioritizing.  (I should probably add here that I don't think that permanent acting ensembles are a one-size-fits-all solution to institutional theater woes, but I do think that more local artists getting paid more and getting benefits would be a good thing).  

A few years ago, I spoke with a staff member of a theater in the midst of a major capital campaign to build new spaces.  The subject of the discussion? The fight they were having with Equity to keep wages down.  The priority of that theater was space rather than the people in the space.  And we see this over and over again. Most recently in New York:  NYTW opens a brand new state of the art shop... and then lays off the entire full time staff that was supposed to work in it.  

The reasons behind this are understandable (And here we come to the "financial realities" portion o the quote).  When you open a new space, you get an immediate bump in subscribers (most of that bump will not re-up the next year, but some of them will).  It is much easier to get money for building campaigns than for "general operating costs".  Generally building campaigns also include money set aside to increase budgets on shows and at times salaries, so the two things are more interrelated than perhaps we like to think of them as.  A good space used right can be a real artistic home for a local theatrical community, assuming you don't break the bank to build it. The problem being, of course, that breaking the bank is all too common these days.

This is also not to say there aren't times when building is called for. Many theaters benefit from constructing a permanent home for themselves. Even building a new building when you already have one can be a net positive. Woolly Mammoth built a new building because they lost their old one and wanted to make sure they'd have control over their space and their future.  If I worked at The Public, I'd be looking at the 10,000 subscribers that I have to seat in a 300 seat theater and wonder if having an extra hundred seats or so for a mainstage show wouldn't be a bad idea. 

But I think most people looking around at our theatrical landscape right now would agree that our building addiction has gotten a bit out of control, especially given the financial realities of working in the theatre right now. So what is to be done?

One thing that's gotten bandied about a bit (on this blog and by Mike and a few others) is, essentially, finding a way to re-brand the idea of General Operating Expenses by taking a page from how Opera and Ballet do it and creating named endowed funds that pay for people's salaries.  Just like how at Playwrights Horizons there is the Ford Motor Company lobby, why not have the Ford Motor Company Company, or the Beaumont Acting Chair or whatever.  But the truth of the matter is this can't happen without the first step being people agreeing that the outcome of such an action (spending more money on things like artist salaries and less on construction projects) would be positive.

Finally, I'll just note that an implicit assumption of this conversation is that the money to be had is finite and that adding revenue to one stream means taking it out of somewhere else. In my experience, that's a pretty valid assumption to make.  In fact, one of the most problematic assumptions facing arts-business conversations is the idea that there's always more money to be had.  As this awesome article (Thanks Forte!) discusses, one of the reasons why we're in this pickle is that the Ford Foundation money that helped kickstart the regional theatre movement was meant to be "Seed" money which would then help encourage the government to give money to sustain it, but the government didn't. Instead, the Gov't provided less funding in order to make "seed" money to help private foundations give the money to sustain it and on and on and on until you've got an arts funding pyramid scheme.  We'll get more into this with a subsequent post, but I thought it was worth pointing out.

Hey can I ask... all of you readers out there who do not have your own space to perform in... how much money roughly are you guys spending on real estate a season? What percentage of your budget?

Comments

[chance d. muehleck]

Greetings from a frequent lurker, first-time commenter.

My company is currently finalizing a residency agreement with the Brooklyn Lyceum, which is an amazing space in the South Slope area. We're very fortunate to have found a creative solution to the real estate problem, and hopeful that audiences from both Manhattan and Brooklyn will know where to find us.

As a group that develops material collaboratively over time, we covet long incubation periods. When we do pay for rehearsal and performance space, it eats about 50% of our budget. That leaves half for everything else, including marketing and actor salaries. And while we always pay our performers fairly, we want to be able to increase those amounts. Which seems to be the crux of the conversation (even for Board-less indie theatres like mine).

Thanks for maintaining such an interesting blog.

[Ken]

"One thing that's gotten bandied about a bit (on this blog and by Mike and a few others) is, essentially, finding a way to re-brand the idea of General Operating Expenses by taking a page from how Opera and Ballet do it and creating named endowed funds that pay for people's salaries."

It's odd that you bring this up, Isaac, because lately I've started wondering whether theater in America should follow the model of the Opera, Ballet, and Symphony Orchestra: a big-ticket, high-end status item, that is performed less frequently, but in luxurious surroundings for the benefit of big-bucks donors. There is a lot that is scary about this scenario in terms of theater's need to be challenging, provocative, and accessible, all of which are likely to be comprised by such a situation. However, as small theater company after small theater company folds up its tent, one can't help noticing that there's always a Metropolitan Opera, New York Philharmonic, or New York City Ballet season---good or bad economy, real estate boom or bust. When you're starving out on the street, it's normal to be jealous as you look through the restaurant window at the happy, well-fed diners inside.

I don't know if anything I've just said makes any sense in terms of the theater we would like to see and make. I just don't know.

[RLewis]

I think what my company spends on real estate would be misleading because of the site-specific nature of our work. Most of our spaces are donated, box office splits, or some minimal fee to cover occupancy expenses (electricity, security, water, etc.). Time and leg-work are our real expenses.

But one thing I would raise in the buildings vs. people issue is their financial disconnect. While you're correct in saying, "so the two things are more interrelated than perhaps we like to think", it's still not much so on the balance sheet. I doubt that folks think much about how these 2 things come almost entirely from different pots of money.

Local govt's fund Capital Campaigns in ways that neither they or any other pot of money funds artists. I'm sure that makes sense to elected officials, cuz even if your company goes under, they'll still have a new building and increased property tax revenues going forward. It's almost a no-lose give for them. Artists are more like consumable foods - once eaten, the money spent is off the balance sheet (so eat an artist slowly).

So, I worry that comparing artists and buildings will not serve this discussion as well as it does HTFA, but I would like to see a bunch of actors roaming the City with brass plaques on their backs of Ford Motor Company Company. Nice one.

[Adam]

After working in a development office at a university for 4 years, I learned that it was easier to get people behind funding student scholarships than it was to get them to support a new building. I wonder why there isn't something comparable in more theaters where funders support productions or artists.

Some theatres do do this. I can name one that I know of where funders supported a specific director each time around--or at least the project the director was working on.