From the Executive Director

Thinking About Tomorrow

By Teresa Eyring

Goodbye, 2008. You were a 12-month period that most of us will not easily forget.

In your early months, TCG theatres had the great fortune of participating in a phone conversation with former U.S. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, who explained what was at play in the economy. He leveled with us that he’d never seen anything quite like it. We came to understand the seriousness of his observation with each new credit-crisis development and stock market spasm. We accepted the fact that “times are tough”—and then they got worse. The devastating financial situation that began in the U.S. came to illustrate our true interconnectedness internationally and brought to light the effects of the global economic restructuring that has been underway for some time. We saw that it’s not just about the wars we start and the fast-food chains we export, but about how our economic practices—whether sound or misguided—instantly reverberate across borders. Not to be outdone, nature added her own catastrophes to the man-made ones, as hurricanes and wildfires wreaked havoc nationwide.

But the direness of the news this year was combined with the brilliance and hope that came about during a presidential campaign—a campaign that generated more curiosity and activism among the American people than has been seen in many years. More people committed to understanding our economic system and its peculiarities, with terms like “derivatives” and “credit swaps” rolling off tongues as easily as “I’ll take a Whopper with cheese.” And more people got involved in the election process, making personal investments in the outcome through awareness-raising and voting in record numbers.

Two-thousand-and-eight generated more widespread civic engagement than I can remember seeing in my lifetime. How can we capture and build upon this energy?

The great gift and hope as we enter 2009 is in welcoming a new president who represents the promise of enormous change in our nation’s sense of itself and its global reputation. I believe we also have a president-elect who takes the arts more seriously than any chief executive in recent memory. From early in his campaign, Barack Obama has had an arts-policy committee with a national pool of representatives. He has had an articulated arts-policy statement that includes reinvestment in arts education; an expansion of public/private partnerships between schools and arts organizations through the Department of Education’s Arts Education Model Development and Dissemination Grants; the creation of an artists’ service corps of young people trained to work in low-income schools and communities; and increased funding for the National Endowment for the Arts.

As the news headlines remind us again and again, Obama inherits enormous challenges. Where do we invest as a nation, in order to recover? And when the rubber hits the road and the issues are being sorted through, will the arts be viewed as part of the solution? Many of my colleagues have lately been recalling one of the bolder moments in our history, when the arts were the beneficiary of national spending and investment aimed at driving the economy out of depression. With Roosevelt’s New Deal, an investment in artists was an absolute given. The Federal Theatre Project was born and millions of dollars were appropriated to save artists from unemployment and to help energize the economy. It was a powerful time in the history of our field—a time that resulted in long-lived masterpieces of theatre and film.

Separate from politics, discussions among theatre practitioners are also escalating around the idea of reinvention—new financial models for organizations, new ways of engaging artists and audiences, new ways of ensuring relevance for the work. The radical re-imagining of our field and its institutions has never been a more serious possibility. But where must we invest? Or, as one colleague recently suggested: “We know that someone will buy up stocks that will cause them to make piles of money as the markets rebound. What is the equivalent for theatre? What investment could we make today that would pay off when and if the world returns to some form of normal?” Is there an opportunity glaring at us? Or can real opportunity only be identified by someone with the equivalent of a great stock-picker’s eye?

For my part, I hope that we can recognize and capitalize upon the civic awakening and engagement that have been percolating in 2008. I hope we can make the kinds of investments that keep theatre central to the public discourse and communal interaction that has been our form’s hallmark, from its origins. And I hope that (with unemployment a chronic and growing issue for artists) the mobilization of Obama’s artists’ service corps will not only employ artists but help ignite a passion for the arts among young people and help compensate for lost arts-education programs.

It might also be the case that, even with limited resources, theatres will find a way to continue investing in a diversity of new work that speaks to shifts in our population, our cultural practices and our shared values. Concentrating on international relationships could be a way for individual theatre organizations to make long-term connections to an increasingly globalized culture and economy. We can be there now, instead of attempting to board the proverbial train after it has left the station.

So here’s looking forward to great challenges and great hope. Let’s mobilize our creativity and brainpower as we stand together at this groundbreaking moment in time.