With the recent announcement that the 39-yr. old Intiman Theatre in Seattle would abruptly halt its 2011 season in order to regroup and avoid fiscal catastrophe, there's been much talk in the blogosphere about runaway spending, artistic hubris and impossibly high deficits throughout America's regional theatre landscape.
In the late '80s and throughout the '90s I ran a small experimental opera company in Boston called New Opera Theatre Ensemble. During my tenure at N.O.T.E. one of my proudest boasts was that the company had operated "in the black" since its inception. The recent demise of several theatre companies across the country due to financial woes has shined the spotlight anew on this issue. And, although I do agree with those who argue that fiscal discipline is essential, as I look back on our small experiment in Boston, I actually think one of the drags on the company was that we never allowed ourselves the kind of growth that can only come by running a small and manageable deficit.
We began as a company the day I picked up the phone and called a few singers and a pianist and gathered them in my living room to experiment with forging operas out of improvisation. Over the years we managed to mount several new works, staging them in the most unlikely of venues. Often, our choice of venue was influenced by financial considerations, like when we mounted a one-woman opera starring Cherie Magnello in the Danco Furniture Showroom behind the campus of M.I.T. in Cambridge. We got the space for free due in large part to a brilliant bit of cross-promotion. Customers of the furniture store were given two-for-one tickets to the opera and opera ticket holders were encouraged to use their ticket stubs for a 20% discount on furniture.
With a capacity of 70 per performance, it's no wonder that the show sold out its short run. Of course, we didn't make much money and the furniture store sadly did go out of business a year later. I choose to believe that wasn't our doing entirely.
Our shows were modest in scope. Our budgets were tight. Our house sizes were tiny by most standards, but over the years we did slowly build an enthusiastic and loyal following, however small it may have been. What we never did as much as we could have, however, was invest adequate resources in promoting our work to the media and in expanding our audience base.
Some examples.
One year, instead of hiring the best publicist, we hired a friend of a friend of one of our board members who offered us a steep discount as a favor to her friend. Rule of thumb: the moment someone responsible for a vital piece of a production puzzle has said out loud that they are doing the production "a favor," you're in trouble. Calls went unreturned. Press releases were late. Follow-up was miniscule. The result was anemic box office and faint notice in the local press.
Another year, we partnered with the Museum of Science to present one of our most popular works, Blind Trust, a sort of musical radio play performed in the total darkness of the Hayden Planetarium. In this case, we benefited from the broad reach of the museum's own PR department and the show was both widely covered and well attended, the latter in large part due simply to the daily foot traffic in the museum and the museum staff's enthusiasm for having a unique opportunity to promote something to the visually-impaired community. For all I know, our little opera in the dark may have found its way onto one or two grant applications.
But when the question of touring our planetarium hit to other planetaria throughout the country came up for discussion at a board meeting, the effort was deemed too costly and tabled. In retrospect, that was a mistake. We should have capitalized on a hit to broaden the reach of our efforts with an innovative use of a particular type of space that generally-speaking was underutilized.
In 1990, we brought our first show to NYC. We received a tepid but encouraging review in the New York Times and we were a bit too green to recognize just how significant it was to be reviewed at all in that paper. Our box office for the week we were in town was not great but the audience enthusiasm was off the charts and we instantly expanded our mailing list by a few hundred New Yorkers.
Two years later when we had plans to bring our second offering to NYC, we choked. We had raised only 50% of the total cost of the tour. The show in question had been a success by our standards in Boston. We'd extended the run by one week. And yet, suddenly the board and I sat down to evaluate in the eleventh hour whether the company could afford to risk losing our shirt on another trip down to New York.
And herein lies a key mistake. Having raised 50% of the cost of the tour, in retrospect, I'd say we were actually in pretty good shape. We may have even snagged another Times review and held steady with our box office levels from the last show. But fiscal restraint won the day and we pulled the plug on the whole tour and this show was never performed again anywhere.
If I were facing that same decision today, I think I would make the call differently. And here's where I think I failed as Artistic Director in this instance. By focusing on fiscal discipline myself in a room full of accountants and lawyers and other business-minded folk who populated our board, I mind-melded with them. And I think that's not what a company needs from its Artistic Director. He or she should always be the one in the room who dares to dream, who is perhaps just a little bit impractical, who is from time to time reined in by the voices of reason on the board. That's the balance that, I think, is essential for growth and it ultimately means the difference between a company continuing for more than a decade producing at the same budget level year in and year out (as we did) and a company that grows, expands, takes risks and claims a bigger cultural footprint for itself.
So I do hope that as some of these theatres around the country face the challenge of evaporating government funding and lackluster subscriber support, they won't lose sight of the value of risk. Without it, the fruit can just as easily die on the vine.
