Dire Finances Also Reason For Long Wharf Theatre Exit

Financial realities — not just artistic re-envisioning — triggered the Tony Award-winning Long Wharf Theatre’s announcement in March that it will leave the physical complex it has called home for the past 57 years for a nomadic existence within the community.

With years of six-digit deficits, declining endowment and audience numbers, and capital needs of its physical complex, Long Wharf’s leadership is changing the theater’s business and artistic structure.

“This is a step in that direction,” said Managing Director Kit Ingui of the move. “It’s acknowledging our income stream, and right-sizing the model to that reality. We have to break the practice of operating at a deficit that has been part of our life and that cannot continue.”

The theater’s endowment — currently at $11 million, down from a high of $17 million seven years ago — credit lines and philanthropic funds have kept things running despite years of red ink.

Following the close of the current season in June, the organization will take a year off to regroup, seek local input, deal with its physical inventory and plan for an itinerant existence in yet-to-be determined spaces throughout New Haven.

Long Wharf is not alone in its fiscal dilemma. Other Connecticut theaters and not-for-profit producing venues across the country live perilously close to an economic precipice, theater executives said.

“The business model [among America’s regional theaters] is not strong,” said Cynthia Ryder, managing director of Hartford Stage. “The year-to-year survival of Connecticut institutions should not be…|CONTINUED|