Thinking aloud about the future of theater
When I was creating this website (August 2023), theater was in freefall, imploding before our eyes, or in crisis depending on where you got your news. Theaters were closing across the nation, reducing or canceling seasons, laying off staff, or undertaking emergency fundraisers. Arts consultant Amy Wratchford announced in the pages of the Washington Post that “by this time next year, I think the industry will shrink by half.” Non-solutions were offered: a government bailout and a massive increase in the NEA budget, begging audience members to come back in order to “support the theater,” or reconsidering the business model. Monica Byrne, in a Washington Post op-ed provocatively entitled “Why theater (in its current form) does not deserve to be saved,” called for a few practical changes—fund artists directly, and scale back staff members to make theaters much smaller — and was promptly attacked for pitting artists against staff, and just being a bitter meanie in general.
It soon became clear to me that the focus would, as always, be on how to maintain the status quo rather than reimagining a new tomorrow. This is because most theater people are simply unable to imagine an alternative to the nonprofit model that, apparently, they believe had been carved on stone tablets by William G. Baumol and William Bowen back in 1965. It was like trying to have a conversation with religious fundamentalists about alternative interpretations of God.
I’ve created Theater Skunk Works as a way of bypassing the True Believers. In business, a skunk works is “an often secret experimental laboratory or facility for producing innovative products.”
That’s what I hope to do here.