American theaters are facing a severe crisis, with fewer venues, productions, and performances than before the COVID-19 pandemic. Several prominent regional theaters, including Cal Shakes, Lookingglass Theater, and the Williamstown Theater Festival, have significantly reduced or canceled their productions.
The article points to several key factors contributing to this crisis:
Interviews with 72 regional theaters indicate a projected 20% decrease in productions compared to pre-pandemic levels. Many theaters are shortening show runs, reducing cast sizes, and simplifying sets to cope with financial pressures.
The situation is dire, with artistic directors expressing significant concern about the future of nonprofit theater. The article highlights examples of specific cost-cutting measures implemented by various theaters, such as reducing performance days and show lengths.
There is less theater in America these days. Fewer venues. Fewer productions. Fewer performances.
Cal Shakes, a Bay Area favorite that staged Shakespeare in an outdoor amphitheater, is producing no shows this year. Chicago’s Lookingglass Theater, where Mary Zimmerman’s “Metamorphoses” had its premiere before coming to Broadway, has halted programming until next spring. The Williamstown Theater Festival, known for its star-studded summer shows, has no fully staged productions at its Western Massachusetts home this season.
The coronavirus pandemic and its aftermath have left the industry in crisis. Interviews with 72 top-tier regional theaters located outside New York City reveal that they expect, in aggregate, to produce 20 percent fewer productions next season than they did in the last full season before the pandemic, which shuttered theaters across the country, in many cases for 18 months or more. And many of the shows that they are programming will have shorter runs, smaller casts and simpler sets.
Seattle’s ACT Contemporary Theater has reduced the length of each show’s run by a week. In Los Angeles, the Geffen Playhouse will no longer schedule performances on Tuesdays, its slowest night. Philadelphia’s Arden Theater Company expects to give 363 performances next season, down from 503 performances the season before the pandemic.
Why is this happening? Costs are up, the government assistance that kept many theaters afloat at the height of the pandemic has mostly been spent, and audiences are smaller than they were before the pandemic, a byproduct of shifting lifestyles (less commuting, more streaming), some concern about the downtown neighborhoods in which many large nonprofit theaters are situated (worries about public safety), and broken habits (many former patrons, particularly older people, have not returned).
“It’s impossible not to be distraught about the state of the field,” said Christopher Moses, an artistic director of the Alliance Theater in Atlanta. “It’s clear this is the hardest time to be producing nonprofit theater, maybe in the history of the nonprofit movement.”
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