Building a Sustainable Theater: How to Remove Gatekeepers and Take Control of Your Artistic Career

By Scott Walters

You are an artist, not an employee.

 

This book is about change, innovation, rebooting the theater system in order to make it more widely available and its artists more strongly empowered. It is written for theater artists who are trailblazers and bushwhackers who want to take control of the theatrical means of production by starting their own theaters--theaters that are sustainable financially, artistically, and personally. If that's you, read on.

 

The difference between an artist and an employee has little to do with the quality of your work. Works of overwhelming genius have been created by employees, and works of mind-numbing mediocrity have been created by artists. The distinction I am drawing concerns one thing only: agency.

 

Artists have agency. They are in control. They develop a personal vision, they set goals, and they chart a course to achieve them. They do not have to fit into somebody else's ideas about them. They do not have to ask permission. They initiate.

 

Artists are owners.

 

A theater is a small business, something that will exist beyond a single production or even a single year. The goal is the creation of a company in both the business sense of a "structure that is a separate legal entity from its owners," but also in the theatrical sense of a group of artists who have an ongoing creative relationship.

 

I'll be describing some strategies and techniques that will empower you to become an "independent artist." So what do I mean by "independent"? Think of the Declaration of Independence, in which the Founding Fathers declared themselves free of the control of England. Same thing here: independence means freedom from the control of others. It is the freedom to control what you do, when you do it, and where you do it without asking permission of an external authority. It is the freedom to be in charge of your artistic development—the projects and experiments you need to do to expand your skills and imagination and fully embody your vision.

 

You're in charge. You're the boss.

 

Our current theater system turns artists in to employees. This book seeks to change that one artist at a time by showing you that, with some thought, planning, and research, you have the ability to start a sustainable theater and lead a creative life that is fulfilling and engaging.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scott Walters
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223250708

Scott Walters

Scott Walters is Emeritus Professor of Drama at the University of North Carolina Asheville, where he taught play analysis, theatre history, and directing for more than 20 years. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Access to Excellence grant, and co-authored with Cal Pritner Introduction to Play Analysis. 

Book preview

Part 1: Basic Principles

Chapter 0: Forget Everything

I’M BEGINNING THIS book with Chapter 0, because it is actually something you have to do before you begin moving forward. It is a foundational attitude necessary to begin your journey.

Basically, you have to forget everything you think you know about theater. Not forever; just for now. Let me explain.

Remember the beginning of Dorothy’s journey in The Wizard of Oz, when she is instructed to follow the yellow brick road? Her first steps on that journey actually take her in a spiral, not a straight line. Had she stopped after the first few steps, she would have found that she was facing in the opposite direction from where she ultimately wanted to go! But it was necessary for her to walk in a circle to shake off her natural sense of direction (Kansas is all about straight lines, right?) and open herself to a new approach.

That's what I'm asking you to do, too.

To start your journey, you have to forget everything you think of as truths about how theater is made, what it looks like, and who has to be in the audience. You have to abandon your preconceptions and assumptions. Only then will you be able to consider your creative life afresh.

Sociologists refer to these underlying assumptions as doxa, the ideas that are given, that go without saying. They are the ideas that we absorb during our creative life that seem unquestionable, but they are also stories that may be standing in the way of following our creative path. So:

If you think that theater needs to be done in special buildings—forget that.

If you think that theater requires sets, lights, costumes, even multiple actors—forget that.

If you think that theater needs to be done in front of a particular audience—forget that.

If you think theater needs tickets and a box office—forget that.

If you think that theater needs a text—forget that.

If you think that theater needs to be nonprofit—forget that.

If you think that the goal of doing theater is fame—forget that. (Especially forget that.)

All of these things ultimately may or may not be true—or, at least, true for you—but they must be intentionally examined and consciously chosen, not simply inherited from authority figures, mentors, and the Grand Myth of Theater in the US.

The economist E. F. Schumacher, in his book Small Is Beautiful, wrote All through our youth and adolescence, before the conscious and critical mind begins to act as a sort of censor and guardian at the threshold, ideas seep into our mind, vast hosts and multitudes of them. These years are, one might say, our Dark Ages during which we are nothing but inheritors: it is only in later years that we can gradually learn to sort out our inheritance. In my experience, the Dark Ages for theater people extend far beyond youth and adolescence. Ideas about theater careers and how theater is done are constantly hammered into us by our teachers, by other theater artists, by the stories told in the media. Eventually, we come to believe in TINA: There Is No Alternative.

But there are alternatives—we've just forgotten them. Or more likely, we were never told about them in the first place.

Someone Else’s Dreams: A True Story

This is an excerpt from Seth Godin's fabulous book The Icarus Deception: How High Will You Fly? (Highly recommended.) It illustrates the way our preconceptions about the way theater is done shapes our career path. Godin writes:

Sarah loves to perform musical theater. She loves the energy of being onstage, the flow of being in the moment, the frisson of feeling the rest of the troupe in sync as she moves. And yet . . . And yet Sarah spends 98 percent of her time trying to be picked. She goes to casting calls, sends out head shots, follows every lead. And then she deals with the heartbreak of rejection, of being hassled or seeing her skills disrespected. All so she can be in front of the right audience. Which audience is the right one? The audience of critics and theatergoers and the rest of the authorities. After all, that’s what musical theater is. Its pinnacle is at City Center and on Broadway, and if she’s lucky, Ben Brantley from the Times will be there and Baryshnikov will be in the audience and the reviewers will like her show and she might even get mentioned. All so she can do it again.

This is her agent’s dream and the casting agency’s dream and the director’s dream and the theater owner’s dream and the producer’s dream. It’s a dream that gives money to those who want to put on the next show and gives power to the professionals who can give the nod and, yes, pick someone."

Sound familiar? He then continues with some important truths that I hope might resonate in your heart and mind:

But wait. Sarah’s joy is in the dance. It’s in the moment. Her joy is in creating flow. Strip away all the cruft and what we see is that virtually none of the demeaning work she does to be picked is necessary. What if she performs for the wrong audience? What if she follows Banksy’s lead and takes her art to the street? What if she performs in classrooms or prisons or for some (sorry to use air quotes here) lesser" audience? Who decided that a performance in alternative venues for alternative audiences wasn’t legitimate dance, couldn’t be real art, didn’t create as much joy, wasn’t as real? Who decided that Sarah couldn’t be an impresario and pick herself?

The people who pick decided that."

This is why I suggest that the first step is forgetting everything. Because the dreams of the people who do the picking—the gatekeepers—are powerful; and they limit your options. They box in your imagination. It’s like a 3-card Monte game you see on the street of a major city. The guy who’s running it, who’s dealing the cards, convinces you that there are only three choices you can make: left, right, and center. What’ll it be? What’ll it be? What’ll it be?

The Dealer then does his best to distract you from focusing on what is most important to you, so that you lose sight of the important card. And most of the time you do. All of the games in a casino are rigged to favor the house. But there are other games to be played, games that have many more cards and give you a much better chance of winning. You just have to walk away and find something else.

The Most Important Thing You Need to Forget

Here’s the most important obstacle that you need to set aside: that you need permission to create your art. You do not need to be picked, as Godin says. You can be in control of what you do, when you do it, and for whom you do it. Artists do not beg for permission to create art. This should be your mantra.

The goal is to remove all the tracks of A Chorus Line from your mental playlist. It does not provide a model for an artistic life:

[ALL]

God, I hope I get it

I hope I get it

How many people does he need?

[BOYS]

How many people does he need?

[GIRLS]

God, I hope I get it

[ALL]

I hope I get it

How many boys, how many girls?

[GIRLS]

How many boys, how many...?

[ALL]

Look at all the people!

At all the people

How many people does he need?

How many boys, how many girls?

How many people does he...?

[TRICIA]

I really need this job

Please God, I need this job

I've got to get this job.

To quote another song from the same musical, That ain’t it, kid. That ain’t it, kid!

Chapter 1: How We Got Here

I’M WRITING THIS CHAPTER on a July morning in 2023. Over the past couple weeks, I’ve seen a flurry of announcements of closings of regional theaters across the United States. Here is the list as I write:

Long Wharf Theatre (New Haven, CT)—gave up its theater and is now homeless.

Center Theatre Group (Los Angeles, CA)—cut it’s budget and paused programming in the Mark Taper Forum.

Oregon Shakespeare Festival (Ashland, OR)—after raising $2.5M in emergency donations in April in order to keep it’s 2023 season afloat, is now trying to raise another $7.5M or the season might be cancelled.

Triad Stage (Greensboro, NC)—permanently closed.

Southern Rep Theatre (New Orleans, LA)—permanently closed.

New Ohio Theatre (New York, NY)—permanently closed.

Public Theatre (New York, NY)—eliminated the Under the Radar Festival and cut 19% of its staff in a cost-saving measure.

Arena Stage (Washington, DC)—working with what its leaders call ‘deficit planning’...[and] reducing the number of plays they produce.

Lookingglass Theatre Company (Chicago, IL)—ceasing operations until late spring 2024.

In my neck of the woods (Western Massachusetts), the Williamstown Theatre Festival (Williamstown, MA) and the Westport Country Playhouse (Westport, CT) have basically become roadhouses who occasionally do play readings. And I’d add the Brooklyn Academy of Music (Brooklyn, NY), who cut their staff by 13%.

And of course, it’s not just the large theaters who are struggling. American Theatre published an article by Gabriela Furtado Coutinho called BoHo Theatre and the ‘Brutal Calculus’ of Chicago Storefronts, which describes the closing of the 20-year-old BoHo Theatre. Couthino provides a list of Chicago casualties: In 2023 alone, First Folio Theatre, Sideshow Theatre Company, The New Coordinates, and Interrobang Theatre Project shuttered after grappling with these exacerbated issues.

Peter Marks, theater critic for the Washington Post, published an article on July 6 entitled Theater is in freefall, and the pandemic isn’t the only thing to blame. What was notable about Marks’s article were the quotations he has included from various experts in arts management concerning their beliefs about the seriousness of the crisis and its causes. For instance, Michael M. Kaiser, the former head of the Kennedy Center who now chairs the DeVos Institute of Arts Management at the University of Maryland, said It’s happening more and more, and it’s going to be an epidemic. I’ve always believed that we were heading for a time that we were going to lose a whole lot of midsized cultural organizations. And I still believe that’s true. Amy Wratchford, president of the arts management consultancy Wratchford Group, goes even further and makes a truly alarming prediction: By this time next year, I think the industry will shrink by half. Gulp!

She continued, in what is surely a phrase designed to send chills up and down the spine of arts leaders everywhere, that the nonprofit theater is suffering from donor fatigue, which Marks explains is a reluctance by some financial supporters to continue to shore up struggling institutions. Apparently, there is a limit to the number of times you can ask donors to reach into their pockets to keep you afloat before they start asking whether you might need to change the way you’re doing things. What we’ve got, Wratchford says, in what seems to me to be an understatement, is a disconnect between theater and the people who fund it.

To me, the term donor fatigue combined with what has always been scant government support for the arts says, in effect, the party’s over for a nonprofit model founded on the constant generation of unearned income from a donor class drawn from the rich. Michael Kaiser, without coming out and saying it, blames the financial crisis on some theaters becoming woke (not his word) without bringing their audiences or their doners or their boards along with them...And as a result, I think we’re seeing some serious loss of audience and board support and donor support. I have my doubts, but maybe there’s some truth there—after all, the rich donor demographic is not noted for being particularly liberal in its politics. It may be, and probably is, something else entirely, but what is undeniable is that we are seeing what seems to be more than what people in the stock market call a correction.

There are some who might suggest that publishing a book on how to start a theater at this precise moment in theater history might be unwise, to say the least. But I disagree. In fact, I’ve been rushing to get this finished as soon as possible, and it is why I am making it available free of charge.

Why? Because this book describes the exact antithesis to the nonprofit model that has dominated the theater since the mid-1960s, which came into being when the arts, thanks to the presidency of John F. Kennedy, were considered cool, and when a couple major foundations, mainly the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, were pumping money into the theater sector at a stunning rate. But it didn’t last long. Joseph Wesley Ziegler, writing in 1973, only eight years after the founding of the National Endowment for the Arts, in his book Regional Theater: The Revolutionary Stage, said the 'cultural explosion' had already proved to be largely a myth: the natural increase in population and per capita income had given the appearance in the early 1960s of increased interest in the arts, but the percentage of people interested in the arts had not grown significantly. But an entire movement was built on assumptions that the Ford and Rockefeller money would continue indefinitely. It didn’t. And we’re paying for it today.

During the same week that newspapers were filled with stories of shuttered theaters, Andy Horwitz at the Culturbot website wrote an essay entitled The Theater(s) We Need Now that included the following paragraph:

Be real about money: Unless you are willing to charge exorbitant ticket prices (Broadway, commercial touring houses), then the performing arts are not a sustainable business, much less profitable, and they’re not supposed to be (learn about Baumol’s Cost Disease, read Lewis Hyde’s The Gift). Embrace the idea that non-profit theater is a money-losing proposition that we must subsidize as a public good, for the public benefit, and plan accordingly, change the ways in which you ask for support, who you ask for support and what you ask them to support.

And I just couldn’t. I had to stop.

As far as I’m concerned, all of the other recommendations in his essay, as admirable as they are and as much as I agreed with most of them, are negated by this point. If the only way you can create art is by dreaming of the day when money falls from the sky, then you should just give up now. I’ve been hearing this song for almost 50 years now, and I even sang a few verses myself when I was younger, but singing it in 2023 in the midst of the smoke and rubble of the theater crash is embarrassing. It’s like basing your finances on asking people to applaud for Tinkerbell. And it certainly isn’t being "real about