The Fight To Keep Philly’s Theater Scene Alive
Vital to the region’s economy and identity, Philly’s regional theaters thought if they could just make it through the pandemic, life would go back to normal. Three years in, audiences haven’t returned, costs are up, and funding is down. The show must go on, but how?
Act I. Setting the Scene
“What a wonder is a gun! What a versatile invention! First of all, when you’ve got a gun — ” Actor Steve Pacek suddenly stops singing, and the musicians fall silent as he stands center-stage during the Arden Theatre’s season opener, the Stephen Sondheim musical Assassins. He moves from brandishing his gun admiringly to pointing it directly at us. We’re all momentarily suspended in his sights, and there’s a sudden charge in the air as we feel the menace, even if it’s only pretend. After a few beats, President Garfield’s assassin, Charles Guiteau, coyly finishes his line, singing, “Everybody pays attention.” We reflexively exhale at the broken tension and truth of the line. Sondheim’s 1990 work, which could easily be called Guns, the Musical!, gives us a vaudevillian-type revue starring American presidential assassins through the decades, from John Wilkes Booth to would-be killer John Hinckley Jr. It shines a light on America’s deranged fascination with and celebration of guns. It couldn’t feel more timely.
The performance was relevant and provocative and impeccably delivered, with smart, sleek theatrical choices. As I leave the show, I’m energized with that live-theater communal thrill. So why was I next to an empty seat, and why has the Arden gone from 503 performances last year to 363 this season?
Regional theater around the country is in trouble — and, some observers say, headed toward a financial cliff. Thirty-five major regional theaters and festivals around the country have already closed in the aftermath of COVID, according to research compiled this summer by a publication of Theatre Communications Group. Many of the seeds of this crisis took root well before the pandemic, but COVID is often cited as the accelerant. Worry over adequate financial support is, predictably, ongoing for theaters, but the complaint got louder as donor fatigue set in and institutional philanthropy began shifting priorities. All the federal bailout money that kept companies afloat is gone, and with prices going up for every production component — just the lumber for a set might cost more than the actors’ salaries — companies are trying to make do with less.
What ticket buyers want is changing, too. During the pandemic, people got hooked on spending cozy nights at home, streaming dramas from their sofas. Those who want to consume culture in real life now and can afford pricey tickets might prefer to spend their money on immersive experiences, live music, or even a quick trip to enjoy New York City theater. Amid rewired ways to live and play, a night out at regional theater may simply not feel worth it.
Many theaters are clinging to solvency by tinkering with costs: cutting back on production budgets, reducing the number of shows they present and the number of performances of those shows. Others are reducing staff, canceling or postponing productions, or selecting shows with smaller casts and simpler set and costume requirements. “All of us are doing very specific behind-the-scenes adjustments, because most everyone is dealing with balance-sheet issues, leaning on lines of credit or on our boards,” says Theatre Exile producing artistic director Deb Block. Theatre Communications Group revealed in a 2022 study that the number of theaters budgeting for a deficit rose from 10 percent in 2021 to 62 percent in 2023. But the arts-and-culture sector has been and still can be a powerful economic engine for Philadelphia, and a major contributor to a city’s return from a blow like the pandemic.
(To be clear, we’re talking about the slice of theater that consists of not-for-profit companies, not the commercial Broadway shows that tour the country, which are nearly back to pre-pandemic audience levels, or the typically all-volunteer community theater made by amateurs.)
Theater leaders are trying to process what motivates ticket buyers these days — We want fun, we want to be challenged, we want guaranteed crowd-pleasers, we don’t want to be passive for two hours, we want to feel safe getting there, we don’t want to break the bank for a night out. There are so many mixed messages about what motivates potential ticket buyers that theaters find it hard to plan. Every lesson about audience trends and marketing ever learned by regional theaters is up in the air. Nick Stuccio, the retiring president and founder of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, is as baffled as everyone else. “It’s weird. I’ve been doing this for almost 30 years now,” he says. “I bounce from ‘We are completely fucked’ to looking at the box-office reports we got from this past Fringe, and we got a 25 percent bump on ticket sales. So I’m like, ‘Huh? How did that happen?’”
Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance president and CEO Patricia Wilson Aden says that the current situation is a perfect storm of challenges: “The worry level is high, and that is based upon the real experiences and pressures that our theaters are experiencing right now.”
Act II. Back to the Beginning
The late, legendary theater producer Joseph Papp wrote in the forward to the 1986 book Theater in America, “Someone once called theater the fabulous invalid, because every age feels certain that it is on the verge of extinction.” Papp then listed multiple woes afflicting theater that year, including monumental production costs, high ticket prices, a paucity of dramas, and dwindling audiences. Sounds familiar. Such worries come up cyclically whenever there’s an economic downtown or a major shock to social systems — post-9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, a global pandemic.
When you walk past our not-for-profit theaters, you might assume they’ve been around forever. But regional theater companies are a relatively new invention. Their origin story reaches back to high-minded amateur aspirations of the Little Theater Movement that sprang up in the 1920s in response to popular commercial theater. But it wasn’t until the Ford Foundation made a galvanizing $9 million grant in 1961, followed by the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1965, that this current era took off. Those financial commitments gave birth to hundreds of companies around the country, and they thrived, making it possible to have a career in the theater beyond New York City. Writers who dreamed of more than just making a buck in the profit-driven commercial realm could turn to regional theater as a home for their creativity. And some of the biggest creative hits on Broadway these days — Hamilton, Hadestown, Dear Evan Hansen — got their start and were incubated at not-for-profit theaters. James ljames’s Pulitzer-winning play Fat Ham got its start at the Wilma Theater (in a film version), finished its run on Broadway this summer, and returned for a run at the Wilma through December 30th.
Philly’s path has been a bit different from that of other major cities because of our proximity to New York. We remained in the Big Apple’s gravitational pull and served as a useful tryout town for commercial fare at venues like the Walnut and the Forrest into the 1970s. Our theatrical ecosystem coalesced in the 1990s, when then-mayor Ed Rendell spearheaded the charge to make Philadelphia a great cosmopolitan arts-and-culture destination. His 1993 revitalization campaign for Broad Street, rebranded as the Avenue of the Arts, coincided with the aspirations of a new generation of theater makers. The Philadelphia Fringe Festival, launched in 1997, became a huge draw via its unconventional venues and performances. Simultaneously, empty nesters flocked back into Center City and became patrons of these theaters. With generous funding from philanthropic powerhouses like the William Penn Foundation and Pew, theater companies of all sizes were energized and supported, and creativity burbled happily along. Our relatively cheap cost of living and plenty of employment opportunities in university theater programs and small and mid-size theater companies contributed to the productive environment.
Still, there were clouds on the horizon. As the decades passed, audiences were aging; season subscriptions were going out of fashion as patrons preferred not to commit their time and money so far in advance. Ticket buyers were increasingly unsure of their health and their plans — or just preferred to pick and choose what they attended. There never had been widespread diversity in theater audiences or programming, and pay for those who worked in the field was generally dismal. Still, the show did go on — that is, until March 2020. Theaters survived COVID, but this past summer a rash of closures nationally demanded attention. Among others, Los Angeles’s Center Theatre Group at Mark Taper Forum and Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre Company are “paused” indefinitely, while Louisville’s Humana Festival of New American Plays closed.
Local theater leaders were so concerned about the doom-and-gloom national news stories that in mid-July, artistic directors and managing directors from 16 regional theaters convened at the Arden to figure out how to collectively create a resilient theater ecosystem. They wound up forming groups focusing on two core areas: advocacy for fund-raising, and shared marketing, including coordinating with Visit Philly to market the industry as a whole.
Bristol Riverside Theater’s Amy Kaissar, the co-producing director and a member of that informal gathering — it continues to meet monthly by Zoom — says, “I’ve been around long enough to have worked through the period after 9/11 and the 2008-2009 recession, and this is probably the most challenging period of the industry. There’s no road map, no guidebook and no data for what we’re experiencing.”
Act III. So, What Do Audiences Want?
If you bought a ticket last September to the play Adam Sandler Jury Duty, you weren’t supposed to be impartial; the stronger your opinion, the better. The 35-minute interactive work, created by Rose Farrell, was one of many interactive plays presented at the 2023 Philly Fringe Festival. The choose-your-adventure-style piece didn’t just hope for audience participation; it depended on it. It fell to those attending to review the comedian’s cinematic repertoire and judge whether Sandler is good or bad. Juror numbers were handed out to each set of 12 ticket buyers as they filed into Fishtown’s MAAS Artist’s Cottage and took seats around the living room table. Four actors joined them for the proceedings: a judge, attorneys for the defense and prosecution, and “Adam Sandler.” Some audience members got into the spirit and vigorously defended Sandler, while others spent their time heckling the lawyers. Still others quietly wondered what the heck was happening. That’s the thrill of interactive theater: its unpredictability.
Almost as a reaction to our deepening love affair with home-based screen time, many of us found ourselves craving human connection after so much time sequestered indoors — particularly the younger set, which has been saying yes to large gatherings and immersive experiences. They flock to concerts and festivals at which the audience can dance, move, puff and drink away the night with friends, which makes you wonder how a night sitting passively in a theater seat can compete. Back in 2015, I spoke with Dutch deejay Armin van Buuren, who was already aware of this trend. He told me then, “There’s a big shift right now with a whole new generation. People don’t want to buy a ticket, go to a show, and just watch anymore. That’s the reason theaters are having such difficulty pulling in audiences. People want to be part of the experience. I think it goes further than just deejaying; it’s the future of theater, the future of performance.”
The allure of experiential theater, where patrons can put themselves inside the moment, should be taken seriously. Younger generations grew up gaming and raving, says Alan Brown, managing principal of arts consulting firm WolfBrown. “The threshold for sensory stimulation is much higher than for generations before that,” he explains. “So generally, people want more interactive and immersive experiences than they could get sitting in a quiet theater. We have to come to grips with that.”
Some theaters are embracing the challenge. West Philly’s Theatre in the X got inventive earlier this year with a presentation of Langston Hughes stories that was anything but typical. Co-producing with EgoPo Classic Theater, Theatre in the X staged The Ways of White Folks inside historic Glen Foerd mansion. The audience was transported to 1930s Harlem and walked from room to room for different monologues by the actors. The organizing concept, based on a Hughes story, is that audience members are prospective members of a commune and are touring the mansion in small groups led by a guide. If you paid extra for a “drink experience,” you got champagne in one room, a gin-and-tonic in another, and a shot of bourbon in a third room. “If someone just wanted an interesting experience, they stumbled into theater,” executive director and co-founder LaNeshe Miller-White says. “It’s like we tricked them into a love for the arts.”
Fringe had a big year in large part due to this informal vibe. “People seem to like the beer-hall kind of atmosphere,” says Stuccio. This reminds me of what a Guardian theater critic claimed back in 2013 about decorum ruining theater. Toby Parker-Rees wrote about how in the late 19th century, theater became quite proper and something for the elites: “The communal exhilaration that had been going for 2,500 years — since the Greeks first honored Dionysus with noisy songs about goats — was finally and comprehensively shushed. … Whatever the reason, theatre is stupidly quiet now.” Traditional theaters have turned to experimenting with less rigid ways to present works. Macbeth in Stride, Whitney White’s new Black-female-centered musical retelling of Shakespeare’s classic at Philadelphia Theatre Company, hits all the freewheeling notes. Besides the rock-music setting, audience members are encouraged to shout responses to actors’ questions, drink champagne served by Lady Macbeth, and clap along and make some noise; one person was even asked to come up to the stage and interact with the three witches.
What else do ticket buyers want? In a study on audience habits, the number one word people used as their motivation for going out was “fun,” according to the Kimmel Center’s chief marketing officer and audience experience officer, Crystal Brewe. Weary from an unrelenting barrage of grim news, people want a guaranteed good time, which is one reason holiday and comedy shows have done so well at the box office. Comfort and joy are buzzwords that entice audiences; Amy Kaissar at Bristol Riverside Theatre planned on running A Christmas Story for five weeks this season, in an attempt to offer as many shows as she could sell tickets for.
But comfort and joy mean different things to different people, so there’s a challenge to planning a successful season that takes into account the disparate tastes of ticket buyers. Leave it to a Wharton marketing professor to boil all the hand-wringing down to its essence: “You’ve got to give me a reason to go back to the theater,” says Barbara Kahn. She doesn’t think the concept of live theater is dying, nor that it’s threatened by streaming. She posits that the attendance drop-off could be curbed by a closer examination of what people are seeking from their IRL experiences. “The world has gotten more global, and when you see more things, your standards go up,” she says. “You might not have the patience for less-good material anymore. Are you sure it’s not a quality issue? Give them a reason and people will go back.”
Kahn floats another marketing concept: Perhaps it’s not about the product, but about the customer’s experience obtaining the product. The solution may not lie in changing the theater, but in reducing the friction of the experience of getting there and back. Think about all that going to the theater involves: grabbing food before or after, walking there or driving, and then finding parking — a huge point of anxiety for suburbanites. Theaters need to look at the entire experience, not just the play, she says. (The Kimmel, Crystal Brewe notes, prides itself on improving customer experience: If there’s a parade or other reason why traffic will be bad, an alert goes out to ticket buyers to leave early. The Center hosts themed dinners that accompany the tickets and offers parking nearby. Any one factor can make a difference.)
Then there are the demographics. For decades, American theater has in large part been built atop one particular audience — one that’s affluent, white and over 65. Younger and more diverse audiences haven’t been cultivated to replace that dwindling cohort, so companies now have to try to do so by offering work that lures multiple slices of the community. But companies that course-correct too abruptly for one group may not achieve what they’re hoping for. This tension makes setting a season’s schedule a delicate and crucial assignment that factors in diversity, a range of interests, and risk-tolerance for new plays and unfamiliar playwrights.
“The 75-plus audience isn’t coming out anymore,” says Brewe. “They were the audience that was coming here seven times a year and made up most of our subscribers. If arts-and-culture organizations hadn’t begun to seriously think about cultivating the Gen Z and millennial audience before the pandemic, they are now doing so at a disadvantage.”
Act IV. Theater is Good for the City, But is the City Good for Theater?
If you don’t know your Sondheim from your Stoppard and can’t tell a cyclorama from a melodrama, you may ask why you should care about the fate of regional theater. There’s another reason beyond the fact that theater, and the arts more broadly, encourages our compassion and curiosity: money.
In our area, arts and culture is a $4.1 billion industry that generates 55,000 jobs. The arts are multipliers, says the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance’s Patricia Wilson Aden: Patrons from the suburbs or beyond come to the theater, park, go to dinner, maybe even spend the weekend. The dollars generated by a cultural experience multiply again and again. But people are nervous about “making it a night” at the theater when disorder and homelessness are supposedly routine in Center City. We know the arts are a massive economic driver of city vibrancy, but some people are questioning how comfortable they feel driving or walking to the theater these days.
Numerous cultural and tourism leaders I spoke to pointed to the surprising results from a study published this past April by the Brookings Institution. Its authors say that actual crime isn’t the primary cause of a slow-recovering urban core; rather, it’s “fear of rising crime and a general sense of ‘disorder’ compromising previously ‘safe’ areas of their cities.” Perceptions impact residents’ sense of safety. The numbers back this up: Though there was a 38 percent increase in property crime in Philadelphia between 2019 and 2022, there was just a one percent increase in violent crime. And Center City accounted for less than one percent of the increases in both categories.
But if people feel that a city is in disarray — think litter, public drug use and urination, graffiti — and that there are no active systems in place to keep order, partaking in city life can become less attractive. The perception of crime outstrips reality, says Aden: “We need to appreciate the real negative impact of sensationalizing crime on the theater experience and audience willingness to attend.” The inverse is also true, says Julie Goodman, department head of arts and entertainment enterprise at Drexel University: A successful theater can enliven an area and keep it safer in the afternoons and evenings, because it gives people a reason to be out and about.
While Ed Rendell’s stint as mayor in the 1990s was touted by the New York Times as leading to “the most stunning turnaround in recent urban history,” we haven’t been feeling that of late. “Is the city doing enough?” asks Nick Stuccio. “It’s got a lot of issues and problems, and it’s suffering from a lack of leadership.” Aden, though, applauds City Council for recognizing the sector’s needs and making a transfer at the end of last year of $21 million into the cultural sector. She hopes the incoming mayor “will be an arts mayor.”
Act V. Innovate or Die
Two women and a man are on a low stage in the middle of a room at Malvern’s People’s Light. They’re huddled around a Ouija board, receiving messages from the Great Beyond about the identity of the father of the lesbian couple’s baby. In unison, the three voice the spelled-out letters on the board: “I-T-S-H-I-S!” We all gasp. Even though it’s only been a seven-minute performance, we’ve connected quickly to the unfolding drama — and we’ve had two of our three generous glasses of wine at this point. After the cliffhanger, the three actors clap hands, and the play is over. One of them turns to the audience- members sitting- at tables surrounding the stage and offers prompts to discuss with our tablemates: Who is telling the truth? Is there ever a morally acceptable lie? This evening’s three mini plays have been paired with three different glasses of wine and an ample cheese plate and are part of three cleverly designed Flight Nights that People’s Light has planned in an attempt to kick-start the theater-going habit. After sharing wine, snacks and some drama together, our table is happily discussing morality and fruit-forward cabernets — and talking about returning for the next Flight Night in February.
Such theater-adjacent events align with the zeitgeist of people clamoring for novel experiences and could get us back in the habit of considering a visit to the theater. Cannonball Festival has taken this in another direction with its Blind Date Experience. Sick of dating apps or played-out bar scenes? Would you pay $35 to meet the love of your life — or maybe someone who doesn’t need to be dragged to a night at the theater? Cannonball Festival sold tickets to its innovative Blind Date Experience as part of this year’s Fringe Festival: You were paired up with another audience member and could meet pre-show to get to know each other with some provided icebreaker questions and a pair of drink tickets. Sipping on a beer or glass of wine under the fairy lights of Kensington’s MAAS garden, you could make a new friend and enjoy some risk-filled theater.
Cannonball started offering the blind dates in 2021, says core producer and program manager Ben Grinberg, “and got a great response right away.” He says that when theater is good, you naturally want to talk about it with someone: “We really like to foster a space for social connection to get people connecting. Blind dates do that at another level.” One enthusiast came back eight times for multiple dates. Grinberg says a couple of romantic sparks have been ignited through the years.
People want to feel that their time and effort to leave the house will be worth it, so a pre- or post-show option for discussion or special group nights enhance the experience. Wilma Theater has designed multiple connection points around Fat Ham aimed at this: Black Affinity Night, Pride Night, pre-show and post-show feedback sessions, and “relaxed” performances for those with sensory and communication disorders or on the autism spectrum. “When folks are given an opportunity to stick around for a talk-back, it deepens what the experience is and leads them to be repeat buyers,” explains Miller-White. “These are the ways to get new audiences, not just younger audiences.”
With the Surgeon General’s recent warning about the devastating epidemic of loneliness and isolation facing Americans, maybe the theater community drinking and blind-dating its way to financial health and community-building is no joke. The trend points to the larger truth that creative people will devise ways to be meaningful and responsive to their communities. One strategy to get through this period could include pooling resources for recovery. There’s talk at organizations like the Theatre Communications Group and others of exploring ways that companies might collaborate or co-produce productions. Sharing ticketing systems, set-building shops, rehearsal and performance spaces, marketing efforts and the like could provide ways forward during fiscally tight times. Any hint of competitiveness seems to have vanished in favor of a communal cry to work together.
The unreliability of the season-subscription model has had one positive consequence: Companies are diversifying their demographics through single-ticket sales. Theaters have relied for decades on season subscribers to smooth the financial ride by paying up front and committing to a season of performances. But habits have been shifting away from that for a while. If companies must court single-ticket buyers, they’re motivated to market each show hard to groups they think will enjoy that particular play, which can lead to attracting more diverse patrons. It’s a more expensive strategy, but it may be worth the long-term investment to refresh the pool of ticket buyers. One potential downside: The pipeline for new plays could dry up. “I don’t know and have yet to find another person who knows how to sell a play that no one ever heard of by a playwright never heard of,” says Amy Kaissar. “My biggest fear is how to launch new plays without subscriptions.”
Act VI. Will the Show Go on?
The sound system is blasting the famously naughty 1967 duet “Je t’aime … moi non plus” by French icons Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot — you know, the one that ends with Bardot’s heavy breathing. Theatre Exile supporters mingle with Trestle Inn regulars at the intimately lit go-go bar’s Feel The Love happy hour. It’s a monthly event that raises money for local not-for-profits, with 20 percent of bar sales going to the organization. Guests are sipping the signature How Deep Is Your Love cocktail when Deb Block summons their attention to offer all the usual — and appropriate — thanks and words of appreciation to Exile’s devoted patrons and the Trestle Inn. Before introducing a scene from Exile’s October show, Bess Wohl’s Camp Siegfried, Block makes a final plea to those in attendance. “Live theater is the place to be in Philadelphia. The god of wine is the same god of theater, Dionysus, and I’ve already started to feel the love,” she says, raising her cocktail higher. “I’m making a call for you to go enjoy live theater. If you can’t get to Exile, go see something at another theater.”
We love what we do. We are not doing it for money. So come hell or high water, these places will exist.” — Nick Stuccio, Fringe Festival president and founder
This collective spirit of the theater community is special to Philadelphia — and will be needed if that community is to make it through this murky period. A lot of our renowned civic hallmarks — we’re scrappy, we’re cheap, we’re friendly and unpretentious — are qualities that should help the group effort move forward. Wilma’s managing director, Leigh Goldenberg, says, “I tend to be optimistic. We are creative people. Really, how could I go to work if I think we’re not going to figure it out? I go to work every day and make art because I know it will have an impact.”
Her words remind me of a story Nick Stuccio shared about a meeting the William Penn Foundation had with arts leaders after the 2008 financial crisis, which had forced a funding reduction. “A consultant said with a for-profit company, the failure rate is around 80 percent, but the failure rate for not-for-profit theater is zero. He said, ‘You never die,’” Stuccio recalls. “Mom-and-pop theater companies might go from four plays a year down to one night a year, but they’re not going away.” He laughs. “We love what we do. We are not doing it for money. So come hell or high water, these places will exist.”
Art is a public good for many reasons. The current uncertain era offers theater companies an opportunity to regroup, better serve the public, and deliver art in new ways — maybe even better ways, that connect to more people. We’ll have to wait and see if the measures theaters take now to survive wind up compromising the product. The sentiment among the theater leaders I spoke to was, dare I say, cautiously optimistic. Theater is in a period of transformation and reinvention. Many of those involved hope to look back in 10 or 20 years on all the positive changes this will give birth to. When I ask Stuccio for his best guess on when we can stop worrying about theater, he says, “You’re trying to make sense of post-Armageddon. We don’t know. It’s like a disaster movie: The credits are about to roll, but the sun has just come out, and the sun is shining on us. We are the cockroaches emerging from the manholes. The story is still being written.
Published as “Stage Fright” in the December 2023/January 2024 issue of Philadelphia magazine.