Perspectives, Ben Cameron

Ben Cameron, Executive Director and Joan Channick, Deputy Director

The 2005 fiscal year was a typically busy one here at TCG. Many of our signature programs showed important growth, expansion and refinement. Our National Conference, held in Seattle, was the most highly attended—and arguably the most enthusiastically received—in our history, drawing 825 theatre professionals from around the country.

Together, we were inspired by artists Sekou Sundiata and the Cornerstone Theater Company; we engaged in networking and problem

solving, and we collectively participated in a provocative and thorny discussion about the polarized society in which we now live—a discussion stimulated by the participation of Thomas Frank, George Lakoff, and Ellen Ullman, among others. We launched a new partnership with National Arts Strategies, offering a pre-conference gathering in advanced organizational planning for artistic leaders—a gathering that sold out in record time, with a waiting list as long as the registration slots themselves. We announced a new advocacy coalition, expanding our ongoing work with the American Arts Alliance by now offering select Americans for the Arts programs and services to TCG theatres as a member benefit. We expanded our publications list with significant new works by longtime TCG authors Tony Kushner, Donald Margulies, and Paula Vogel as well as, for the first time, plays by Ping Chong, Will Eno, Richard Maxwell, Richard Nelson, Carl Hancock Rux, and John Patrick Shanley, and with an important new resource for theatre trustees entitled The Art of Governance, an anthology both philosophic and pragmatic, specifically for arts board members. We began a new partnership with ASSITEJ/USA, the U.S. Center of the International Association of Theatre for Children and Young People, to create a field-driven education program assessment model—a first for the theatre field as a whole. All this, in addition to our ongoing publications, grants programs, research, management, education, advocacy, international and artistic programs—all offered for a membership that reached all-time high levels.

As always, however, challenges loomed on the horizon. While our earned revenue sources continued to exceed our annual budgeting projections, we remained deeply challenged in key philanthropic sectors. As an organization that serves field professionals but that historically has shunned the larger public limelight, TCG remains largely invisible to many major individual donors of means—individuals whose allegiance is rightly to those theatres that give such meaning to their lives but rarely to those who work behind the scenes to make those theatres perform in more fiscally responsible and thoughtful ways. And in a time when many (but thankfully not all) corporations measure philanthropy against marketing goals and when many foundations, especially post-9/11, restrict giving to narrow geographic areas (and praise the heavens for the exceptions), we have yet to convince many that building strong individual arts organizations is not tantamount to building a strong sector. It is this latter pursuit that guides us daily here at TCG, even while we strive to help each individual theatre perform more optimally. Until this philanthropic conversation changes, annual budgeting pressures will increase in powerful ways: clearly the future will lie in reframing conversations and shoring up longer term assets than the recent past has allowed us to do.

We are immensely grateful to our Board of Directors, led by the extraordinary Paula Tomei of South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, CA, who finished her second and final term as our Board President at the end of the fiscal year. Paula's inspired leadership, her ebullient personality, her selfless availability at all hours day and night, set a standard for partnership that we will forever treasure. Indeed, our every board meeting is inspiring: that so many from the field give their time, their counsel and their resources to us never ceases to move all of us at TCG.

What is not apparent in these pages is the huge amount of planning that consumed us at TCG—planning that, a mere four months after the 2006 fiscal year began, had already led to a new visual design, a major re-creation of American Theatre magazine, the reorientation of our fall trustee forum, the launch of a fellowship program for actors, the switch to an annual cycle of conferences, our first ever audience development pilot program, and more—advances that surely were part of our receiving a special Tony Honor for Excellence in Theatre in October 2005. But for fuller accounts of those programs, you'll simply have to wait for the 2006 annual report—and to remember to tune in again a year from now.

In the meantime, all of us remain deeply honored, inspired and awed by the confidence the theatre field continues to place in us. We will continue to do our best to warrant this trust, and extend our deepest thanks to you for your interest and support.