Too Much of a Good Thing?

From the Executive Director

By Ben Cameron

On a recent trip to address a theatre community in a major urban center, I was lobbed a question we’re all likely to hear more and more: “Especially in these times, do we really need all these theatres?”

Whatever the speaker’s intent, what I heard behind the question was the fear of shrinking resources and the likelihood of more people clamoring at the gate for fewer crumbs from the table. How does a donor meet the growing need, even as his or her assets shrink as well? Wouldn’t this all just be a lot easier if a few of those theatres went away or, at the very least, merged?

It’s a concern that grows louder in many circles, and that played a role, for example, in the prolonged dance between the Cleveland Play House and Great Lakes Theater Festival over merger (a move they ultimately decided not to take). Indeed, the sense of the shrinking pie is perhaps the arts story of the year: As Martin Knelman put it in the Toronto Star, “In 2003, the most telling...cultural activity won’t take place on a stage, on a screen or in a gallery. It will be a drama of whispers, nuances, meaningful pauses—and calculators. Call it the dance of the fundraiser and the philanthropist….The big questions that loom in the year ahead: Is there enough money to go around and sustain all these projects? Or are at least some of them doomed to fail while others succeed?”

Now, the poor speaker who dared to ask the question that is on so many minds (albeit not often so baldly stated) was greeted with low murmuring, an intake of breath, a quiet boo or two. And, after the meeting, tempers were a bit frayed. How dare someone ask this, people seemed to say. No one asks whether we have too many restaurants, for example, much less whether we suffer from a surfeit of churches or hospitals or universities and colleges. 

But let’s face it—there are a hell of a lot of us. Indeed, theatre seems to have the highest market penetration of any performing arts discipline in the United States. Visit a major city and you’re likely to encounter an opera, a symphony (or possibly two), a cluster of dance groups—and literally hundreds of theatre companies. It’s time to look in the mirror and ask ourselves: Have we oversaturated a marketplace that simply cannot or will not sustain us?

I’m afraid my answer then was a bit of a fumble, but I haven’t been able to let go of this question. If I had it to do over again, I’d applaud the speaker for the question and ask whether the fault lies, not in the question, but in ourselves and our own work. 

Put simply, this question may well spring from our failure to create distinctive, meaningful artistic work and profiles for ourselves. In this economy, theatres that lack a clear, unique energy, that produce complacent work, and that have failed to articulate a strong sense of the value added to their communities are unlikely to claim community allegiance. 

I have been thumping the pulpit for my five years at TCG, urging theatres to become ever more articulate about the value they offer the community by answering three basic questions. What is the value our theatre offers? Harder, what is the value our theatre and our theatre alone offers or offers best? (Duplicative or inferior value in this economy will not stand.) Hardest, how would our community be damaged if our theatre closed its doors and went away tomorrow? 

The last question is the one I have struggled with the most, but increasingly I believe it to be the most critical. As one who is on the road 20 days a month, I often cannot easily distinguish one city from another. Everywhere I go, there’s a Starbucks here, a Barnes & Noble there. The channels in the hotel rooms all follow the same choices; McDonald’s has swamped the urban landscape; even housing architecture seems indistinguishable from one community to the next. We are, in short, living in an age of the homogenization of America: I tend to know where I am on a given day more because my PalmPilot tells me than because the urban landscape is so unmistakably unique that it could not be anywhere else. 

We in the arts resist that homogenization. The work we produce is chosen for our local community, produced for our local community, crafted (at least in significant part) by citizens of our local community for friends, neighbors, colleagues. 

Especially in these times, the arts confer distinction on a community. This sense of local value was articulated beautifully by MacArthur Foundation president Jonathan Fanton in announcing $50 million of grants to Chicago cultural organizations. “One of the great treasures of Chicago is the number of arts and cultural organizations that, like the foundation, call this great city home. From its institutions that are influential throughout the world to the smallest of neighborhood theatres, Chicago is alive with cultural offerings that enrich our lives, stimulate our imagination...bind communities together and stimulate economic activity. In these challenging times, it is important to remember how critical it is to support institutions that do so much to nurture the spirit.” And these grants were made in general operating support!

We must rise to the challenge that distinction implies: Seizing the community connection, not for audience-development reasons but for the simple fact that our local nature is potentially our greatest asset, and can vitalize our work in fantastic new ways. 

And if we are clear about our value, if we are artistically bold and courageous, I doubt whether the question will be: “Do we really need all these theatres?” Instead, we may be asked: “How can we have more theatres in our town?”  

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