10 Ways to Save Philadelphia Theatre, Part 1

Philadelphia isn’t widely recognized outside of the region as being a major US theatre center, despite the fact that the city is home to dozens of professional and semi-professional theatre companies. In this two-part series, I explore five issues Philly theatre artists must address in order for Philadelphia to become a world-class theatre city.

1. Philly theatre artists have to get over New York.

Recently, a local niche theatre company was invited to participate in a niche theatre festival in New York. The artistic director of this company was ecstatic that the company had been written about in the New Yorker, and notified his mailing list. It was a performance listing, without a description, mentioning only the performance dates, the name of the play, and the director.

This is a company known locally for doing high-quality plays with excellent local talent, usually to critical acclaim. They deserved a review or a feature story, but they are from Philadelphia, so who cares? There is a huge amount of theatre in New York, and much of it is crap. New Yorker theatre is already obsessed with itself, and the rest of the country buys in.

Philadelphia theatre companies only chance of achieving a national reputation is by bringing work to major metropolitan areas outside of New York, where their it will actually be noticed and reported on. Philadelphia theatre needs to get over it’s New York inferiority complex and push itself to the rest of the nation, and the world.

2. Philly’s most successful companies need to actively nurture small-theatre activity–not just rent them performance space.

The Arden Theatre Company initially got its start when the Walnut Street Theatre allowed its young and spunky founders access to space and some resources for their first year running. InterAct Theatre Company initially benefitted from the support of the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts. These two companies were an important part of the Philadelphia theatre renaissance that started in the 1980s and is in full-flower today.

When was the last time any of Philly’s most successful companies offered time, space or mentorship to Philly’s theatrical up-and-comers, or proven small companies? The Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis has made it’s secondary stages available to smaller promising local companies, promoting these efforts as co-productions. The Steppenwolf in Chicago does the same. These relationships are cast as collaborations, co-productions and mentorships, not rental agreements.

If large theatre companies want to draw younger and/or more diverse audience members, they should bring local theatre companies that have those audiences into their spaces during dark times or after hours, at the very least.The benefits are obvious. Large companies get to market themselves as being sensitive to the needs of diverse audiences. Small companies benefit from the association with more established companies and their home performance spaces. Through mentoring and supporting small companies, the biggies also help to develop a stream of young, hungry potential interns and employees for their production, marketing, education and development departments. It’s a win-win for all involved.

3. Get over being “edgy”.

The desire to appear provocative is a pose. The need for theaters to take risks is not.

Look at the marketing materials of Philadelphia’s most successful small theatre companies, and you will see a lot of darkness. Popular productions from recent seasons include sexual abuse, rape, horrific violence and pedophilia. Meanwhile, major social issues relevant to the community, such as race relations, economic inequality and political divisiveness have little or no place on area stages.

As much as Philly audiences seem to be titillated by violent and sexual content, there’s nothing particularly risky about giving it to them. It’s much more risky to challenge an audience’s core beliefs and push them, through performance, to reexamine what they take for granted in their every day lives. There is plenty of theatre in Philadelphia that is merely entertaining. More often than not, “edgy”, “provocative” or “challenging” are adjectives that Philly companies use to make “entertaining” sound subversive.

4. Make the Live Arts Festival year-round, and stop the unfair competition with the Philly Fringe.

It’s long past time for Live-Arts and Philly Fringe Artistic Director Nick Stuccio to stop pretending that he has any interest in the Philly Fringe. Though these two institutions were once intimately intwined, they are now perpetually in competition for audience and media attention, to the detriment of both independent theatre producers and Philadelphia’s role in national and international performance communities.

In my opinion, the Philly Fringe is the time when local theatre companies do their most interesting work, and when local audiences are most willing to take risks. The Live Arts Festival, at its best, is an opportunity to bring important performing artists and companies from around the nation and the world to Philadelphia audiences. Both festivals have necessary roles in the heath of the Philadelphia arts community.

The Philly Fringe needs to be completely organizationally separate from Live Arts so that it can serve the needs of the independent theatre producers that make it all happen. The Live Arts Festival should present programming year-round, instead of competing directly with the Fringe Festival each year.

The private and corporate funders in our community need to recognize that these are distinct organizations with different goals and needs and stop subsidizing the Live Arts Festival with grant money that is intended to support the Fringe Festival.

5. Philly theatre companies should collaborate more and compete less.

Ask almost any local artistic director how to succeed in the Philadelphia theatre scene, and they will tell you to identify your niche and define your theatrical brand in such as way as to make your company seem independent and unique. The reasoning goes that the size of Philly audiences is small, and so theaters must compete for their attention. The niche model is also increasingly reinforced by granting organizations and funders, who push theatre companies to define themselves on the basis of their “unique contributions to the community”.

While niche-marketing may make sense from a branding perspective, it also fosters a background level of unfriendly competition among local theatre companies, both for audiences and funders. All of this doesn’t stop these companies from doing the same sorts of work at the same time. Both EgoPo Classic Theatre and the Lantern Theatre Company produced Beckett festivals during the 2009-10 season, for example. Does Philly really need two competing Beckett festivals?

To counteract this unhealthy competition, Philly theaters must collaborate and co-produce much more frequently. There have been a few worthwhile efforts towards this end in the last few years. EgoPo has reached out to other local companies to co-produce readings of plays related to their expressionist- and Tennessee Willams-themed seasons. In the 2010-2011 season, the Lantern Theatre Company, Theatre Exile, Amaryllis Theatre, Act II Playhouse, the Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts and Inis Nua participated in what was billed as the Philadelphia Irish Theatre Festival.

Festivals represent excellent opportunities for local theater companies to cross-market, attract press coverage, woo funders and build audiences–and Philly audiences seem to love them. The festival model of cross-promotion is a step in the right direction, but it doesn’t typically lead to true artistic collaboration between companies. In the festival model, theater companies do the shows they were planning to do anyway, independently of each other, then figure out a strategy to package market those productions jointly.

Fully seven local companies have produced/are producing Jewish-themed productions this fall, all independently of each other. Of all the local media, it appears this was only significant to the Jewish Exponent (Theaters Do Jewish, by Michael Elkin). Couldn’t at least a few of these companies communicated with each other about their upcoming seasons, pooled their resources, and collaborated in some substantive way?

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