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Is your theater building a community? Or is it just putting on shows?

slide with text "a thriving arts sector creates suprising ripple benefits throughout our community"

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 it can: mass-audience pleasing work; stunt casting; paying actors, designers, and crew as little as possible. Nonprofit theaters that use the same tactics repeatedly abandon their core reason for being a nonprofit: to strengthen their community. 

Much like a forest must withstand a fire every so often in order to clear out decay and make room for new growth, the past few years should be viewed similarly for our local theater ecosystem. Has it been painful? Sure. Has it been drastic? In some ways, yes. 

Can we now look around and ask ourselves "how are we resilient, how do we move forward and build organizations that are more focused on the community and supporting the artists within?" Now is exactly the time to do that. Zingerman's president Ari Weinzweig recently wrote "Perhaps most of all, we can create organizational ecosystems where resilience is present and persistent in the best possible ways." 

  • Boards need to be changed to resemble the community the organization serves. 
  • Administrations need to diversify in nonprofit the same way Fortune 500 companies need to have more diverse staffs throughout their "pipeline." 
  • Work presented needs to reflect the conversations the community must have. 
  • Actors need to be advocates and admin needs to get off the wall of "well we've never done that before" and make safe, supportive working spaces for all. 
  • And audiences have to show up for all the work. All. 

For our theaters, resilience isn't putting on another show or having an endowment or even a few donors with very deep pockets (although all those things help). Resilience is building a community both inside and outside the doors that wants to ensure the art continues to make a difference. 

 

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