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NOTE: The writing below does not necessarily reflect my current views. I include it to show where my mind was at the time and share those views with you.

INTRODUCTION TO AN ALTERNATIVE PARADIGM

By Brad McEntire (February 2006)

I am just entering my 30s in the year 2005. My generation, it should go without saying, is different from the one before. Yet, as a theatre practioner, I have been passed down an antiquated paradigm that does not reflect the kind of artist I am, the kind of theatre I do, the kind of audiences I want to reach, and the way this theatre will be administered.

Suppose a group of young guns graduate from a costly undergraduate program somewhere in the United States this year. This group is made up of several 20-somethings with fresh theatre degrees. They have gumption and enthusiasm, and most importantly- optimism. They want to band together and form a theatre company.

Where do they look to for guidance? What is the model they can base their own endeavors on?

Since the mid-20th century, the most prominent model has evolved to form a specific nonprofit paradigm. This model, best exemplified by various mid-sized Regional/Resident theatre companies throughout the U.S., involves the following goals and/or standards:

~ A hierarchical artistic/administrative staff

~ A controlling “board” of directors (sometimes called trustees)

~ A “season” of four to eight “slots” that “shows” are plugged into

~ A subscription system that dictates operating on projected income

~ Marketing campaigns that emphasis the productions over the organization

~ The aim towards bigger, wider growth (i.e. to be an “institution”)

~ A by-show basis for hiring contracted artists (often, but not always the case).

I’ll call this the LORT paradigm (after the League of Resident Theatres, founded in the 1960s).

The youngsters, with their new ideas and new energy to add to the field of theatre start from scratch. And it is hard. They get bogged down with paperwork instead of getting on with mounting productions. They don’t have the money needed to pay a staff enough to do everything that needs to be done. They run in circles with other post-grads, who are as poor as they are. Not the sort of fodder one would expect to cobble a board of directors out of (i.e. the wealthy arts patrons, the kinds that financially support museums and symphonies are not in the post-grads immediate social circle). They find that the audiences they want to do theatre for, folks around their own age, do not respond to the subscription idea. The young guns pick shows that are new or original, so can’t rely on some sort of market-friendly hook to cull audiences ( as if the name of a playwright would be a selling point these days anyway). They don’t have a specific venue that they operate out of, but move about the city as sort of urban gypsies. Because of this, they can’t really plan a “season” and they don’t have slots to fill with programming. They like the idea of organically producing one work after the other. And they want to stick together to get their messages across, as an ensemble of sorts, and not open the doors to any stranger who wanders in to audition.

Basically, they go against the grain as the grain has been drawn out since the early 1960s.

So, the old-school LORT paradigm is no good to them. The thought of putting together a 30 person board, mounting six full-blown productions a year, and operating on a $3+ million budget is as foreign and as ridiculous as thinking that because you like to fly toy aircraft you ought to work for NASA and walk on the moon.

But the reason the youngsters head into their new theatre endeavor, basing it on the LORT model, is the same reason Eskimos eat so much whale blubber… it’s the only thing on the Artic buffet. It is the only paradigm, the only path. It is what is taught in Theatre Management classes around the nation.

But a young forward-thinking group of theatre artists do not necessarily have to re-invent the wheel. There can be alternate ways of making and presenting theatre. Before we explore this alternate paradigm, let’s see where the LORT model, presently so much the status quo, came from and how it has evolved.

It is well documented that the field of nonprofit theatre practice arose over the course of the 20th century. So, by some token, the paradigm we have come to accept as standard is not that old. But it still is not new, either. George Pierce Baker’s Harvard playwriting class“47” in 1912 may have started the movement off, with leaps and bounds in forming a collective/ensemble (as the Group Theatre did in the 1930s), selling subscriptions as the Theatre Guild did (founded in 1919), and trying to establish a genuine repertory system (as Eva La Gallienne tried with her Civic Rep in 1926). And of course Margo Jones spring loaded the whole idea of a regional/resident theatre movement with her Theatre ’47. It is my understanding, through reading in Stephen Langley’s text, THEATRE MANAGEMENT AND PRODUCTION IN AMERICA, that the main reason for the nonprofit incorporation of many theatres was due to the Ford Foundation in the late 1950s.

… what could be identified as a nonprofit theatre movement was the commitment of the Ford Foundation in 1957 to give almost sixty million dollars to the arts over a short period of years – the first such philanthropic undertaking in American history.

… the Ford Foundation arts program made one thing very clear for the first time: If a theatre wished to receive a philanthropic gift, it had to be an institution, like the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, the Lyric Theatre of Chicago or the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Furthermore, it had to be professional (both in terms of its objectives and its employees).

Since 1957 foundations and corporations have been givers to the arts. In 1965, during Lyndon B. Johnson’s term in the U.S. Presidency, the National Endowment for the Arts was created (the NEA), furthering the anchoring that a theatre group needed to follow the established nonprofit paradigm. Money was at stake. Everybody better get on the same cookie-cutter page or you don’t get to play in the gimme-grants game.

And so it has gone since.

I propose over the next several writings to present an alternative paradigm to the LORT model. I will explore and hypothesis trends in how the theatre arts organization of the 21st Century could operate (especially small ones), what theatre artists of the present and future will be like, how these artists will work together and what their work will likely be like, and what the audiences are like that will consume this work. It is a new kind of work for a new kind of audience.

NEXT: The Alternative Approach to Small Theatre Operating Structure!

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