Last Friday, Seattle Repertory Theatre made a major internal announcement, informing staff of a significant structural overhaul that will eliminate seven jobs—six full-time and one part-time—before creating three or four new ones. (Different sources at the Rep give different numbers—but they agree that at least one of the new jobs will be part-time.)

This comes one year after the hiring of Jeffrey Herrmann, who replaced longtime managing director Ben Moore. "It's hard in the short term, it's no fun in the short term," Herrmann said in an interview yesterday. "But we're trying to set the theater up for success in the long term."

The biggest changes are hitting the Rep's education department. All three of its full-time positions will be cut, making way for two new positions: a director of education (who will oversee the remaining youth programs, such as the student matinees and the August Wilson Monologue Competition) and a "community engagement coordinator" to expand the Rep's outreach to Seattle-area adults. Herrmann also said the theater plans to create new fundraising positions in its development department.

Woolly Mammoth Theatre in Washington, DC, weathered a similar transition—including the scuttling of its education department in favor of a "Connectivity" department—back in 2009, two years after Herrmann was hired as its managing director.

The first reactions in Seattle's theater community could be emotional—not least because the Rep's education department had been run by Andrea Allen, a beloved and longtime local director (she once led Annex Theatre), who passed away in 2012.

But the changes bring up tough questions: If the state won't adequately fund arts eduction in public schools, is it up to nonprofit theaters to fill the gap? If a theater's primary goal is to find great work and put it on stage, does that trump its education projects?

And if a theater's long-term health is at stake, what responsibility does it have to students—who don't tend to buy full-price tickets, don't buy subscriptions, and don't write checks?

Sarah Meals, the Rep's public relations manager, says the Seattle Rep is not in financial distress—"we're not on fire by any means"—and hadn't planned to publicly discuss these changes. But reporters started calling.

The long-term strategy, Herrmann explained, is to invest more in the Rep's onstage work, marketing, and consumer/community development.

"Produce astonishing art, market the hell out of it, create a family out of those ticket buyers, and reach out to different constituencies and potential ticket-buyers," he said. "The education department, as originally constituted, was focused on youth... We're dead as a field and dead as a theater company if we stay in the arts bubble. We have to be relevant and present to everybody's life in Seattle." He mentioned the Public Theater's "Public Works" program—in which the theater partners with health and human services organizations—as a potential model for the Rep's new community-engagement strategy.

Kristen Jackson, connectivity director at Woolly Mammoth, said she wasn't at the theater when its education department was eliminated in 2009, "but I know that it was not a decision that was taken lightly. It was difficult."

Woolly Mammoth focuses on new plays—ones in which, as Herrmann put it, "people would get naked, swear, and do terrible things to each other"—and what was happening on stage didn't have much to do with the theater's more traditional education programs.

The way Jackson explained it, the connectivity department sounds like a combination of education and audience-building with three components: "audience design" (trying to attract demographics relevant to a given play), events (discussions, poetry slams, yoga sessions, trivia nights), and "interactive lobby experiences" (a play involving incarceration, for example, featured a lobby game about life after prison).

"The point," she said, "is to find ways to personalize the theatergoing experience."

Herrmann said that the changes at the Rep are "not about cutting—this is about taking resources from one area of the theater and investing in another part of the theater." The net loss of jobs, however, is undeniable.

"We're planning to see more money coming in our doors and going out our doors to staff and artists," he said. "It's a complicated message. We'll see the fallout over the next couple of weeks."