I've been thinking a lot about theater and where we're heading... 1/?

One theater cancels its whole season and has to furlough most of its staff. They turn their attention to organizing resources for artists and holding seminars on how to apply for unemployment. They are interrogating what their value might be in a world where we can’t gather. 2/

Our first concern was to make sure we could keep paying everyone what we had promised them” says another AD at a much smaller place.

Seems laudable coming from the small theater with the small staff. 3/

Then the big theaters keep their staff on and people are wondering why they’re paying administrators instead of artists. 4/

But then my friend who works in a development department at a big theater gets laid off the week after their successful online gala. Theaters pivot to online fundraisers raising money that is going to …. I’m not sure. Some are sharing the details. Some are not. 4/

One theater in New York sets itself up as the hub for a mutual aid organization. Another one begins to raise funds for undocumented New Yorkers. 5/

Then the AD of the Guthrie shares an inspiring video about the long history of theater and its persistence. 6/

Just a few days later - you see the lines in the
PR strategy - the Guthrie announces it won’t resume programming till March 2021 clearly requiring massive layoffs and signaling the prospect of a much longer time until artists can be hired. 7/

They’re on thin ice with a lot of people anyway and I start seeing posts wishing for the Guthrie to go bankrupt and hoping it’s replaced by smaller theaters who center artists and pay a living wage.

That feels like something I agree with. 8/

But then OSF announces the cancellation of the rest of their season and their new associate artistic director is a good friend for whom this job is a huge leap into a larger arena. And then there are my actor friends who were heading up there for the first time 9/

You can’t just cheer the destruction of the theaters we have and hope that something else grows from their ashes. Or at least if you do, you have to know there are a lot of good people who will be caught in the flames. 10/

I watch my friend who’s taken over Portland’s largest theater just as this pandemic descends. She shares on Facebook her brave, heartbreaking video messages to her staff and audience.

She’s worked for this for years. I can’t wish for her theater to close. 11/

Playwrights on twitter share rejection letters they’re getting telling them that this Festival or the other one isn’t happening and by the way they weren’t selected for it anyway. 12/

This is also a crisis of missed opportunity, the evaporation of a leap to a new level, the possibility of the one that would have been something special. 13/

I spent the last three years tracking the new leadership hires at theaters, celebrating the slowly expanding diversity - a few more people of color, many more women, a generational shift. It felt like hope. Will it be enough to come out of this crisis in a different shape? 14/

The mural on the theater around the corner from me hasn’t changed since the show that closed before it opened. They are digging deep to find ways to keep hiring artists for short-term online projects, to keep up with their obligations to the local artist community. 15/

They go into their locked theater and measure out how many people could fit in the house if they had to be 6-10 feet apart. It isn’t enough to make it possible to open again. 16/

I’m on the board of another theater. We look at complicated financial statements showing the different possibilities. Here’s the thing: it’s cheaper not to put on shows. Shows in small houses always lose money. 17/

My friend in New York gets an invitation to apply to be part of an online festival. She writes that her piece will be about imagining a theater without gatekeepers. 18/

What are the ethics of this moment? Should theaters keep paying all their staff? Pay the artists they would have hired? Pay them with what? Should they liquidate their endowments? Sell the buildings? 19/

I read that the Metropolitan Museum could pay its full staff for 10-12 years without draining its endowment. This is not the choice they’ve made. 20/

Who is owed the value of the real estate? Who deserves the last crumbs? Scarcity shows more in crisis and so does inequity. I think maybe the ethics of the moment are just the ethics of always. 21/

But maybe that’s the problem here, this part of the pandemic also hitting hardest on those already marginalized. The gap between the wages at the top and the wages at the bottom more visible than ever, the gap between the employee and the contractor even worse. 22/

The TCG conference was last week. They did open, first-come-first-serve registration. A gesture towards inclusion I think, although one that privileges people who are sitting at their computer still employed. I didn’t click the link in time. 23/

I hope they talked about the difference between preservation and liberation. I hope they started to imagine what it would like to dissolve the institutions’ fossilized wealth without destroying the people whose lives are intertwined with them. 24/

I’ve been thinking about the enclosure of the commons. Maybe the way our field is set up walls off what should have been resources commonly held. What if the buildings belonged to us all, belonged to the makers? 25/

This is also a crisis of empathy. It’s easier to feel for the people you know, the people who share your experience. 26/

If you work in a big theater and have friends all over the country who work in big theaters then that becomes “the theater” to you and that is what you end up fighting to preserve. 27/

If you’re an artist working outside that world then “the theater” to you is all the other unaffiliated artists scrapping by on the opportunities that come and go and vanish in times like this. 28/

What would radical empathy look like in this moment of tremendous fear and emergency? What would it look like to imagine solutions for the broadest definition of “the theater”? 29/

I’m thinking about the fair trade movement. What would a fair trade or just practices scorecard look like for this moment? What would justice look like? 30/

The mural I keep passing on the shuttered theater is for Henry V, a beautiful painting of the woman of color who was playing the lead. We few… we happy few…we are here on the eve of a great battle that will be remembered for a long time. What will we be remembered for? 31/31