Enter the Boosters, Bearing Theaters

New York Times
March 9, 2008

By JESSE GREEN

IT isn’t every day that a busy portion of Philadelphia’s longest thoroughfare gets shut down, at least not on purpose. But one scorching morning in October, the block of Broad Street from Pine to Lombard, part of a stretch somewhat grandly called the Avenue of the Arts, was taped off, tented, festooned with mums and Mummers. While hundreds of guests sat wilting before the dais, awaiting words from Mayor John F. Street, Gov. Edward G. Rendell and Senator Arlen Specter, a clown on stilts entertained. It was all so quaint and civic, you’d have thought President Taft was coming to town.

But no, the worthies were there to cut the ribbon on the $25 million new home of the Philadelphia Theater Company, which for 25 years had rented a charming but dysfunctional theater a few blocks away. That 1912 building was called Plays and Players; it often seemed that the word audience was omitted deliberately. Sara Garonzik, the company’s producing artistic director, said that many of its 324 seats were broken, that the lobby was too small to shelter patrons, and that the two hideous little bathrooms were barely accessible even to people not in wheelchairs. “That facility was a very trying situation,” Mr. Street recalled.

And not the only one, apparently. In recent years many of the 75 companies that form the League of Resident Theaters have looked at their aging or unaesthetic homes and joined what amounts to a nonprofit theatrical building boom. Since 2000 they and other institutions coast to coast have initiated dozens of construction projects whose combined tab is approaching $1 billion. The size of the scrums of dignitaries and donors who inevitably attend the groundbreakings and galas (and whose names seem to serve as wallpaper inside) suggests what it takes to get these buildings up. What’s less evident is what it really means to operate them once they’re built.

For one day, at least, that was not the Philadelphians’ concern. It was a time for admiring the improvements and complimenting the architects, KieranTimberlake Associates, on the plush seats, roomy ground-floor bathrooms and lobby amenities reminiscent of a suburban bookstore. Backstage accommodations for the players are more modest, but the plays are well served with the latest technology.

Neither plays nor players, though, foot the bill, so the theater is named instead for its leading donor, Suzanne Roberts, a local actress and philanthropist whose husband, Ralph, is the founder of the Philadelphia-based cable giant Comcast. Ms. Roberts’s signature, blown up to Rushmore size as if on a very large check, forms the marquee on the building, which is part of a condominium development called Symphony House being marketed to lovers of the arts.

The politicians’ own marketing was of a different sort. They did not paint themselves as culturati by praising the company’s commitment to new American plays or its latest Terrence McNally premiere. Instead of art as an aesthetic endeavor, they spoke of it as a form of urban renewal and the new building as a weapon in the war of municipal competition: If Chicago can do it, so can we.

Mr. Rendell called the Roberts a worthy addition to the “sense of dynamism on the Avenue” and “a great civic achievement.” (Several other theaters — the Wilma, the Merriam, the Prince — have built or renovated spaces nearby.) Mr. Street said, “Arts and culture are at the heart of what makes a city work.” They might have been dedicating a shiny new stadium or water-treatment plant.

They were not wrong to take that boosterish approach; public culture is based on the put-something-in, get-something-out model. Because government had a financial stake in the Philadelphia project (the state contributed $5 million and the city $3 million), it made sense for its representatives to justify the investment in terms of the economic return promised by well-heeled new neighbors and liquor tax receipts. But art is different from culture — it is culture’s subtext, in a way — and one can’t help sensing, among the actual artists at events like this around the country, a plaintive question behind the platitudes: Who are these buildings for?
Others have been asking that question too, wondering if the regional theater movement, which began in the late 1940s, has lost sight of its founding mission. As described by the monologist Mike Daisey in a recent article for the alternative Seattle newspaper The Stranger (and in a new piece called “How Theater Failed America” to be performed at Joe’s Pub in New York next month), that mission was “to house repertory companies of artists, giving them job security, an honorable wage and health insurance.”

“In return,” he continued, “the theaters would receive the continuity of their work year after year — the building blocks of community.”

For Mr. Daisey that dream is dead. “When regional theaters need artists today, they outsource,” he wrote. “They ship the actors, designers and directors in from New York and slam them together to make the show.”

And it’s true that the building boom, particularly among the aging lions of the regional movement, is partly about creating whiz-bang “destination” theaters that will attract national talent. (Also, younger audiences.) But the companies say they are doing this to enhance or recapture their mission, not discard it.

At the same time they seem to be making pre-emptive statements about their centrality to the culture. In the last two years alone the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis moved into its new $125 million Jean Nouvel home overlooking the Mississippi River; Arena Stage in Washington broke ground on the $120 million Mead Center, designed by Bing Thom; and the Dallas Theater Center, in the city where the regional movement arguably began, started building Rem Koolhaas’s Wyly Theater, part of a cultural complex pegged at a Texas-size $338 million.
“You either grow or you die,” said Joe Dowling, the Guthrie’s artistic director.

If the choice was that stark for a giant like the Guthrie, it was even starker at the smaller end of the scale. Companies like the Signature, in Arlington, Va., which moved into a $16 million new home last year, simply couldn’t continue to function in their old spaces. The Signature was running at 97 percent of capacity in a 136-seat converted garage whose lobby also served as the main rehearsal hall. Patrons for hit shows were routinely turned away.

Ms. Garonzik, in Philadelphia, had the opposite problem: an aging core of subscribers who would not renew because of the physical discomfort of Plays and Players. “They told our telemarketers that they just couldn’t do it anymore,” she said.

Theaters like these are basically moving out of jury-rigged bachelor flats and (with the help of the folks) into their first real homes. They remain intimate. But some midsize institutions, like the Berkeley Repertory Theater, which in 2001 grew to 1,000 seats from 400, are expanding because their longtime homes no longer encompass their values and ambitions, if they ever did. The Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts made do for 48 summers with what looked like a high school auditorium on the campus of Williams College; even great work seemed dinky there. The $50 million new complex it has shared since 2005 with the college’s theater and dance departments is a more professional space than most of what you’d find on Broadway. But the surprising result has been too many productions that seem less professional by contrast: mediocre (but house-filling) musicals and mysteries starring television actors.

As a summer theater Williamstown has always depended on imported talent. The so-called resident theaters, as Mr. Daisey’s criticism and the word “resident” suggest, weren’t supposed to work that way. But the goal of increasing national presence has made attracting names a deliberate part of many new building programs.

Michael Kahn, the artistic director of the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, said it was difficult enough to induce New York actors, afraid to be out of town for too long, to commit to the six-week rehearsal periods he favors, let alone the eight-week runs necessitated by the small size of the Lansburgh Theater, where the Shakespeare performed for 15 years. Longer runs also meant fewer productions. And like many retrofitted theaters, the Lansburgh, carved from the shell of a department store burned in the 1968 riots, placed unfortunate technical restrictions on designers and directors. A theater without trap space, Mr. Kahn pointed out, has no grave for Ophelia.

The company’s $89 million Sidney Harman Hall, which opened with Marlowe’s “Tamburlaine” in November, solves all those problems. Productions in its reconfigurable 775-seat auditorium can theoretically turn a profit in five weeks. Ophelia can have a grave, an aerie or a flying carpet if a director so desires. And because the company has kept the Lansburgh, it can now program two theaters in sync.

But such improvements do not come without a cost, even beyond that of construction. (The Shakespeare is still short of its capital goal by about $18 million.) There is also the hugely increased cost of running a new theater once it’s built.

Eric Schaeffer, artistic director of the Signature, said his staff had increased by 12 positions, including their first full-time custodian — and, of course, more people in marketing and development. Greater lighting capacity (the old theater had 88 electrical circuits, the new one almost 600) resulted in higher utility bills. A bigger and better-equipped stage meant doubling the cost of productions. (You can’t ask a set designer to put cardboard scenery in a platinum setting.) In the year the Signature moved, its annual operating budget ballooned to $5.5 million from $2 million.

That pattern holds universally. The Philadelphia Theater Company’s annual operating budget rose to $4.1 million in the new space from $2.1 million before its capital campaign began. The Shakespeare’s rose to $19.4 million from $10.2 million; the Guthrie’s to $26 million from $19.5 million. And as staff members at each theater pointed out, raising money to pay the janitor’s salary is an entirely different problem from raising money to erect an edifice.

“People love to build a sexy new building,” Ms. Garonzik said. “It’s an offering. It says yes to the future.” But donors who have put their names on the cloakroom or water fountain may be tapped out when it comes time for the boring old annual fund. And annual funds are distressingly annual.

“Will we have to beat the bushes more?” Mr. Kahn said. “Yes.”

The good news is that even without large increases in ticket prices (some have actually dropped), earned income at most of the new theaters has risen. There are more seats, of course, and people are curious to see what the spaces are like. Mr. Kahn said that was why he opened the Harman with “Tamburlaine,” a play unlikely to draw crowds otherwise.

“Tamburlaine” was also a successful test of the theater’s expensive acoustics and production capabilities. Leading a backstage tour, a staff member proudly pointed out the new prop kitchen, in which the requisite buckets of blood were made and stored. Previously such work was done in the same cramped kitchen where the actors kept their yogurt.

It’s also good news that the buildings, as objects of architecture, are more successful than those built 20 or 30 years ago. They abjure the industrial aesthetic of that generation of theaters and the smug grandeur of many newer cultural centers. These theaters are voluptuous, albeit sometimes in the manner of a blingy trophy wife. Several even feature a private intermission lounge for high rollers. The Shakespeare’s transparent cantilevered mezzanine lobby, like the Roberts’s undulating walls glowing with hidden halogens, means lucrative rentals for corporate events and nontraditional bar mitzvahs.

Providing party space and winning architecture prizes are not among the founding goals of the regional theater movement. In building their temples, theater companies risk losing some of the old-time religion — the reliance on local resources, the seat-of-the-pants aesthetic — that gained them adherents in the first place. But the companies are stuck in an economic bind. Reasonably enough, directors want the opportunity to stretch their imaginations with the latest technology, performers want dignified work conditions, and audiences want seats whose springs don’t threaten to give them tetanus. If the theaters don’t address these issues, they will stay small. If they stay small, they have to raise their prices; if they raise their prices, they risk losing new audiences; if they lose new audiences, they don’t have a future.

The new buildings are the only way out, even if they make tangible the institutions’ contradictions as well as their aspirations. With enough Harmans and Wylys and Robertses, though, those contradictions can be papered over almost inconspicuously. Mr. Kahn pointed out that he did not have to open his new theater with “Hello, Dolly!” in Elizabethan clothes or some other desperate attempt to pay the mortgage at the expense of the mission.

Similarly, at the Signature, Mr. Schaeffer has not scaled back his theater’s productions of difficult American musicals. Just the opposite. For “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” which begins performances Tuesday, he has gone ahead with a three-story set more complicated than anything the theater has ever built.

The only problem is that they’ve run out of space to store it. “We need a bigger scene shop,” he said with a sigh.