Day two of the announcement of Rocco Landesman being announced as President Obama’s pick to run the National Endowment for the Arts, some questions are popping up on the blogosphere and the internet.
Among them: Does he understand non-profits after spending almost his entire career in the commercial theater world? Will he remember that the United States consist of more than New York City?
I don’t think anyone needs to worry about either of these. In some ways, I think Landesman understands the core value of arts in a community – sometimes more than some of the folks in the non-profit sector.
And for those worried about his understanding of theater outside of New York City should note his father owned a cabaret theatre in St. Louis and has championed artists with strong relationships with to theaters outside of New York which Jujamcyn with whom Jujamcyn often partnered. Also the Jujamcyn Theater award has been given the companies that have made an impact on the theater world but not necessarily the commercial theater world. Playbill had a nice feature on Rocco in August 2006 in A life in the Theater series. Or Culture Monster’s From Broadway to NEA Nominee for up-to-date commentary.
But in all the discussion let’s not forget the most important thing. With a leader like Rocco Landesman at the helm of NEA, there will be someone really championing re-envisioning the structure of non-profit theaters. Taking risks will be rewarded and encouraged. Of course the NEA is technically only a funding agency, but we should all be willing to admit that is has become a symbol of something else. It is like the “Good Housekeeping Seal of approval” for the arts. Whether we like it or not who the panels fund and how those companies operate have encouraged conformity and inexplicitly continued the perpetuation of the myth that there is only one business/economic model for non-profit theater.
It makes me want to run out and set up a 501-3(c) for a new company. A clean slate that could be a place for exploration.
June 4, 2000
THEATER: Broadway: Devil or Angel for Nonprofit Theater?; A Vital Movement Has Lost Its Way
By ROCCO LANDESMAN
Who ever heard of an intermission that lasted 26 years? Well, to be honest, people in the theater, and to be precise: the First Annual Congress of Theater, which was held in 1974 and brought together representatives of the country’s commercial and nonprofit theaters. Sparks flew, as described in the following articles, and the group never met again. Much has happened in the theater since, so much, in fact, that it seemed a good idea to some optimists to see how commercial and nonprofit interests can relate to each other today for the betterment of the nation’s stages. Thus, ACT II, the second congress of theater, will take place June 16-18 on the Harvard campus in Cambridge, Mass. Here are some thoughts from members of the planning committee who represent the commercial (Rocco Landesman) and the nonprofit (Ben Cameron) sides of the debate.
IN 1974, the entire American theater, from Broadway to Off and Off Off Broadway, to regional institutions, to radical cells and communes, convened at Princeton University to discuss the state of the art. It was called the First Annual Congress of Theater (FACT) and my assignment — I was then an assistant professor at the Yale School of Drama — was to report on this historic event for the Arts & Leisure section of The New York Times.
Twenty-six years later, that congress, now called ACT II and minus some participants due to circumstances beyond their control, is reconvening at Harvard University two weekends from now.
In my current role as a Broadway producer and theater operator, as well as one of the planners of this conference, I am presumed to be too much a participant to be able to report on it objectively. But I couldn’t pass up the chance to return to these pages with some observations about what has happened to the American theater in the quarter century between conferences.
My feeling as I arrived at Princeton that June weekend is best and most simply described as awe. The producers walking across those lush lawns were giants whom I had only read about. Better still, all the major players, as I observed and talked with them over three days, stayed deliciously in character.
The (not always successful) producer Alexander H. Cohen, the congress’s host and instigator, was Max Bialystock himself, direct from Mel Brooks’s classic movie, ”The Producers” — but more elegant, better dressed, as Max himself no doubt had been, 50 flops ago.
David Merrick, the most powerful producer ever, seemed to know his role, affecting an air of near total indifference, speaking to everyone as if that particular conversation were the biggest waste of time he could imagine.
Bernard Jacobs, the president of the Shubert Organization, was disdainful and dismissive in every discussion, with such a sour facial expression that he always looked as if he had just eaten something really, truly bad. (Much later, when I got to know him, I found out that this was an act. Warmhearted and generous almost to a fault, he was painfully shy and uncomfortable in any public setting.)
Julian Beck of the Living Theater, an aging revolutionary from central casting (bald, but with long hair), screamed at most of the conference participants and insulted all of them.
Joseph Papp, the founder and head of the Public Theater, was the alpha male of the nonprofit sector: brilliant, passionate, forceful, he heard not a word anyone else said.
Those were apocalyptic times and the tone of the conference was predictably contentious. It was not just that the personalities involved were oversized, with egos to match; at that time an uncivil war was being waged between the established culture and a counter-culture. Off Broadway fought Broadway, the nonprofit theaters defined themselves in opposition to the philistines in the commercial sector, and a battle was being joined over the most fundamental question about the purpose of theater: should it challenge the received wisdom of the audience or simply entertain, confirming values we already have and enhancing our sense of well-being?
Tempers were lost, interruptions were the rule. It was attack and defend, with no safe quarter for anyone. Everything was finished, over with. ”The capitalist pig theater must go! We rejoice in its death!” shouted the revolutionary, Julian Beck.
”The profit theater as we know it is, in effect, dead,” said the reactionary, Bernard Jacobs.
The critic Robert Brustein lamented the end of culture (he is lamenting it still). David Merrick said he was getting out of the business.
As I drove home on Sunday, and I remember this vividly, I thought: ”So much anger, defensiveness, resentment. Am I the only one who had fun?” Of course, nothing very notable was accomplished, and they were a miserable, cantankerous, unhappy lot. I miss them terribly.
Today, the theatrical landscape of 1974 would seem to be that of a distant planet. Broadway, currently doing record grosses, was then in a prolonged decline and had just endured its worst season ever, with more theaters dark than lit, its survival routinely questioned. A banner headline in Variety the week of the conference proclaimed, ”Theater Now a National Invalid.”
The nonprofit resident, or regional, theater movement, on the other hand, was in a phase of explosive growth, with private and public subsidies financing the proliferation of new institutions across the country and the expansion of established ones.
Such was the divergence in fortunes between the two sectors that it was widely assumed that the purpose of the conference (organized, after all, by Mr. Cohen, a commercial producer) was to enlist the nonprofit theater in an attempt to get help for the increasingly desperate commercial operators.
A speech by W. McNeil Lowry of the Ford Foundation and remarks by some government officials quickly indicated that that was wishful thinking, but throughout the conference the nonprofit delegates regarded their commercial counterparts with ”What-do-they-want-us-to-do-for-them?” suspicion.
Today, it is the other way around. The National Endowment for the Arts has cut back support to next to nothing; there are far too many nonprofit theaters chasing a decreasing pool of dollars, and theater companies everywhere are choosing plays and musicals with an eye toward a Broadway transfer.
Last year, when I spoke on a panel at a Theater Communications Group conference in San Francisco, I prepared to defend myself, and Jujamcyn Theaters’ profits, from attacks by idealists who had put pursuit of their artistic vision above money (T.C.G. represents 360 nonprofit theaters). The first question came from the managing director of a highly regarded minority theater: ”What can we do to get you to notice our work so it might reach a much larger audience on Broadway?”
To me, what is much more disturbing than a nonprofit theater tailoring shows specifically for Broadway is the fact that the big distinctions, so important in 1974, seem so nominal now.
Gerald Schoenfeld, the chairman of the Shubert Organization, has observed that the profit/nonprofit dichotomy is obsolete, that the proper terms should be taxable/nontaxable or subsidized/nonsubsidized.
With the culture wars receding into history and with financial survival or security the essential measure of theatrical success, we have entered a cultural fog in which nothing seems defined or distinct. We on Broadway look like the nonprofit theaters and they look like us.
Since I was trained in a resident theater (the Yale Rep), my first order of business at Jujamcyn was to set up a familiar structure, with a resident dramaturge, a resident director and a group of subsidized, in-house producers. The other two major theater operators in New York — the Shubert and Nederlander organizations — are structured similarly and we compete to handicap which plays produced in resident theaters have the best chance of commercial success on Broadway. At Jujamcyn, our biggest artistic success, Tony Kushner’s ”Angels in America,” was already famous, through productions in nonprofit theaters in London and Los Angeles, before we had anything to do with it.
As for the so-called nonprofit theaters, many of the best and most successful ones, like Lincoln Center Theater, Roundabout Theater Company, Manhattan Theater Club, Joseph Papp Public Theater, and the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, produce frequently on Broadway. They are often better at commercial producing than some of us veteran Broadway producers.
But what happened to what used to be called the resident theater movement? What had been a cause seems now to be mostly a marketing campaign. The subsidies that once enabled nonprofit theaters to take artistic risks are now increasingly apportioned according to box office and critical success (not to mention the advancement of multiculturalism).
AT one time, theatrical institutions established their identities according to the ways they chose to serve and advance the art. Playwrights Horizons and the Second Stage Theater are dedicated to the playwright; Steppenwolf in Chicago and the Atlantic Theater Company are identified with particular acting styles; the Goodman in Chicago and the Guthrie in Minneapolis are director-centric, and the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., is dedicated to the repertory ideal.
These and other institutions continue to do compelling work, but increasingly the template of success comes from the commercial arena, which is, in the end, not dedicated to the art so much as to the audience. The uber-model for this trend is ”the American Airlines Roundabout Theater,” whose artistic director, Todd Haimes, saved a bankrupt institution by adapting contemporary, market-savvy, the-audience-is-king techniques of modern corporations. Pleasing the customers, giving them what they want in the form they expect, works for Coca-Cola — and it works for subsidized theaters, too. Provide a familiar product (a well-known play with a well-known star) in a congenial setting (singles nights, comfortable seating), add a powerful corporate sponsor, and you will have a subscription that is the envy of every theater in America. It would, I suppose, be hyperbolic to say that Todd Haimes has had a more pernicious influence on English-speaking theater than anyone since Oliver Cromwell (and it wouldn’t be nice, either, since Mr. Haimes is a personable and honorable man), but it can be reasonably argued that the forces of the marketplace through the years have been just as effective a censor as government edicts.
CHEKHOV wrote that, ”We must strive with all our powers to see to it that the stage passes out of the hands of the grocers.” Because he wrote this in 1895 he could not have known that the threat would come not from a supermarket chain but from the automobile and airline companies that are now branding our marquees and ”enhancing” revenues. Is it wrong to succeed? That question, unthinkable now, was a subject of much discussion at Princeton in 1974.
It is disappointing enough that those of us in the commercial theater have long ago abdicated any purchase on sustained artistic enterprise. The idiosyncratic giants of an earlier day have given way, by and large, to syndicates of producers and corporations. Big Broadway successes are more often the product of well-crafted nostalgia brilliantly marketed than of bold and intrepid producing (”Chicago” and our own ”Smokey Joe’s Cafe” are recent examples). The road presenters poll their audiences’ response to various titles and stars before deciding on their seasons. The stakes (read costs) have simply become too high to assume undue risks. There is still a quotient of wonderfully reckless independent producers, but those careers usually don’t last long.
And now, in the nonprofit theater, too, the forces of risk control are at work. The managing directors, with their good board relationships, audience development campaigns and marketing strategies, are asserting their clout as the pressures to ”succeed” increase.
In my hometown, where the artistic director of the St. Louis Rep was challenging audiences and generally causing trouble, the board simply hired their managing director to replace him. In most institutional theaters today the model of, say, the Public Theater, where the artistic director and producer (Joseph Papp, George C. Wolfe) is lord of the manor, is giving way to at least equal partnerships between the artistic and managerial sides.
The planners of ACT II have been advised by consultants that the conference should be ”managed” with certain objectives and results in mind so that we can have some accomplishments to show for our efforts. No doubt we’ll talk about how the commercial producer relates to the nonprofit theater in which he is developing his musical. We’ll share insights about labor relations, and we’ll talk about a nationwide, 10-cent-per-ticket assessment to finance a national marketing campaign (the beef and milk industry ads were great!).
My fervent hope, however, is that sometime during the conference, lines will be drawn, voices will be raised, someone’s integrity will be challenged, and we will remember, if only briefly, that we are different from one another, with opposing, maybe irreconcilable views of what theater should be; that we are essentially unmanageable and that whatever pieties about our common purpose we endorse, there is still a hell of an argument to be had. So far, that session has not been scheduled.
