Less isnt more Essay Example For Students

Less isnt more Essay Theatres aim to strike the delicate balance between downsizing creative risk-taking. More and more these days, art imitates business. The grimmest financial picture in memory has sent Americas nonprofit professional theatres scurrying to the profit-seeking community for means of survival. Mounting deficits and dwindling resources force theatres to cut costs in every conceivable way. Productions are fewer, smaller and safer. Budget gaps drive theatre professionals to other lines of work. While well-heeled theatre companies dig into their pockets, smaller companies scrape by, hoping that an economic upturn will improve their prospects. Just like hundreds of strapped companies in every industry, theatres have embraced downsizing. Clearly, downsizing has merit. When income shrinks, budgets have to shrink also or the venture eventually will fail, whether it produces widgets or new plays. But theatres that succumb to the profit sectors passion for downsizing should be wary of pitfalls. In the for-profit world, downsizing is supposed to eliminate ventures where the outcome cannot be predicted with a high degree of certainty. Research and development often go first. Marginal units and projects go next. Businesses routinely survive crunches by becoming low-cost suppliers of goods and services. Cost savings go to investors, who measure success by return on investment. Return on investment cannot be measured, however, when the payback is aesthetic. A theatre that slashes its equivalent of research and development in the name of tighter management sacrifices its soul, not to mention future audiences. Vibrant theatres court uncertainty. They do not banish it because times are tough. When you downsize so much, the biology of the institution gets compromised, warns Zelda Fichandler, who has been at the vanguard of nonprofit theatre since she launched Washington, D.C.s Arena Stage in 1950 on $800 per week. The budget today exceeds $9 million per year. I dont think theatre will improve because you strip it down to its core. Fichandler fears a loss of experimentation and creative dialogue in a downsized climate. Theatre must be some kind of journey where every village does not have a perfect dinner, she declares. The toll is already profound. No one today could dream of producing a show like Arenas 1967 smash, The Great White Hope, a production that required 60 actors, 232 costumes and 11 sets. The trend poses a risk that nonprofit theatres will lose touch with writers whose plays fill wide tableaus. So far, however, the appetite for these plays has not vanished. In Chicago, the Steppenwolf Theatre Company recently restaged last seasons hit, The Song of Jacob Zulu, by Tug Yourgrau, with 25 actors in the cast, then transferred the production to Broadway last month. The Lambs Theatre in New York City has agreed to produce Arthur Girons new play about the young Wright brothers, which will require more than 10 actors and some very imaginative staging to recreate mans first powered flight. Robert Schenkkans Kentucky Cycle, an epic drama that runs six hours and calls for 19 performers, received its world premiere at the Intiman Theatre in Seattle, a subsequent run at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles and the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The acclaim dramatizes the argument for taking risks that are inconsonant with downsizing. The Intiman took an enormous gamble on the Kentuck y Cycle, Schenkkan says. |Artistic director~ Liz Huddle did the rest of the season on a unit set. But the recognition that it brought the Intiman cannot be bought. It put them on the map in a significant way. Large and small nonprofit theatres have approached Schenkkan for the rights to mount new productions, but thus far the shows scale has kept it on their back burners. The chance of being first to produce next years Pulitzer Prize winner does not alter the fact that strained finances clamp down on options. Sadly, theatres must impose restraints just when they have matured as institutions. We probably have the most thoughtful and experienced group of people who set artistic policy than at any time, says Jon Jory, producing director at Actors Theatre of Louisville. It is ironic that at the very time when we have finally prepared this cadre of experienced artistic directors, financial restraints are most severe. When people are expansive aesthetically, they have to be conservative financially. Even Actors Theatre, with a recent $9.5-million capital fund drive under its belt and no deficit, is downsizing. Name an aspect of the budget and weve taken 10 to 15 percent out of it, says Jory, who sees no turnaround on the horizon. We are saying no for the first time since the early days, Jory concedes. It used to be a resident set designer was $1,700 over budget and we didnt discuss it. Now it requires a full-fledged meeting. Jory no longer casts shows in New York or Los Angeles. Rather than conduct expensive searches on either coast, he relies on several hundred actors he has worked with beforeeven if that pool does not include the perfect actor for a particular role. Meantime, the theatre has scaled back advertising and marketing activity. But these were easy cuts. If subscriptions continue to erode at the same pace, one thousand or so a year, the next round may go much deeper. We are flat-out going to have to think about popularizing our seasons, he declares. Shows with track records may suit audiences comfortable with realism and naturalism, but Jory frets that they are out of sync with the best young directors, who tend to share an inbred disdain for realism and naturalism. What's the matter with tax exemption? EssayHope is alive at two theatre groups in Philadelphia. We have spent very little time going Woe is me,' says Dan Schay, executive director of the Philadelphia Drama Guild. Instead, a growing deficit sounded a wake-up call to the board. Together with a board member acting as a de facto financial vice president, Schay initiated a thorough organizational assessment. Meanwhile, a discrete fund drive raised more than $100,000. We did not want to get to the point where we had to cry wolf, Schay explains. We wanted to talk quietly about the existence of wolves. Some funds have come out of artistic projects, but overall Schay says the impact is negligible. Still, the theatre postponed a production of Brechts Galileo that required 20 actors to portray 55 characters. Something as complex as Galileo should not just fill a slot, its an event, says Schay, who is attempting to raise support for the project. Meanwhile, the Drama Guild replaced Galileo with Nora, Ingmar Bergmans version of A Dolls House. Across town, the Philadelphia Festival Theatre for New Plays recently won kudos for a production of Chekhovs The Seagull, translated by the theatres artistic director, Carol Rocamora. The payoff for a production with 12 characters and four sets was an extraordinary invitation to restage it for the 1994 International Chekhov Festival in Moscow. We are lucky to have funding sources that believe in us, Rocamora says. In its 19th season, the Illusion Theatre in Minneapolis has been attracting larger audiences to its productions, but not enough to offset erosion to other sources of income. As a result, the theatres budget has shrunk slightly in each of the past two years. We are thinking much longer and harder about when we are ready to commit to a production, says artistic director Michael Robins. In 1993 the theatre retreated from a tradition of producing at least one epic play each season. None of the casts numbered more than three actors. But the pipeline holds at least two larger plays that are candidates for production in 1994, under the auspices of the Fresh Ink Series. One, a play by Martha Boesing, is taken from Meridel LeSeurs stories about life in Minnesota during the Great Depression. The saga centers on The Annunciation, a story about a pregnant woman who wants to have her child although hopelessness surrounds hera theme not entirely foreign to the nonprofit theatre itself these days. There will be nine actors and live music. We want to go with the |original~ idea rather than make the idea for three people, Robins says. Another play in the Fresh Ink Series, Ping Chongs epic Deshima, originated in Holland and had a U.S. production at La Mama ETC. It tells the story of the Dutch colonization of Asia in a visual collage with lots of slides, fairly elaborate technical requirements and a large Asian-American cast. StageWest, a Lort C theatre in Springfield, Mass., may be more typical of many nonprofit theatres. Funding sources have dried up left and right, says artistic director Eric Hill. The budget has fallen from $2.2 million to $1.3 million since 1989. We have lived for four years with the sword of Damocles over our heads, Hill says. To make up for funding shortfalls, the current season offered audiences Tennessee Williamss Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Love Letters by A.R. Gurney, Other Peoples Money by Jerry Sterner and Shirley Valentine by Willy Russell, in contrast with the 1990-1991 season that featured Visions of an Ancient Dreamer, adapted from Euripides by Eric Hill; Sweet N Hot in Harlem, conceived by Robert Elliot Cohen with music by Harold Arlen; and Night Must Fall by Emlyn Williams. The company continues to develop new projects on its 99-seat second stage. Like Visions of an Ancient Dreamer, some receive main stage productions. Last seasons Hamlet, performed by a cast of interns, traveled to the main stage and then on to Japans annual Toga Festival at the invitation of Tadashi Suzuki. Currently, the troupe is developing What You Will, a multimedia version of Shakespeares Twelfth Night adapted by Hill for a cabaret format. The adversity-builds-character school will maintain that financial restraints force an institution to focus on its true mission. Besides, as playwright A.R. Gurney notes, the theatre has always operated under limitations of some kind. In earlier eras they were cultural and religious. Our limitations are financial. How theatres defy modern limitations will eventually inspire nostalgic recollections. The theatre has rarely been a very rich place to work, and creativity has no price tag. As long as there is willingness to take risks, brilliant ideas should not be any scarcer just because the chips are down. It just seems harder to give them shape that will attract an audience. But this is nothing new. Heroics are part of the fabric of the theatre, Zelda Fichandler notes. The structure of drama itself consists of people trying to get around obstacles.