From the Executive Director

Beyond the Numbers

By Teresa Eyring

TCG's steady commitment to gathering, verifying and analyzing fiscal information from its member theatres—as well as a wider theatrical universe—has created a tremendous body of knowledge and historical information for the benefit and use of theatre leaders, educators and funders. The annual Theatre Facts report on the finances and productivity of the field, in our print edition and available online, provides crucial information for the present moment and at the same time serves as an historic profile of the growth of our art form. It has helped us get to know ourselves and each other better—and it has strengthened theatre in America by providing a regular benchmarking mechanism for those organizations opting to use it in such a way.

When the survey was first launched for the 1973-74 fiscal year, then executive director Peter Zeisler wrote:

This cooperative and reciprocal project is an indication of the growing trend among these theatres to see themselves not only as individual institutions serving specific regions and communities, but also as segments of a larger phenomenon which reflects many mutual concerns and characteristics and may be considered America's "National Theatre."

Over time, this vast financial profile has become a respected temperature gauge; it is used by a wide array of spectators, and TCG has become a "go to" source when it comes to understanding the fiscal realities of the not-for-profit theatre field. At the same time, it shouldn't constitute our sole vocabulary for describing the health and vitality of our collective enterprise. For some time, we at TCG have been seeking ways to shift the focus in order to ask, on a consistent basis, not only the quantitative and typically financial questions, but also those questions dealing with matters such as the evolution of relationships between artists and institutions.

How healthy is our theatre ecosystem, that interdependent network encompassing artists, audiences, trustees, students and even the spaces in which our performances occur? Starting out with a series of artist teleconferences focusing on specific disciplines, we asked questions about what is working, and what is not working, in the web of relationships between artists and institutions. (I take this opportunity to thank the actors, directors, designers, playwrights and dramaturgs who participated in these conversations.)

We took a cue from business gurus Chip and Dan Heath, who ask in their current book Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, "How do you step out of a constant problem-solving mode and instead identify and replicate successes—the practices that are actually working?" Our discussions centered not just on the fiscal dynamics, but also on the effective non-financial gestures that advance creative work and artists' sense of being valued. For many artists, for example, it's crucial that an artistic director sees work in his or her community and knows the capabilities of the actors there; that trustees truly understand what's been lost when a set design is pared down to a fraction of its original intent; that local artists are at the table when key decisions are made affecting the art or the engagement of the audience.

Our teleconferences yielded a gratifying flurry of information-sharing, and these exchanges will be enhanced by further in-person conversations in the field, thanks to support from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. We initiated the series in Los Angeles, which will be the site of TCG's 2011 National Conference. Among the tentative findings are that many theatres are delving deeper into their communities to establish relevance and meaning; for others, raising the status of the artist has become a priority; and, despite their ongoing struggles to maintain stability, more and more institutions are putting new structures in place for creating work and engaging artists—structures that are in many cases attracting additional resources. It's also clear that such issues, while national in impact, are very local in their particular dynamics.

As he launched TCG's first Fiscal Survey, Peter Zeisler reflected on the advent of a "National Theatre." In a new twist, our national theatre movement is going increasingly global. There is a growing interconnectedness among theatrical phenomena, a sharing of artists and of audiences, a mash-up of genres and influences, no matter what the economic or performance-space model. As this wide world opens up, a full slate of questions is on the table—questions about our reasons for doing theatre, the places in which it's done, where the money comes from, and how that money affects the art. And, of course, what needs to be measured in the process.

Since the availability (or the lack) of resources in our theatrical ecology is naturally a source of tension, stressful conditions may be, for the time being, something we have to live with. But these conditions have also brought about a new sense of cooperation.

And, as our Theatre Facts story—skillfully reported by former American Theatre managing editor Sarah Hart—points out, it is through cooperation, ingenuity and hard decisions that our theatre community is surviving and sometimes thriving in these difficult times. What we can count as our ace in the hole is that through this process, we are paving the way for a bright, diverse and richly global future.

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