Snakes on the sidewalk. No, it’s not a new Samuel L. Jackson movie. The snakes are real, and are just one of the seemingly endless challenges facing summer theatre companies and festivals as they struggle toward recovery after 2020. Snakes—and skunks and bears, oh my—are showing up in theatre communities as their habitats shrink, giving the artistic and managing directors of these companies just one more thing to worry about.
Theatre is suffering from “long Covid,” said Utah Shakespeare Festival executive managing director Michael Bahr, speaking not literally about the virus but about its long-tail aftereffects. Added Utah Shakes artistic director John DiAntonio, summer theatres are “being tested about how essential our art is to our community.”
Morgan Manfredi, managing director of Creede Repertory Theatre in Colorado, agreed, saying the pandemic not only led to burnout, it “laid bare everything theatres have been struggling with for years.”
Oregon Shakespeare Festival staved off financial ruin only with a blast of emergency fundraising; in Wisconsin, American Players Theatre ran a deficit for the first time in 30 years and expects to do so for at least five years; and in Massachusetts, the Williamstown Theatre Festival severely curtailed its season after controversy exploded over staffers and interns feeling abused and exploited.
Bahr said that many theatres, including his, were excited to simply jump back in as the Covid crisis eased, but soon found “fissures in the system. This crisis showed us where the leaks were, but we didn’t immediately take the lesson that you can’t continue doing business as usual.”
“We have two nickels. How are we going to spend them? Why do we want to keep existing?”
Peggy McKowen, artistic director of the Contemporary American Theater Festival in West Virginia, agreed that it’s time to embrace the need to adapt. “Change can be difficult, but it is exciting to have the opportunity to restart and imagine something better,” she said. “We’re trying to figure out how we can be better servants of the work for our community while enabling folks to have a life and a family.”
Manfredi said that while some theatres were thrilled just to come out the other side and reopen, others took a moment to “look themselves square in the mirror,” adding that Creede “landed somewhere in the middle. We came back strong in 2022 as if nothing had happened, which I would say was a mistake. It was good for our audience—we were back to pre-pandemic sales numbers in 2022, and last year was one of our strongest ever—but I don’t know that it was good for the company. The journey of figuring out how to adjust has just really started this fiscal year.”
Others didn’t have a choice. Williamstown had to dig into financial reserves to survive and skipped full productions last year. Outgoing interim artistic director Jenny Gersten said that scaling back was “not only about being fiscally responsible but also about looking inward to ask, ‘What’s important to us? How do we turn the ship around? We have two nickels. How are we going to spend them? Why do we want to keep existing?’”
Not everyone is in such dire straits. Creede’s leaders said they’re better off than pre-pandemic, and McKowen said CATF has not been constrained by financial woes. “We’ve always had the great fortune of being able to produce the work we want to do,” she said. Still, she added, CATF is beginning their first ever major gifts campaign to help pave the way for future viability.
At OSF, the new artistic director, Tim Bond, said things have vastly improved in his first six months. After the emergency fundraising that kept the theatre afloat amid a tumultuous artistic turnover (see AT’s Fall 2023 issue), the theatre received support from the state and foundations, allowing them to balance their budget. “We’re not at full strength or a full-blown season,” Bond conceded, “but we are on track with ticket sales and donations, and we are fairly stable while we figure out how to get back to the size we need for a sustainable business.”
Vanessa Morosco, the new executive director at the American Shakespeare Center in Virginia, is in a similar boat but is facing a new problem. “We still need a certain budget in order to produce enough content because our audience’s expectations haven’t changed, but our donors’ behavior has radically changed,” Morosco said. “During the pandemic, many rose to the occasion to help theatres survive, but as the passion of that moment dies down, we now have donor fatigue.”
Compounding matters is that, while sponsorship and funding are trending down, costs are rising and staying high, said Jackie Alexander, producing artistic director of the North Carolina Black Repertory Company, home of the biennial International Black Theatre Festival. “Tech costs have gone through the roof,” he said. “We can’t afford to do as many big shows, to mic 20 people with sets, lighting, and sound costs going up.”
Still, amid the challenges, theatre leaders say they have hope, believing that reexamining their approach will reinvigorate their mission—if they’re willing to take time and risks.
How to Succeed in Business by Really, Really Trying
Creede interim artistic director Kate Berry has seen costs increase over recent years, including housing rentals for the theatre’s summer company, a common problem among organizations of this kind, as many are in rural locations. Additionally, in pursuit of a more equitable field, theatres are looking to pay their workers more and provide more perks.
“We have areas that we know we need to work on in terms of wages and compensation, and we are continually trying to do that,” said Brenda DeVita, APT’s artistic director.
In 2022, Williamstown began offering all employees and trainees free on-campus housing; they also implemented weekly hour caps and a guarantee of at least one day off per week. Pre-pandemic, Bahr said, Utah Shakes invested $700,000 in raising their minimum wage threshold. They later raised other wages, though that mostly stopped post-reopening, with the company running a systemic deficit, raising questions of sustainability.
APT took a similar approach to Utah Shakes pre-pandemic and has taken other steps since, including adding more understudies to lighten actors’ repertory loads. The theatre is also looking for ways to take on more expenses for visiting performers and staff, with incremental steps like covering utilities for housing, but it’s tricky within such tight budgets, said Sara Young, managing director at APT. Young noted that, during the pandemic, donations “skyrocketed” for APT, and last year they reached 95 percent of pre-pandemic ticket sales. But, after the company’s “long track record of being fiscally conservative—some people would say too fiscally conservative,” she said, APT ran a deficit last year for the first time in three decades. Young said they have the reserves to fund the budget through five years of projected deficits but added that they’re also quietly undertaking some special fundraising. As DeVita put it, “We went to our board and said we needed more funds.”
Bahr noted that Utah Shakes had offered childcare for patrons, then added it for artists. “It started getting really expensive,” he said, “but because it’s part of the cultural DNA now, we say, this is a cost of doing business and we just have to find someone to help pay for it.”
Berry has an anonymous donor supporting Creede’s childcare program, but it’s done year-to-year and could change. However they make it work, all these additions show that summer theatres have “come a long way,” she said. Manfredi said the change, “putting resources from the bottom up,” is welcome. In 2011, as an assistant stage manager at Creede, she worked 80-plus hours a week for $295, and “that’s not the kind of company that I think anyone here has any interest in running.” But there is a price to pay: Now, when concession workers reach their weekly hourly limit, Manfredi or other full-timers must run down and sell popcorn or take on other roles.
The additional costs associated with pursuing a fairer, safer theatre world have left summer theatres “struggling in that regard,” said American Shakespeare Center’s Morosco. The call for a five-day work week is a “great idea,” for instance, but it would lead to reduced rehearsal hours, which might result in fewer (or weaker) shows and thus a potential loss of audience support.
Berry added that repertory, while more expensive and exhausting, is necessary for festivals, because the close-one-open-another show model doesn’t work for theatres in remote tourist destinations. (DiAntonio added that Covid also led to the need for more understudies—in 2022, they had more than 130 roles filled by understudies, which can create chaos in a repertory theatre.)
“If we don’t have enough offerings, we’ve learned audiences won’t make the journey here,” added Bond. “We’re not really in a position to cut back so much.”
After having just five shows during a reduced 2023 summer season, this year OSF is in transition, relying on four solo shows to enable them to stage 10 total productions. “Those shows are very spare and not being fully built in order to not break our crews,” Bond said.
McKowen said CATF, which previously did six plays in repertory, eliminated full rep and reduced the number of shows to four to create “a more manageable experience for the artists and lessen the workload while still creating work that’s important.” She added that their audiences had been saying there were too many plays, leaving them feeling frantic in their quest to experience everything.
The Play Is Only Part of the Thing
In the ongoing effort to lure back audiences, appealing programming is key.
“During the pandemic people were away from the theatre and got accustomed to lying on the couch and watching what they wanted when they wanted and pausing it if they wanted to,” said North Carolina Black Repertory Company’s Alexander. “You have to sell more than just a night at the theatre and make it an experience so people are willing to pay the babysitter and pay for parking.”
Getting creative, Alexander said, means partnering with restaurants, hosting markets where visitors can buy goods from local vendors, holding Black heritage tours, and adding poetry jams and films to the festival.
Theatres like OSF and Williamstown are following a similar playbook. Raphael Picciarelli, who joined Williamstown in February as managing director for strategy and transformation, said they are “doubling down on crafting experiences for people,” including morning and late-night experiences. Williamstown has also created a four-day weekend “mini-festival” within the festival as an experiment. “We’ve got to give people a real reason to get up off their couches and be together,” Picciarelli said.
As Bahr noted, even this concept presents a challenge. “Do we have the resources to devote to this when everyone’s overworked, to say we have to do all the things around a play to make it an event?” he mused.
Those resources are further strained by gaps in staffing, Bond said, because many people left the business during the pandemic, and “being in a rural location, it’s challenging getting back a full complement of production personnel, even with great pay.”
Bahr agreed, adding that “the supply chain of welders or people doing lighting is gone,” and that in Utah, the issue is deepened by the festival’s reliance on local college students, who missed several years of in-person learning. As carpenters and other skilled workers explained to him, seniors used to teach the juniors and they’d teach the sophomores, and so on, but “it’s like they’ve got four years of freshmen now.”
Attention Must Be Paid
After George Floyd’s murder in 2020 and the public reckoning that followed, diversity and representation became a central conversation across the theatre field. Creede’s Berry says that after 2020, many theatres rushed their reactions. “You want to feel like you’re doing something, so there were a lot of steps taken in terms of Black Lives Matter, but at a certain point you have to get more nuanced,” she said.
Since those early days, Gersten said, Williamstown has been studying “how to create equitable hiring and equitable opportunities. I don’t think it’s easy, but we continue to build more intention into all of our internal processes.” The festival is also overhauling its infrastructure by searching for a managing director for operations and advancement and, Picciarelli noted, a rotating artistic leadership model that will “bring in a diverse set of thinkers and curators.”
Over the next few years, as the theatre seeks a sustainable model that can produce a “robust season,” Picciarelli said, there will be more significant change. But, he added, the company has learned one important lesson: “We’re doing this rebuild over time so we don’t bite off more than we can chew and get overwhelmed.”
Manfredi said that while Creede has undertaken EDI training and artEquity initiatives, they’ve found it challenging to attract people of color to come work full-time in a rural community that is 97 percent white. The staff also occasionally wonders whether doing shows with Black casts, like Marco Ramirez’s The Royale, for white audiences is somewhat performative. “It doesn’t mean we don’t want those shows,” Manfredi said, “but it’s a great question to ask.”
Since Creede’s neighboring counties have large Latine populations, they’ve also begun looking for local voices who can speak to that experience in plays, both at the festival and in works that could tour those communities for people who might not make it to Creede.
There’s a balance between bringing white audiences along into contemporary America’s diverse experiences and dragging them, DiAntonio said. “Some people say, ‘I’m uncomfortable seeing this, why would I pay $75 to be lectured from the stage?’ But others are saying, ‘We like this conversation and want to continue having it.”
Bahr said that, with the need to fill houses, finding the right mix and tone is especially important. DeVita said sometimes there are solutions that satisfy all comers—they’ve done plenty of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, “so now we just have to make sure that we help our audience understand that August Wilson is our American playwright in the same way.”
Diversity is about more than race, she added, noting that their 2023 season included a production of Romeo and Juliet that featured Deaf actors, which meant the company had to learn how to prepare the rehearsals and “figure out what we need to do to make these people able to be great.”
Alexander noted that even a Black theatre festival can have an awakening. “The conversations in 2020 made me think: Just because we’re a Black theatre doesn’t mean we can’t diversify too.” That has led to shows for the Deaf community and a free outdoor bilingual reading of Romeo and Juliet. This year, the North Carolina Black Repertory Company’s festival will include two new commissions: Eljon Wardally’s I Am…a Shepherdess, about a diverse group of Black women in America, and JuCoby Johnson’s Heritage, which examines the relationship between
the church and the LGBTQ+ community. Both plays were developed through the theatre’s Finding Holy Ground collaboration with Wake Forest School of Divinity and Wake the Arts. “We have a heavy churchgoing audience, and we hope this play is the first step toward opening a dialogue,” he said.
Meanwhile, CATF will stage Tornado Tastes Like Aluminum Sting by Harmon dot aut, about a non-binary autistic teenager. McKowen said they are working with a local group to make the show more accessible to people on the spectrum. The company will also produce Donja R. Love’s three-hour epic What Will Happen to All That Beauty?, about the impact of AIDS in the 1980s and about living with HIV three decades on.
“It’s about how we as a society are still not understanding the impact of that disease, particularly in the Black community,” McKowen said, “and we will have a chance to welcome a community of artists who are Black queer men, with some openly identifying as HIV positive. To create an environment for them that feels safe requires us to do our work.”
The Storm Is Up, and All Is on the Hazard
With all these challenges, it seems almost unfair to ask summer theatres to shoulder yet another burden. Mother Nature has other ideas. “We now have black snakes and skunks on the sidewalk where our actors and staff are living,” said McKowen. “We are dealing with wildlife on a daily basis.”
OSF’s Bond said that bears are coming out of Rogue Valley and into his backyard more frequently, though he added helpfully, “You won’t see them at a performance.” For Bond and his region, the more immediate threat is smoke from wildfires.
“We had 10 cancellations last season,” he said, which is a serious financial hit. “We now have a ‘smoke team’ that monitors the smoke and the direction of the wind. They’ll know when the smoke will arrive, so sometimes we cancel even when audiences are seeing blue skies because we’ve gotten good at knowing when it will roll in.”
DiAntonio said in Utah they have weather guidelines that require different costumes when the weather hits a certain level of humidity. Bahr added that, in 2022, they had to cancel nine shows because of wildfire smoke, which cost them $500,000.
Young said that 2021 marked the first time American Players Theatre had to cancel outdoor productions in their 1,075-seat Hill Theatre for extreme heat. (Last year they lost performances due to poor air quality.) She said that while many audiences prefer matinees because they don’t want to drive at night, they increasingly have trouble sitting through them in extreme heat—weather that is also unsafe for actors. To compensate, APT is shifting outdoor matinees to late August, when it’s cooler in Wisconsin.
“We plan into our budget that we’re going to refund a certain number of tickets for weather,” she said, “but that number is getting higher, and we have to look at what it will be like in 10 years. Are we going to need a large indoor space to accommodate that shift?”
Even indoor theatres are facing new challenges, with increased electric bills for air conditioning and new HVAC filter requirements, Berry said. “We’re going to have to make a significant investment in managing comfort in our venues and our housing,” Manfredi added.
“All these challenges are an existential threat to summer theatre as we know it,” Bond said. “I’m an optimistic person, but we are facing difficult headwinds. I think if we can hold on for a couple more years, we’re going to get to the other side of this, but will everyone make it through that? I don’t know.”
Bond said he hopes that governments, foundations, corporations, and individual donors across the country step up to help in this time of need. Finding workable solutions is essential, Morosco said, especially in this era when people are more isolated and loudly divided. “We are a radical act against that,” Morosco said, “We bring people together.”
Stuart Miller (he/him), a writer based in New York City, is a frequent contributor to this magazine.