From the Executive Director
Measurements
By Teresa Eyring
In this issue of American Theatre, two writers explore the stories told by recent studies of our theatre industry. From the pen of Sarah Hart, "Agility Under Pressure" is an overview of the Theatre Facts report, which uses TCG's annual fiscal survey to build a field-wide portrait from a budgetary and audience-growth perspective. In a nutshell, Hart quantifies the early impacts of a changing economy on theatres' 2008 fiscal years, which mostly preceded the dramatic bank collapses and bailouts of the fall. In another vein, the inimitable Marsha Norman responds to hard numbers on employment and opportunities for female artists ("Not There Yet"). To build her case, Norman draws upon both a recent study from Princeton researcher Emily Glassberg Sands regarding female playwrights, and the New York State Council on the Arts report from 2002. The upshot: There is a massive inequality in the representation of women in the theatre.
Not covered in this issue, but important to the discourse, are two additional studies conducted over the past several years that also deal with playwrights. One—titled Outrageous Fortune: The Life and Times of the New American Play—was undertaken by Theatre Development Fund, under the direction of Todd London, and written by London with Ben Pesner. Another, funded by the Mellon Foundation, was researched and written by David Dower of Arena Stage. The two studies differ in their methodology, but are very effective at probing opportunities and obstacles for playwrights—and how particular communities support their writers. These reports have been previewed at a few conferences this year and will be more widely disseminated in the near future.
All of these studies and the discussion surrounding them are helping to drive a new awareness of how we're shaping up as a theatre ecology, including the priorities we're collectively reflecting and the gaps that need to be addressed. They also offer a platform for identifying what we aren't watching carefully enough, what we don't regularly measure and what we're perhaps not even talking about—but should be.
For its part, TCG has generated innovative studies, reports and surveys throughout its history. One that is constantly referenced to this day is The Artistic Home, authored by London in 1988 while under contract to TCG. And TCG's fiscal survey is an indispensable tool that has been used widely across the field for about 35 years. It helps organizational leaders see opportunities and shortcomings within their own structures. It helps trustees and funders understand how the theatre business works. It may even be argued that the process of benchmarking against this tool has helped our national theatre industry evolve with a certain strength born out of awareness, at least in a financial sense.
Of all the studies in the theatre community, those dealing with fiscal and audience data tend to be the ones undertaken year in and year out. We don't have perennial mechanisms to quantify and discuss progress on qualitative and values-related questions, such as: Is the field making concrete progress on matters of diversity and inclusion? Are artists satisfied with the work they are doing? Are theatres effective in engaging their communities around the issues that concern them most? Have we made progress on the question of how artists sustain a life in the theatre? What are the organizational structures at play in our field today? Are we taking enough risks? Given that you are reading this column, you probably are adding mentally to the list.
The theatre landscape is far from monolithic. There is a range of organizational sizes and structures, aesthetic orientations, cultural specificity, values and opinions. In order to agree upon the right questions to ask, we would benefit from landing, at least in principle, on those values that are most widely held, not just as individuals and organizations but as a national—and international—field.
For instance, diversity/inclusion is a value that is often stated as critical to theatre and the arts. When the National Performing Arts Convention occurred in 2008, diversity was one of five strategies for collective action articulated by the 3,000-plus participants. But if we claim diversity as a value, it's important to know what that looks like in real-world terms—and how we hold ourselves accountable for progress (or lack thereof). And even as we look to TCG and other national entities for surveys and studies to catalyze discussion, we still need individual leaders who are committed to specific actions.
These days, when someone asks me, "How's everyone doing? What are you hearing?" this invariably means, "Is anyone on the brink of closing? Are ticket sales up or down? Are there more deficits than surpluses? Who is losing their job?" In other words, we go straight for the money. The zeitgeist is fiscal—not a surprising truth, given that financial survival is one theme that unites everyone, regardless of budget size.
Insofar as money always has been an issue, there's no time like now for us to reach for a more robust definition of our own health and collective identity—and to find consistent ways of tracking progress over time and having honest discussions about it. Only then can we take stock periodically to see how we measure up—not just in terms of single-ticket sales and working capital levels, but in terms of what we as a field want to see when we take a long hard look in the mirror.
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