Friday, January 31, 2014
Antipermanence: An Argument for Increased Infrastructural Ephemerality in America’s Nonprofit Theaters
HowlRound: Many theater practitioners believe that nonprofit theaters in the United States are ailing. Among them, the word “broken” is thrown around over and over on industry panels, in articles, classrooms, and many corners of the Internet, yielding significant intra-industry agreement that something is wrong. Around the country, organizations producing new and reimagined works for the theater have become bloated and complacent—traits which are reflected year after year in the work on their stages. Regurgitated formulaic family dramas, diluted, stale productions of last season’s mild Broadway success, and the perfunctory nods to diversity that, at best, result in tired productions of August Wilson, populate the stages of America’s nonprofit theaters.
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2 comments:
I think that only large non-profit theatres are broken. The smaller ones tend to be more about doing theatre and making people happy, so they care less about making money. No one gets paid in non-profit theatre, so it is hard to imagine that any non-profit theatres want to make money. I mean, sure you can stock up the organizations bank account and pretend to make money, but you personally aren't getting any money. It is weirdly relevant to my situation right now. Recently, my loal community non-profit theatre started worrying about money problems. The last show we put on didn't draw that large of a crowd, so we didn't make as much as we usually do on ticket sales. Of course there was plenty to cover the cost of putting the show on, but we had to draw from our savings in order to donate the usual amount of money that we give to charities every year. This really concerned some of the Board members for some reason. I mean, non-profit means that all of the money goes back to the community, but we have about $35,000 in the bank just in case we don't get any audience at all for a show (That is about how much it costs us to put on a show including space rental). What they don't realize is that we will always get an audience. Even if the show is something like Will Rogers Follies, which is the show that didn't draw much, we have a couple hundred loyal audience members that come out no matter what the show is because they enjoy the atmosphere of our theatre. Also, we are pretty much professional quality without anyone getting paid. Time and time again, people find our theatre group, come see a show, and then talk about how they felt like they had just seen a Broadway production for a 10th of the cost. Sure, non-profit theatre is dying a little from the fact that the people who were around when it was big are getting older, but that doesn't mean people don't go at all. Broadway is the big thing again and the younger generation doesn't realize that there are wonderful community and non-profit theatres putting on beautiful pieces of artwork just because they love what they do.
Very relevant and engaging article. I'm intrigued by the dichotomy of the large commercial-oriented theaters of Broadway and the more independent regional theaters, and Feinberg presented the information in a compelling and well-organized manner. I especially liked her relating theatre to an ever-changing organism; theatre can become whatever we want it to be. In addition, I appreciated her taking into account the next generation of theatre-consumers (that's me!) and how adjustments should be made for them. It's not very often that I walk into a theatre and see a crowd of other people around my age, and I fervently hope that someday theatre can touch a more diverse audience.
Altogether, I'm inspired by this Feinberg and her dedication to using her research to further develop the theatre world. I'm definitely going to see if I can dig up anything else by Feinberg, hopefully to further grasp the state of art and how it relates to the world. She certainly doesn't shy away from calling out theatre establishments and their apparent hypocrisy. Is every establishment doomed to commercialism? Is that a bad thing? Probably.
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