Chicago Reader: In July, Oskar Eustis, the celebrated longtime artistic director of New York’s Public Theater (the venue where both A Chorus Line and Hamilton were birthed), announced he would be leaving his position in two years. In an interview with Michael Paulson of the New York Times, Eustis, while declaring the state of the Public itself “strong,” also said, “I think the American nonprofit theater movement is over. That doesn’t mean any individual theater is over. But every individual theater is having to make its own case and come up with its own business model. We’ve lost a lot of theaters, and we’re going to lose more.”
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It's very easy to look at the economic model for theatre and feel a bit depressed. High production costs, the relatively short lifespan of a production, and the fact that revenue depends on unpredictable public response. It's nice to read an article that, while grounded in the reality that post covid the American non-profit theatre sector took a huge blow, all is not lost. An interviewee for the article mentions many of the theatre companies that shut down here midsized companies without the flexibility of a smaller company nor the funding of a large one. However I think this is just one more challenge for theatre makers to learn to navigate. Theatre has always been flexible, it's a continuously growing and evolving art form. It's a space for creators, and I think the article hints at, a space to take on challenges. This is just the next challenge, and theatre has still managed to persist. The article quotes first the words of Oskar Eustic, artistic director of New York’s Public theatre, in which he despairs slightly at the fate of American theatre. However, and I think more importantly, the editor also quotes a former Chicago Theatre artistic director who says, “No one asked a culturally specific theater that has been producing for forty years on one percent of the Public’s budget what dying feels like, or what building feels like either. They asked the canopy about the forest.” I found this very poignant. Theatre, like this issue, is all about perspective.
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