E.C.author Duane Kelly recently hosted a public conversation for the Dramatists Guild with arts consultant Susan Trapnell and members of the Seattle theatre community. Rolando Teco posed a few follow-up questions. Here's their cyber conversation:
Q:
Duane, you recently held a public discussion with arts consultant Susan Trapnell as part of your ongoing series of Seattle-area meetings for members of the Dramatists Guild. For those unfamiliar with Susan's bio and recent local events of concern to the community, can you give us some background on how you arrived at this particular subject and at this particular time?
A:
Nonprofit regional theatres have been struggling for some time now, with finances, yes, but also with identifying and communicating their artistic mission, and developing new audiences to replace aging ones. While these challenges predate the current recession, that economic tsunami has certainly exacerbated them. Some of these challenges were aired in the book Outrageous Fortune that was published last year.
The recent announcement that Intiman Theatre (Bart Sher’s former home) has cancelled the rest of this season after producing only one play, All My Sons, to give it time to regroup and reopen next year on a healthier footing, is a major crisis for Seattle’s theatre community. Intiman’s entire artistic and administrative staff, including Artistic Director Kate Whoriskey, were laid off, and the many local actors and designers who were expecting work at Intiman this year have been dealt a financial blow.
Susan Trapnell, who is based in Seattle, has many years of executive experience on the business side of large nonprofit theatres and dance companies. In recent years she has been working as an arts management consultant and was retained by Intiman’s Board of Directors to help develop a survival plan.
Given the long-running debate about LORT theatres (most of the large nonprofits with Equity contracts are in this category), the immediate crisis in Seattle, and Susan’s availability, it seemed an opportune time to meet with her.
Q:
Susan Trapnell has a long history with cultural organizations in Seattle but she has also had the opportunity to work elsewhere, most recently, at the Guthrie in Minneapolis. Were there any revelations about the unique challenges facing the cultural community in Seattle as distinct from those of other areas of the U.S.?
A:
Susan sees many more common issues around the country than ones unique to various communities. Her observations focused on those common issues.
Q:
Recent news of the Intiman Theatre closing (for at least this season) has been the source of much gloomy forecasting elsewhere in the country. Was Susan able to offer any glimmers of hope by virtue of her close view of things?
A:
She is confident that Intiman will return as a producing theatre next year. It may be different than the former Intiman, in fact she argues that it needs to be.
Q:
Your conversation with this arts consultant was conducted before an audience composed largely of writers. How would you characterize the atmosphere in the room? Given the natural suspicion with which writers tend to regard those who hold the purse strings at large cultural institutions, were there any particularly pointed questions posed by members of the audience? And, if so, how did Susan respond?
A:
A few writers expressed concern that Intiman’s Board hasn’t been sufficiently forthright about what’s gone wrong, and where has all the money gone. Because the Intiman crisis is ongoing and Susan is still advising the Board, she was limited as to what she could say. The writers in the room felt that Susan was being quite candid, given the circumstances, and her candor allayed any suspicions such as you anticipate. Susan was clear that Intiman has been going in a negative direction for a number of years, running annual deficits that kept accumulating without being adequately addressed. Intiman did not just become ill recently. The problems go back to when Bart Sher was Artistic Director and Laura Penn Managing Director. (It’s interesting that they are both now in NY, Laura as Executive Director of the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers and Bart at Lincoln Center Theatres.)
Q:
Did the question of Intiman's having made an appeal for $500K as a means of surviving and their having raised nearly that sum. come up as a matter of controversy? And if so, what new information came to light?
A:
Susan reported that those funds were used to pay down debt, which she maintains was necessary to do if Intiman were to have any chance to survive and regain health. The use of those funds has been transparent.
Q:
Did your guest discuss the financial difficulties of ACT following their recent move to historic downtown Seattle? If so, what did you learn?
A:
Not with any specifics. ACT’s artistic and business managers did a lot of soul searching during that crisis and emerged with a clarified artistic mission and better business model, and as a result ACT is relatively healthy today financially and more robust artistically than it’s ever been. Kurt Beattie, ACT’s Artistic Director during the crisis and since, deserves a lot of credit for leadership and being willing to explore, test and implement new models.
Q:
What was most surprising about Ms. Trapnell's remarks? Were there any assumptions or myths that she was able to lay to rest?
A:
At the risk of offending fellow dramatists, writers tend to be naïve and uninformed about the business side of theatre. Educating us as writers for the stage about the business of the stage was the main objective for this meeting. I heard Susan make four main points:
1. The single biggest impact on LORT theatres has been the decline in public funding. In 1982 public funding (mostly NEA but also state, county and city funding) represented 12-16% of a theatre’s annual budget. Today it represents 1-2%. That decline has been devastating because theatres have had to replace that income in other ways. That’s the main reason why the administrative staff budget of theatres has grown disproportionately in recent decades. Raising money from grants and the private sector is difficult and expensive, and more and more development staff has been hired to raise those funds.
Over the last 25 years the message our society, as represented by our elected officials, has given the arts is that they are now a private sector charity. What the arts desperately need is a public sector champion. It’s been many decades since they had one.
2. The shift from a strong subscriber base with corresponding reliable revenue to single ticket sales has been huge. One consequence is that artistic directors have been forced to be more conservative in their programming. Most subscribers to a six-play season know that there will be a few duds in there; by and large they accepted that as part of the adventure of theatre. With a lot more revenue now coming from single ticket sales, those buyers are less tolerant of a dud and one play that underperforms financially can now sink the theatre’s entire annual budget.
Susan observes that in general, younger people want to be the curator of their own artistic experiences. She drew an analogy with the music industry: the music album buyer is like the season subscriber, they trusted the musical artist and record producer to assemble eight or ten songs into a satisfying musical experience; the single ticket buyer is like someone who buys (or not) and downloads a single song.
The marketing effort required to attract a single-ticket buyer vs. a subscription buyer is more difficult and expensive. This trend explains why the marketing staff and budget at theatre companies have also been growing disproportionately.
· (As an aside from Duane, this cultural shift also explains why more audience members are interested in the process of creating the art before its professional presentation, which Roland recently criticized in an EC post. And Roland, I haven’t seen the data supporting this either; I’m just reporting Susan’s observations based on working with a lot of theatres.)
3. All nonprofit theatres are challenged financially right now. But Susan has seen a common denominator in the ones that have gone under or become dangerously imperiled: the board leadership, business management leadership, and arts leadership are not aligned. When two or all three of those sectors work in silos or at cross-purposes, that spells collapse for the institution.
a. As a general observation, in recent decades the artistic management has increased in sophistication while boards have not.
4. Essential questions every theatre should be asking in a rigorous way are:
a. What work does this company want to produce?
b. What audience do we have to have for that work?
c. Can we attract that audience? How?
I asked about how theatre compares to other performing arts. She believes that theatre is in a better position than ballet, opera and symphonies. She thinks symphonies face the greatest challenge because the fixed cost of the orchestra is so high. Theatre companies have a lot more flexibility, and that is certainly a strength in this environment. (Whether theatres will take advantage of their relative flexibility is a different question.)
Q:
Finally, as a writer, can you speak to the importance of such gatherings? How does gathering with fellow writers impact your own creative work? And for those contemplating organizing similar events in their neck of the woods, what advice would you offer?
A:
I believe artists benefit enormously by becoming better informed about the business side of art, whatever the medium. If nothing else, it fosters empathy for artistic directors and managing directors. When empathy and understanding, rather than distrust and suspicion, characterize the communication between an outside artist and art institution’s staff, good outcomes are more likely. The same principle applies to a sculptor and gallery manager, a violinist and an orchestra, or a dancer and a ballet company.
My advice is don’t be afraid to be the catalyst for the kind of interchange we had between Susan Trapnell and Seattle playwrights. My experience is that people are more inclined to engage in these discussions than we assume, and when they do meet with us, they are more candid and informative than we might think. Step up. Go for it.