I asked in a Facebook post in 2011: "Theater is about connections. How do administrators facilitate this connecting? How do theaters (as an entity) ensure this connection continues happening, time and time again?" Strengthening these connections is what makes a theater resilient, what makes the theater ecosystem resilient. Even before Covid forced theater closures, our local ecosystem lost several long-standing organizations due to life happening (people moved, people aged and retired, etc.). Add the normal ebb and flow of creatives coming together for some number of shows and then going on to reassemble in different configurations. New groups crop up, some grow, some provide fodder for a completely different way of making art. Nonprofit theater cannot build itself in the same way as for-profit theater. The very heart of the nonprofit mission is community-mindedness. For-profit theater by its very nature will follow a path of least resistance to earning as much profit as
Musings on Performing Arts, Arts Ecosystems & Community Enrichment, Parenting, and other Perplexities of Life