Building the Successful Theater Company

Lisa Mulcahy

• Publisher: Allworth
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781621535256
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Theatertechnik & Szenografie

What makes a theater company successful? Lisa Mulcahy poses the question to leaders from nineteen of the country's most diverse and vital theater companies from the recent past and present, and offers answers in Building the Successful Theater Company. Producers, stage managers, directors—anyone dreaming of running a theater troupe—will benefit from the practical guidance, amusing anecdotes, and sincere advice in this peek behind the curtains of the often difficult, always seductive, profession of theater. With five additional companies profiled in this fully revised third edition, Building a Successful Theater Company features: •The LABrynth Theater Company
•New Paradise Laboratories
•National Theatre of the Deaf
•Shotgun Players
•Asian-American Theatre Company
•Steppenwolf Theater Company
•The Pasadena Playhouse
•La Jolla Playhouse
•Chicago City Limits
•Berkeley Repertory Theatre
•Arena Stage's The Living Stage Theatre Company
•Mixed Blood Theatre Company
•Horizons Theatre
•Wheelock Family Theatre
•L.A. Theatre Works
•A Traveling Jewish Theatre
•Jean Cocteau Repertory
•Bailiwick Repertory
•New Repertory TheatreNew chapters cover funding and financial aspects, maximizing a company's potential through powerful social media use, and creating successful partnerships by teaming up with corporate sponsors and establishing artistic collaborations. Stage veterans reveal advice on everything from locating performance space, to developing a business plan, to and rehearsing and publicizing productions in this invaluable guide to creating or growing a theater company.Allworth Press, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, publishes a broad range of books on the visual and performing arts, with emphasis on the business of art. Our titles cover subjects such as graphic design, theater, branding, fine art, photography, interior design, writing, acting, film, how to start careers, business and legal forms, business practices, and more. While we don't aspire to publish a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are deeply committed to quality books that help creative professionals succeed and thrive. We often publish in areas overlooked by other publishers and welcome the author whose expertise can help our audience of readers.

PART ONE

ROOTS

Precious Little by Madeleine George

directed by Marissa Wolf

Shotgun Players 2012 Season

Pictured: Nancy Carlin, Zehra Berkman, Rami Margron

Photo by Pak Han

Chapter One

How We Came Together

That any theater company comes together at all, ever, is a miracle.

The reasons why one chooses to set out on the path to starting a company are, of course, rife with good intentions. Usually, there is a burning need on the part of a founder to express a dramatic truth very specifically. He or she recognizes that in order to do this with any measure of control, he or she will have to work independently—you don’t wait for someone to cast you in your dream project or write it and hand it to you. You need to do it yourself.

An admirable goal, for sure. Once you decide you are indeed going to start your own company, your next logical step would be to look around and try to find other people to participate in your vision. This, frankly, is where stuff can get weird. What if the people you choose are flaky and not dependable? Or have egos the size of Cleveland? Or things start off great, but pretty soon everybody starts fighting over everything from material to who has the most lines in your debut show to who broke into the petty cash box to buy pizza?

Or how about financial hurdles? Ignorance about money is the fastest way a theater company founder can run his or her dream into the ground. You need to think ahead to plan a feasible financial vision if you want to last longer than three seconds.

So those are a few possible pitfalls. Now for the good news! You can beat the odds. How? A big-picture plan toward building longevity is what you want to be focused on. You don’t need to be independently wealthy with a huge staff to make your theater company work. You do need information from those who have been there—experience is the world’s greatest teacher. If you don’t have it yourself, you can still make like a sponge and soak it up from those who have been around the block.

In this chapter, our successful subjects give us an understanding of the origins of each of their companies, covering issues like artistic impetus for starting, how founders and staffers met up and determined their common goal, early business planning (or shockingly, lack thereof—but even mistakes can be lessons), compromises, soldiering through difficulty—you name it, they’ve been through it.

These companies’ roots are diverse, yet they do have one thing in common—they made it. Take heart and inspiration, starting with Berkeley Repertory’s resolve to integrate fine literary properties with the San Francisco Bay area’s 1960s sensibilities.

COMMITMENT TO WORDS AND COMMUNITY

According to Susan Medak, managing director of Berkeley Repertory: “Michael Leibert started the company in 1968. Michael’s group began performing in small storefronts about six blocks away from the campus of the University of California at Berkeley.

The decision Michael made to settle in Berkeley had to do with what the community stands for. This community loves itself. It loves its words, loves ideas, and prides itself on its tolerance. My sense has always been, a theater company’s relationship with its surroundings is the key to its success. A friend of mine who’s been very successful in the theater has always put it best: “In this business, geography is destiny.” What’s marking the companies that have been successful in a mainstream area, like Wichita, Kansas, is that they best know that small-town world. In Berkeley, the audience is and always has been completely driven by a love of the written word. And Michael’s original commitment was to literature-based work. So in the beginning, the company was producing Arthur Miller, Alan Ackbourn, very literary shows.

Michael was a very charismatic leader. He was in love with actors, but he was a very troubled human being, incapable of growing personally. This eventually became a problem, because your challenge, as a company, is how to build the structure that sustains what you want to do. It gets uncomfortable when a founding artist—and I think this is true of many founding artists, not just Michael—struggles with building and growing in the long run, like how at that time, the company was not committed to new works.

After starting things up, Michael then worked with a small resident company on six to eight shows. The memory of that moment in time—the late ’60s, the relatively new idea of political activism—for the actors, it was indelible.

Berkeley, known for its activism and university sensibility, informed this company. The company moved to a new space on College Avenue, a 150-seat storefront, with a big peace sign on the front.

Mitzi Sales, former managing director at Berkeley Rep, came on the scene then:

I think the basic impetus, as lore would have it—and I was there three and a half years after it got started—was, you know, Michael was looking for something to do; he’d gotten out of grad school, and he’d been in the theater department. He had some friends who were Equity actors, so I think the most important thing that Michael Leibert did was start the theater as an Equity company. He did this because the actors he knew and wanted to work with were already members of the union, at least a couple of members of his closest coterie.

He had a very successful production of Woyzeck at the International House Space in Berkeley, and he thought, “Wow, what a piece of cake! I’ll just start a theater.” There was this little space on College Avenue, which is not particularly far from the campus—straight down the street. And all of the people that he would be working with were already living in the neighborhood. He thought, “We’ll put on Woyzeck, it’ll be a big hit, we’ll sell all these tickets, we’ll build the theater, and people will come.” Well, of course this was very, very difficult.

But the thing that Michael had that other people didn’t have was a wife with money. So he had a patron, and one of the ways to start a theater company is to find a patron.

Michael originally named the group the Theater. When they went for their articles of incorporation, Michael was told, “No, no, no, you have to have some distinguishing name.”

And so, the Pomegranate Players was picked. But it was a joke—they were never really advertised as the Pomegranate Players; nobody thought they were the Pomegranate Players.

REBELS EMBRACING RISK

For Steppenwolf, the desire to make an artistic statement was fueled by confidence and fearlessness. The founding members convened in 1974, in Deerfield, Illinois, to put on their first show at a Unitarian church. This original meeting of the minds was facilitated by the fact that each founding member recognized they had in common an intense love of the theatrical art form, a need to express themselves through it, and the smarts and self-assurance to know innately that being true to that, they couldn’t fail.

Michael Gennaro, former executive director of Steppenwolf, relates the tale of the company’s inception:

Keep in mind the founders being Jeff Perry, Gary Sinise, and Terry Kinney, they all kind of knew each other—I think Gary and Jeff knew each other the longest, and then Jeff knew Terry. Their first production was Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. After they did that, they said, “We gotta keep this going.” Kind of their impetus, within that first group of which there were about nine people—some of them are still around, like Al Walter, John Malkovich, Laurie Metcalf—I think if you ask them, their impetus was, “We couldn’t get work anywhere else. We can do things with a certain visceral style—that’s what we’re all about. We’re as good as anybody and we can work like that.” And I think underlying all of that, all of the time, was to never settle for anything less as far as they could go. I mean, in some ways you could say it’s just a striving for excellence, but beyond that it was like, no performance is ever set. It’s like, we keep improving upon it every single time we do it.

I think, then, the insularity of the group kind of drove them all the time. What was the financial vision? They didn’t have one. How many staff members? This is a group of people who just got together to do everything and the whole point was just to get onstage and work together. The trust that developed over time, and the way of working together as an ensemble, that was the driving force.

The group had people they admired, like John Cassavetes. They would tackle any play, regardless of the age requirements. If someone wasn’t right, too bad. If they wanted to do it, then they would do it. They saw themselves as rebels and did what they wanted to do. So, everybody had their day jobs, which included John driving a bus and Gary working in a hat store. But their whole day was made up in getting together and working as a theater. Strangely enough, that’s still the driving force of this theater. This theater has never really been driven by—there have been, kind of, plans—but that’s not really the way it’s worked.

SOCIALLY CONSCIOUS VISION

For Jack Reuler, a desire to keep a social leader’s dream alive compelled him to start a theater. Utilizing its status within a community service organization also allowed him a feasible financial vision from the very start. Jack, founder and artistic director of Mixed Blood, says: “I started the organization right out of college. I’d gone to college intending to be a veterinarian, and somehow [Mixed Blood] helped me to take a left turn—a great left turn.

A childhood icon of mine was always Martin Luther King, and seven years after his death was when I decided to start the theater, at a point when the civil rights movement was at its lowest. When I was at school, I had a job with a social service organization called the Center for Community Action [in Minneapolis], which was to seek out needs in the community and set up programs to meet those needs. There was this community theater, Theater in the Round, it’s called, which is still the primary community theater in the Twin Cities. They did a production of The Great White Hope, and Ernie Hudson (Ghostbusters) played the lead. The show was quite successful, but then there was a financial issue. Ernie said, “If I’m going to keep doing the show, and I’m going to keep playing the lead, then I need to be compensated for my efforts.” The media took up on it, interpreted it to be a racial issue, and the public actually started sending Ernie money.

In retrospect, I really do think it was about money, but the point that was certainly revealed, to our area, through the media, was that there was an absence of opportunity for the professional theater artist of color to make a living. As I was thinking about who I was politically, and as a twenty-two-year-old, this showed me an impetus. I said, “Here’s what we need to do: try to find a home for Martin Luther King’s vision onstage, where we can create a world not necessarily as it is, or was, but how we want it to be, as viewed through that lens.” That was the impetus for the organization, and why I come to work every day.

I was actually a senior in college when the Ernie Hudson event came up, then sat down and laid out what the theater was going to be. Really, for the first four years, it was a program at the Center for Community Action. From the time I decided to start the theater until we did the first show, it was just me. No staff. By being part of the Center, which was pretty much a fledgling organization, I had what little support there was from there—a typewriter and a bookkeeper, who handled the whole organization including our program.

In terms of finances, it was 1976 and the $30,000 budget that we had came from three primary sources: CETA, a public employment program; Bicentennial money; and the Jerome Foundation. I think those three sources made up 100 percent of the budget. We did six or seven shows, and everybody got paid, right from the beginning. Other than board membership, we’ve had very little volunteer effort.

That first summer, we had a company of twenty-three, which as I remember was ten African Americans, six Native Americans, seven white. We worked three shifts, nine to twelve, one to five, seven to ten, every day. Working the show, rehearsing the show, working tech.

EXPLORING YOUR IDENTITY THROUGH ARTISTIC EXPERIMENTATION

Corey Fischer’s desire to learn more about his own ethnic culture actually begot one of the country’s most exciting alternative theater companies, the Jewish Theatre San Francisco. That interest, plus a background in the intriguing world of experimental theater, got a company’s juices flowing. Mr. Fischer says of the company’s early days:

When we started, for me it was a natural evolution based on a number of experiences I had had in the two or three years prior—experiences with other experimental, or you might say, alternative theater companies. Working in New York with Joe Chaikin, and at the same time, being increasingly curious about and interested in all the aspects of Jewish culture that I had not grown up with—out of that mix came a desire to do some work in theater from a Jewish perspective, not really knowing what that meant. Theater for me has always been a tool to explore and discover rather than a place to simply plug in ready-made assumptions.

Naomi, Albert, and I had known each other for a number of years in various contexts. Naomi and I had done a lot of theater together. Albert at that time was mainly a musician, a singer, and a songwriter. I had seen his work and admired it. So I asked the two of them to join me in creating a piece. I didn’t realize we were starting a company.

We were working on a particular piece based on a series of legends that I had found. Albert and I performed, and the three of us cowrote. I also made masks and puppets. We spent about nine months working on that, and opened it in March 1979, at a church in Santa Monica called the Church in Ocean Park. It was very progressive, and somewhere along the way, it became clear there was a whole world that we wanted to continue exploring.

On our first trip to New York later that year, we got an incredible review from the Village. We were performing at Theatre for the New City in their old space, when they used to be on Second Avenue, and had a wonderful response from both audiences and critics alike. That kind of launched us. There was no initial financial vision. If we had thought about that, we probably would never have gotten started.

A VITAL VOICE

Gil Cates accomplished legendary work in virtually every aspect of the entertainment media.

As a film producer and director, he guided the Oscar-nominated films I Never Sang for My Father and Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams, plus directed and produced numerous award-winning TV projects with esteemed actors such as Faye Dunaway, Christopher Plummer, and Natalie Wood. Adding to his illustrious reputation, Mr. Cates served two terms as president of the Directors Guild of America and produced fourteen Academy Awards shows. This winner of seventeen Emmy Awards was not just astoundingly talented, however—he had a deep desire to give back. A committed thespian dating back to his college days at Syracuse University, Mr. Cates founded the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television, serving as its dean from 1990 to 1998; his efforts to expose his students, and the city of Los Angeles as a whole, to top-notch, original performances led him to found the Geffen Playhouse in 1995.

From day one, Mr. Cates recognized that his theatrical voice and sensibilities could truly resonate throughout the community. He first immersed himself in the local theater sc...