Can Connecticut Theaters Be Saved?

The site of the former Long Wharf Theatre

By FRANK RIZZO

It's Saturday night at the New Haven Food Terminal complex. The parking lot is deserted and there's an eerie quiet.

For 57 years at Long Wharf Theatre some of the finest productions of American theater were produced, presented and premiered, many with stars and others with artists who became stars, with playwrights who earned Pulitzer Prizes and Tony Awards. It was a place thatm at its peak, attracted 18,000 subscribers and thousands more annually.

Today the theater company is without a stage of its own, housed in a downtown administrative building, as its smaller staff begins its new itinerant life as it faces a dramatically different and uncertain future.

This is a story I never wanted to write.

It's about the crisis in American theater and particularly the state of the not-for-profit theaters in Connecticut. Far more than previous economic dramas, this period is the most critical time for theaters since I started covering the scene in the 1970s.

Nationally, many theaters are barely hanging on after reopening in the fall of 2021, following an 18-month shut-down. Many face dramatic losses of audiences and personnel, declining contributed income, nose-diving subscription numbers and soaring expenses. Theaters have cut staffs, shortened and downsized seasons, even closed. Some have rebounded or have begun a slow turnaround but the “existential threat” as many theater leaders have called it, remains in 2024.

“Without any question, this is the worst crisis to hit the non-profit movement in its entire history,” says Tony Kushner, Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning playwright of “Angels in America.” Kushner recently spoke at the Westport Country Playhouse. “I think for anybody who cares about theater they should be frightened because American theater cannot survive without the not-for-profit movement.”

Connecticut’s six largest not-for-profit producing theaters — Hartford Stage, New Haven's Long Wharf Theatre, TheaterWorks Hartford, Goodspeed Musicals in East Haddam, Westport Country Playhouse and Waterford's Eugene O'Neill Theater Center— collectively report a 50 percent drop in annual ticket sales since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I spoke with more than 40 theater administrators, artists, donors, staffers, consultants and theater-goers; from years past and present; from large theaters and small; from around the state and the country. Their assessment of problems and possible solutions varied widely, all asterisked with uncertainty about the future – and the particulars of each theater.

One perspective, however, was clear. As Goodspeed's former executive director Michael Price says, "At the end of the day, you've got to put asses in the seats."

The evolution of not-for-profit theater

This story opens in the early 1960s with the burgeoning not-for-profit regional theater movement that was propelled by the Ford Foundation and its collective philanthropy of more than $280 million, ($2.9 billion in today’s dollars) and further supported by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), created in 1965.

Nearly 2,000 theaters sprang up across the country, led by visionary theater artists. In Connecticut Hartford Stage and Goodspeed Opera House opened in 1963, the O'Neill in 1964, Long Wharf Theatre in 1965 and Yale Repertory Theatre in 1966.

Acting as an alternative to the profit-driven commercial theater — and decentralizing American theater beyond New York City — these tax-exempt not-for-profits were mission-driven, bringing culture of the classics and new works to communities.

These theaters differed from the state's older presenting houses such as New Haven's Shubert Theatre and Hartford's Bushnell which primarily offered touring shows.

The state’s regional producing theaters — which collectively earned six Tony Awards for outstanding work — created their own productions, employing actors, designers and crafts and crew workers. They became artistic homes for generations of theatrical talent and acted as a kind of cost-free, research-and-developmental arm not only for the commercial theater, but for the film, television and music industries, too.

Oscar-winning actors and Yale theater alumni such as Meryl Streep, Angela Bassett and Frances McDormand; playwright Rolin Jones (“Interview with the Vampire”); and directors such as Michael Engler (“Downtown Abbey”) and Arvin Brown (“Ally McBeal”), honed their craft at not-for-profit theaters in Connecticut before achieving fame and fortune in film and television.

These theaters were never expected to make money — hence the moniker "not-for-profit." Generally between 40 and 60 percent of the budget would come from the box office. The shortfall would be made up by fundraising, attracting philanthropists, foundations, corporations, government and individual donors.

At least that was the plan and, for a time, it worked and theaters expanded their programming, staff and buildings.

The business model became a tenuous one, based on the flow of subscription money. That windfall of cash at the beginning of a season often stalled the necessity of taking out loans, dipping into endowments or last-minute gala money before the fiscal year ended in order to make payrolls and avoid deficits, which were sometimes layered upon past debts.

As the millennium approached, subscriptions — with which theatergoers signed on to a season of shows with the understanding that all would not be home-runs — further declined. New generations preferred to pick and choose individual shows, skipping unfamiliar ones. Entertainment competition increased. Theaters adjusted to revenue loss by cutting the number of productions, lengths of runs and size of casts.

David Byrd, managing director of Goodspeed Musicals, says since theaters reopened three years ago not only have theatergoers slowly returned, but “people are now waiting longer and longer before they commit to a show,” further destabilizing a theater’s finances.

Other revenue streams a theater depended on — from corporations, foundations and government — were drying up leading to a reckoning many had been forecasting for years.

If a theater was able to make it just on the box office it would be a commercial enterprise doing plays for the profit of its owners and investors. But a not-for-profit theater depended on figuratively passing the hat — with critical dependence of its development director and artistic director in wooing donors.

Over time many philanthropists moved on, changed priorities or died. Foundations faced increasing asks from different social agencies and levels of theater support fluctuated. Corporations significantly contributed in communities where they resided but over the decades, many of them — or their headquarters — left Connecticut, and with it the level and nature of commitment to theaters, such as Aetna and United Technologies whose headquarters moved out of state and with it their level of funding.

As for government, NEA funding decreased following political efforts to prevent public funding from going to “objectionable” projects in the late '80s. State giving was thin, too. The National Association of State Arts Agencies report that state and jurisdictional arts agencies saw a 24 percent decrease nationally for the 2024 budget compared to the previous period, due in part to ending of federal pandemic support.

Connecticut theaters were hardly alone in this financial pickle. American Theater magazine reported 85 major not-for-profit producing theaters surveyed even before the pandemic had negative working capital — and each of the preceding four years, meaning they borrowed funds internally or externally to meet their daily operating needs.

Theater leaders characterized the crisis as "the perfect storm," "the tipping point" or more colorfully, "[expletive] hitting the fan.”

Pandemic woes

The COVID shut-down broke longtime theater-going habits and made people rethink how their leisure time — and money — is spent. “The Netflix factor” is oft-cited as a leading reason for the lackluster audience return.

Theaters also faced staffers not returning to their jobs and artists leaving the state or moving on to work in film, TV or other careers entirely, all adding up to a huge labor shortage. Inflation, too, made production budgets skyrocket. There was a plummet in media coverage. And longtime audiences were not responding in large enough numbers to dramatic shifts in programming.

Vulnerable now is Long Wharf Theatre, which was on the financial precipice even before the pandemic. Hopes now are on its reset, but can it bring enough of its established audience on its nomadic journey at scattered venues of various sizes and types and, if not, can it attract new fans to make up for that loss?

“Though there have been some joyful experiences on stage, sadly things haven’t changed much (financially) for all of us since last year,” says Kit Ingui, managing director of Long Wharf Theatre, adding that costs in producing theater has risen 20 percent since the end of the pandemic. “Philanthropists and foundations can’t fill that gap and we need some systemic government support.”

Westport Country Playhouse's future is also unclear. It is now working on a new model, with three full productions instead of five, and offering various entertainment presentations during the rest of the year.

But there’s some upticks, too. After decades of expectations, Yale’s David Geffen School of Drama drama will finally have a new theater complex and venue around the corner from “The Rep” in the coming years.

Some of the state's smaller theaters were well-entrenched in their communities such as West Hartford's Playhouse on Park, Waterbury's Seven Angels Theatre and Collective Consciousness Theater. New Haven's A Broken Umbrella, a small company presenting site-specific works, will open a new venue for multiple arts groups in the Westville neighborhood.

TheaterWorks Hartford is quick to try new approaches and to engage with audiences. Its new music programming has seen sold-out shows and its streaming of its theater productions has also seen growth. Goodspeed Musicals, too, is on relatively steadier ground as it tries to satisfy both older and newer theatergoers with big-title shows. “The only way out is to produce our way out of it,” says Byrd.

Nationally theaters made it through the shutdown because of the hundreds of millions in federal support. But that money is near-exhausted and theaters here are turning to the state.

Ticking clock on government funding

This year the six producing not-for-profit theaters proposed $6 million in funding to rebuild audiences, stabilize operations and create new fiscal models. The six presenting houses, too, united as the new Connecticut Performing Arts Centers Coalition and lobbied for additional support.

However, at the end of the state legislative session in May for the 2025 budget, which ends June 30, 2025, not-for-profit theaters received a shock when the anticipated remaining federal pass-through funds of $2.6 million from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) were reallocated elsewhere, Brett Thompson, executive director for the Connecticut Arts Alliance, says.

To make matters worse, even ARPA federal funds from the previous fiscal year were cut by state legislators in May from $3.5 million to $2.25 million.

Apart from the ARPA funds, the six producing not-for-profit theaters each receive $43,000 line item funding from the state annually. The six presenting houses receive around $196,000 each, he says. The only other direct state funds theaters get annually is from the Office of the Arts, which total $1.5 million – down substantially from previous years, says Thompson. Those funds, he pointed out, are for all arts and cultural groups, not just theaters, and excludes theaters that receive line item funding.

“To put it in perspective,” Byrd says, “What we get from the state only covers a fraction of the payroll for one week.”

One glimmer of hope is that some national political leaders are taking action. This spring legislation was introduced in the U.S. Congress for a $5 billion aid package for not-for-profit theaters – $1 billion annually for a five year period.

Not-for-profit theater leaders are calling this "an existential moment.” But it's one for the government and its citizens, too, in determining what value these theaters are to the state and to their communities – and how to support them. Otherwise, for some theaters the curtain may be coming down for good.

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