For members of such a low-stakes, chicken-feed industry, theater people are bizarrely resistant to speaking on the record about how and why things go wrong. It’s easier to get FBI agents to go on the record than arts administrators.
Matthew Richter, the founder of Consolidated Works, finally agreed just last week to go on the record about how and why the organization collapsed—five years after the fact. Allison Narver, who was the longtime artistic director of the much-loved Empty Space Theatre when it collapsed in 2006 (after a successful emergency fundraising campaign), still won’t go on the record. Her explanation: “I still consider the closure a major defeat. It is a deeply painful subject for me. I feel that the closure betrayed the trust of the many artists, donors, subscribers, and supporters who had given so much to us over the years. It is not a story that can be summarized quickly or in which blame can be easily assigned.”
Trying to get people to publicly explain about how and why Intiman Theatre abruptly canceled its season and laid off its staff in April is nearly impossible. I’ve spoken with staff, executive staff, much-loved former artistic director Bartlett Sher, much-maligned former managing director Brian Colburn, board members… and while they’ve mostly been willing to talk at length (the board members were the only terse ones on that list), they’re universally shy about allowing their words to be printed.
Even the official narrative of what went wrong at Intiman is hazy.
First, some background information: Intiman Theatre was founded in 1972 as “Seattle’s classics theater.” Twenty years later, it hired Warner Shook as its artistic director. He put Intiman on the national map by a) directing The Kentucky Cycle, the first play to win a Pultizer without being produced in New York first, and b) by directing the first regional-theater production of Angels in America after it won Tony Awards and a Pulitzer Prize. In 2000, Intiman hired Bartlett Sher as its artistic director. He became known for his large, majestic productions of both world premieres and classics. Sher directed shows in Seattle, New York, and Europe, and was sometimes criticized for spending too much time away from his theater. But he was Seattle theater’s indisputable star during those years. He was nominated for Tony Awards in 2005, 2006, 2008 (the year he won for directing South Pacific), and 2009, which muted the criticism. So did the fact that, in 2006, Intiman won its own Tony Award for best regional theater.
A few years later, Sher announced he was leaving and anointed Kate Whoriskey, a promising young director from New York, as his successor. The board rubber-stamped the decision (which was a little unusual, as boards tend to conduct their own national searches for artistic directors) with the understanding that Sher and Whoriskey would work as co–artistic directors for the 2010 and 2011 season so he could show her the ropes. Around the same time, longtime managing director Laura Penn announced that she was also leaving, and was replaced by Brian Colburn, former managing director of the Pasadena Playhouse.
Sher left and Whoriskey became the sole artistic director in March of 2010. Colburn suddenly resigned the following November for “personal reasons.” The theater announced it was having financial trouble. Every week, the news got worse—and it was all Brian Colburn’s fault, according to the first official narrative.
In February of this year, board president Kim Anderson gave The Stranger an interview for a story entitled “Can One Man Bring Down an Entire Theater?” According to Anderson, Colburn had completely fucked up. “I don’t know what Brian’s motives were for not coming to the board and not being truthful about the things that happened,” Anderson said. “We had significant cost overruns in a few of our shows and those expenses were not reflected in the statements that the finance committee and the board were
given—so we couldn’t address them.”
But it’s the board’s job to keep an eye on the money. I asked Anderson when the board first realized there was a problem with either Colburn or the finances.
“I cannot go into any detail about that,” she said.
Then the rumors started: that Colburn had had a personal crisis, that the board had had its own breakdown and neglected to keep track of the theater’s basic finances, that Whoriskey was incapable of leading the organization, that she was imperious, impolitic, aloof. “Sure, she can direct plays,” one former Intiman staffer on the artistic side said, “but she is childish and demanding, and couldn’t put together a season.” (Whoriskey did not reply to requests for comment by phone or e-mail.) Whisperers around Intiman alleged that the entire place was a clusterfuck—that Sher and Penn had held the place together through star power and pure will, but that as soon as they left, the whole place flew apart.
But, of course, nobody would say anything like that on the record.
Then a new official narrative started drifting out of Intiman, courtesy of arts consultant Susan Trapnell, who had been hired by the board to help it fix its problems. (Trapnell, the former managing director of ACT Theatre, is a minor legend in Seattle for saving ACT when it nearly fell apart in 2003. I briefly worked as a ticket seller and bartender at ACT during that time, before getting a job at The Stranger.) Whereas the board initially blamed Brian Colburn—and people privately and not-so-privately wondered how one guy could wreck an entire theater in such a short time—Trapnell blamed everybody.
“There is a long history of spending too much money here, and we have to change that,” she said in April, while announcing that Intiman was going to cancel the rest of its season (after only one show, All My Sons), lay off its staff, and go on indefinite hiatus. She didn’t name Sher or Penn, but said that the “long history of spending too much money” was at least seven years old—back when Sher and Penn were running the show. The failure at Intiman, she (and a few board members) said, was systemic, and had been for several years at both the board level and the staff level. “Such comments,” wrote the New York Times in a May article, “angered Mr. Sher.”
“The theater does good work,” Trapnell told me. “This isn’t a problem with bad work. But they clearly sacrificed sustainability for excellence. These things always happen with the best of intentions.”
“The best of intentions” is a phrase that’s come up over and over again. In talking to people at Intiman, Empty Space Theatre (which abruptly closed in 2006), Consolidated Works (which abruptly closed that same year), Giant Magnet (which abruptly closed this year), and On the Boards (thankfully, still open and thriving) about how and why theaters fail, they like to say it’s “always with the best of intentions.”
That makes some sense: Nobody goes to work for a theater for the money. Staff are underpaid. Boards volunteer their time. You’d think the shared love and expertise would help the staff and the board work together—but the staff/board dynamic in American theaters is legendarily thorny. Both ConWorks and Giant Magnet folded shortly after their boards suddenly fired longtime and much-loved artistic directors (Matthew Richter and Andrea Wagner, respectively). Allison Narver, who ran Empty Space Theatre for several years, is still seething with anger at the board’s decision to close the theater over a (relatively minor) cash-flow crisis in 2006.
“I am so fucking sick of Arts Boards that don’t know what the hell they’re doing,” she wrote in the comments to a Slog post about the death of Giant Magnet. “Firing Andrea was criminal. What a stupid, ignorant, short-sighted move. And now they’re closed. What a waste. What a loss for Seattle… I’m sick of seeing worthy arts organizations (ConWorks, the Empty Space Theatre, Giant Magnet, to name a few) close because of weak, scared, arrogant and/or inexperienced Boards.”
Though people publicly greeted her rage with hallelujahs (both on blogs and at a benefit for Intiman employees where she spoke on a panel), Narver later softened her statement, writing in an e-mail (in which she declined to allow me to interview her for this story): “The Empty Space Board for most of my tenure were nothing short of heroic. People gave generously of their time, knowledge, and resources.”
So why does this keep happening? Why do theater boards and theater staffs chop organization after organization into firewood by getting along so miserably? And why doesn’t anybody do anything about it? And why, for that matter, doesn’t anybody even want to talk about it?
Here’s one answer: Unless you’re looking at a theater in the middle of a major flameout, the subject is kind of boring.
Richard Linzer is a consultant who has worked with dozens of nonprofits across the country: On the Boards, City University of New York, Empty Space Theatre, Folklife, Stanford University, etc. He and I talked for a few hours about nonprofit theater, but we only got really animated when comparing notes on shows we’d both seen. “See there?” he said. “See how excited we just got when talking about performances? In the nonprofit sector, we tend not to want to be cold and rational. We don’t want to look at the cost of raising a dollar or borrowing a dollar or getting involved with appreciation and amortization. It’s the red meat that we love—the dancers and singers. For the audience, that’s why we go. But for the board, it’s a different thing.”
Too many boards, he says, don’t even know what their job is. One board member from the Seattle Symphony recently told me that her/his job is to “raise money and shut up.”
“See, no, no,” Linzer said. “The job of a board is to solve complex problems that can’t be solved by just one or two people.” Sometimes those problems are about money, he said, but they’re often about (or should be about) other functional matters as well. “In theaters, there’s a persistent pattern of boards abdicating two sorts of information. One, artistic information, which they appropriately abdicate to artistic directors. On the other hand, we find many people who love theater and the idea of theater and they abdicate financial matters to one or two board members they’ve dubbed as financial experts. They look to that expert, who takes off his reading glasses and says, ‘Everything’s fine,’ and everyone breathes a huge sigh of relief and their eyes dilate and they get on to the next matter of business.”
So one consistent problem is boards that don’t do enough until it’s too late—the Intiman Problem.
The other problem is boards that do too much—the ConWorks/Giant Magnet Prob-lem. In both of those cases, relatively new board members led campaigns against longtime artistic directors with serious institutional memory and credibility in the community and eventually got those artistic directors fired. Then both organizations, which depended far more on their artistic leaders than the boards ever recognized, collapsed.
Lane Czaplinski, artistic director of On the Boards—which is widely admired for the healthy dynamic of its board, though it’s had its share of rocky moments with past artistic staff—says organizations can avoid this problem by having serious orientations for new board members and mentorship programs, where a new board member is paired with a more experienced member.
“I don’t want to use a bad hazing analogy,” Czaplinski said, “but orientation is about making people feel like they’re wanted, but they also understand their place in the organization. If you don’t orient new board members or get them on the same page—well, it’s why fascism surfaced, right? People got lackadaisical and they weren’t paying attention and some strong personalities arrived who weren’t held accountable and things can go south really quickly. A newbie can come in and make a lot of assumptions about ‘You don’t know this’ or ‘You haven’t thought about this.’ That person comes in with the best of intentions and says, ‘We need to clean out the staff, rename the organization, and change the whole mission!'”
And that’s when things get really fucked up.
In Andrea Wagner’s case at Giant Magnet (formerly known as Seattle International Children’s Festival), she was told that she was being fired in part because the board feared that her relationship with longtime collaborator Brian Faker was too volatile, according to both Wagner and Faker. They thought that if they didn’t fire her, Faker would quit. Faker calls this a “tragic, tragic misreading” of their working relationship, which—like many working relationships in underfunded and creative organizations—was both volatile and loving. (“That’d be like some stranger coming to a Stranger editorial meeting, seeing you have a fight with your editor, and then assuming that the editor needed to be fired,” said Richter, “which is crazy.”) The board that fired Wagner never once asked Faker whether their assumption was correct. “Andrea and I are like brother and sister,” Faker said. “We have always had a volatile, but loving, relationship.”
The board (allegedly, according to yet another anonymous source) told a remaining staff member that they had fired Wagner as a “surgical strike.”
“You know,” the staffer fired back, “your analogy of a surgical strike is more apt than you know. You gathered faulty intelligence and twisted it to your own needs to invade an organization whose customs and people you don’t know the first thing about; you expected to be greeted as heroes, and, as usual, the ones who will suffer for it are the children.”
Here’s another example of the cluelessness of the Giant Magnet board: A few representatives took Wagner out of the building “for coffee” and abruptly asked for her resignation. Wagner was stunned, but remained calm. “Well, you know payroll is today,” she remembers telling them. “What are you going to do about that?”
“Oh, right, right,” she remembers the board members saying. “Um, would you come back to the office and sign the checks?”
“And it’s the end of the quarter,” Wagner added. “Do you have a plan for the taxes?”
“Uh, no,” she remembers them admitting. “Could you also come and take care of that?”
Wagner agreed to sign the payroll checks—”In 30 years as an arts administrator, I’ve never missed a payroll,” she said defiantly—but passed on doing the taxes.
As for Richter, he says he was fired suddenly after the board of Consolidated Works got worried about a former employee who had quit. Said employee would flip out from time to time (about people moving chairs without his permission, who mopped what when, garbage bags, etc.), and he and Richter had a generally stormy relationship. After one of those flip-outs, Richter decided not to talk the disgruntled employee out of quitting. And that was the beginning of the end. Guy quits, board convenes, Richter’s fired, and after lurching along for a little while longer, organization dies.
That’s no way to run a major cultural institution, is it?
The board/staff relationship is fundamentally flawed. Boards do too much or too little. They either don’t raise enough money to keep an organization going or complain that they don’t feel enough sense of participation. Sometimes the board members don’t even attend the performances of the organizations they’re ostensibly there to oversee and support. (That was a problem at ConWorks and Giant Magnet.)
Sometimes board members try to apply the lessons they’ve learned in the business world to their arts organization, typically with disastrous results. “The board is there to support us in doing things that don’t make sense in the business world,” Czaplinski said. “Putting weird art onstage is not going to make you a lot of money, but boards are there to help you do it anyway, because we enjoy it and we value it. And if we have a show with naked people onstage and the public gets riled up about it, it’s an opportunity for the board to do some arts advocacy.”
“Nonprofits are creatures of market failure, by definition,” Linzer concurred. “They’re nonprofits. But some board members try to transfer their experience in the corporate boardroom to the nonprofit boardroom, and it’s like they went to the wrong boot camp.” It’s presumed on too many boards that if you’re wealthy, you must be smart, and if you’re smart, you can tell a theater how it should be more like T-Mobile.
And that just doesn’t make any fucking sense.
So what’s the way forward? How do we avoid another preventable failure like Intiman, Giant Magnet, ConWorks, or Empty Space? While working on this story, I heard “there’s no answer” about as often as I heard “best of intentions.” Some say the nonprofit model is broken, some say the model is fine but boards just need better education, and some say regional theater is in a long decline and this board/staff problem is merely a symptom of a structural problem. The regional theater movement is less than a century old and might prove to be a failure, especially since corporate and government funding for the arts—the revenue that the regional-
theater movement is predicated on—is gone for the foreseeable future.
But we can’t even begin to answer those questions or solve those problems until we admit that we have a problem—and begin talking about it.
And we can only begin talking about the problem when people find the courage of their convictions and go on the record. 
This article has been updated since its original publication.
It seems like one big take-away from Intiman’s troubles is that while a theater can, to some extent, buy prestige (respect from the New York arts crowd, Tony awards, etc) that sort of prestige does not necessarily translate into a rosier revenue picture. Intiman received the accolades that their bloated production budgets helped “earn” them, but their income remained largely static. The accolades were not redeemable for cash.
However, for Artistic Directors, prestige does translate into a rosier employment outlook. Mr. Sher walked away with a wonderful resumé and a chance to finally work in New York full time. Whatever role he played in pushing Intiman’s budgets into the red, he came out on top.
Comte’s right. It’s not that you can’t run a theater as a for-profit business, obviously, it’s just that there’s a difference between the two. Non-profits exist to facilitate work that’s valuable for which a proper market doesn’t exist. They’re products of a market failure to provide either (a) a proper cultural outlet for a community, or (b) a risk-taking artistic venture. It’s a slightly different question whether most succeed at either due to high ticket prices/access issues, and programming choices that earn them monikers like “commercial non-profit theater,” which I rather like as a descriptive term. But there is a difference between them and for-profits. So fundamentally they have a different business-model. The question I think people should actually be asking–which I’ve tried posing various ways–is whether something like the Intiman properly served its purpose and should have been saved, or should have been let go. In the end, non-profits do have their own decisionmaking capacity, and as much as we like to argue about what one “should” do, or how a specific theater could better serve a community, ultimately the ones we’re talking about aren’t obligated to actually change. The people here who think equally valid work could have been done more affordably, with more local artists, serving the community better are barking up the wrong tree–the Intiman was likely never going to do that, but its absence could create the opportunity for one to do that again by building a replacement. Was the board going to stop hiring New York directors and instead install someone committed to Seattle? Not likely.
Its collapse creates more opportunities for the local arts community. I realize the big theaters are attractive because of their resources and existing customer base, but they’re never going to just turn those over to the local arts. Get wise, roll up your sleeves, and look at the Intiman’s demise as a vaccuum to be filled.
Comte’s right. It’s not that you can’t run a theater as a for-profit business, obviously, it’s just that there’s a difference between the two. Non-profits exist to facilitate work that’s valuable for which a proper market doesn’t exist. They’re products of a market failure to provide either (a) a proper cultural outlet for a community, or (b) a risk-taking artistic venture. It’s a slightly different question whether most succeed at either due to high ticket prices/access issues, and programming choices that earn them monikers like “commercial non-profit theater,” which I rather like as a descriptive term. But there is a difference between them and for-profits. So fundamentally they have a different business-model. The question I think people should actually be asking–which I’ve tried posing various ways–is whether something like the Intiman properly served its purpose and should have been saved, or should have been let go. In the end, non-profits do have their own decisionmaking capacity, and as much as we like to argue about what one “should” do, or how a specific theater could better serve a community, ultimately the ones we’re talking about aren’t obligated to actually change. The people here who think equally valid work could have been done more affordably, with more local artists, serving the community better are barking up the wrong tree–the Intiman was likely never going to do that, but its absence could create the opportunity for one to do that again by building a replacement. Was the board going to stop hiring New York directors and instead install someone committed to Seattle? Not likely.
Its collapse creates more opportunities for the local arts community. I realize the big theaters are attractive because of their resources and existing customer base, but they’re never going to just turn those over to the local arts. Get wise, roll up your sleeves, and look at the Intiman’s demise as a vaccuum to be filled.
There’s a reason we have the term ‘drama queen’.
Brendan, I’ll repeat this publicly in response to your reposting this thread to the SLOG and complaining that no-one would talk. A move reminiscent of your complaining that the last Shitstorm was tedious when your own moderator started it off with a two-hour argument about whether there should be a Shakespeare moratorium.
You were asking people to finger someone. And you were looking for volunteers? To go on record? At what point does this implicit idealism become just a convenient excuse for throwing up your hands and pretending these questions are insoluble?
If you really WANT these answers. If you want answers that might get people fired, shunned, sued or charged with crimes, you have to do better than leaving voicemail.
Start with Intiman’s endowment. Every endowment has rules for how the interest can be spent, and provisions for how the principal can be spent. At some point one or more people at the Intiman started spending down the principal of the endowment – something on the order of a million dollars as I understand. Who authorized this? Were the rules followed? Where are the Board minutes where this was discussed? Who was there? Who’s signatures are on those transfers? How could the Administration and Board repeatedly authorize this presumably emergency measure repeatedly, and then profess ignorance that there was a growing financial crisis?
Get a name, tell that person you’re going to hang it around their neck. Stick this threat of public humiliation in their eye until they point somewhere else. THEN you’re cooking, ’cause you’ve broken the Wall of Silence. Force them to turn on each other in desperate attempts to deflect increasingly serious charges. When the music stops, you’ll be able to write an article without following the title with a silent question-mark.
I humbly suggest that THAT be your approach. If you’re going to pursue an inquiry into something this serious, something that could end careers and result in penalties and prison, Seattle Nice isn’t going to cut it.
I’ve enjoyed your more substantive writing and would like nothing more than The Stranger to be my one-stop-shop for arts news, the latest in sexual deviancy and wrath-of-god class muckraking.
But like I said, I’ve already made this suggestion. I’m sure you have your reasons for taking a more polite tack. I offer it here as a suggestion to whomever might be interested.
Someone just suggested that my last post sounded confrontational. Goodness – wouldn’t want THAT sort of reputation.
But as an exercise here’s a more upbeat suggestion, an elaboration on the sentiment I expressed in @48 – STOP TALKING TO LOSERS.
Who the fuck cares about what the people running The Intiman think? The official party line is a mix of ignorance and genteel incompetence. At least The Empty Space was hit by an earthquake – the leadership of The Intiman had NO IDEA how bad things were until they hired Susan Trapnell. They had to raise $500,000 to afford to close.
This is like asking the back of the bus for rehab tips. What’s the point?
You spoke to Lane Czaplinski for this article. On The Boards presents some of the strangest stuff going in this city. Really, really beautiful, strange, off-putting stuff. And last I heard, they sell at something like 90% with a blend of international, regional and local art with the occasional porn screening for variety.
Write an article about THAT. Ask The Village Theatre about how their efforts are going. Ask the folks at ACT how they turned it around and how they continue to avoid a relapse.
Just STOP this post-mortem about The Intiman. It’s just an example of what happens when no-one owns the money, and everyone can just walk away when it fails. Unless it’s YOUR blood, it’s all academic and you just don’t care – not really. And they didn’t care … not really … not enough to know what was going on … not enough to keep asking when they didn’t get answers … not in time to stop it.
PPS – Turnabout is fair play, right Brendan? I mean – you keep telling me how to run a theatre.
Wow. This is all news to me (I’ve been out of Seattle for some years now).
I don’t have a lot to say other than FUCK BOARDS. I know they’re a requirement for not-for-profit status, but they sound like a giant ball ache. I think the regional theater model is pretty much fucked anyway and cry few tears over its demise; hopefully through all the necessary carnage an exciting and sustainable new model will emerge.
@47… Society is not protecting you from “my vision” of the arts… it’s protecting you from yours. Yours isn’t sustainable.
In the last two years, I’ve gone to the Village, ACT, Paramount and Redmond Second Story, as well as several smaller venues. Haven’t been to the Intiman in years. Redmond Second Story (used to be Redmond Town Rep) started strong years ago and then went through a real crisis when it got too self-indulgent too. Like it or not, you need MONEY to put on a production, and money comes directly (ticket sales) and indirectly (sponsors) through happy attendees. Your vision may be art, but not enough people want it to support it. You can have your vision of art, or you can have dinner, but probably not both.
Wow. Reading all these comments from the Theater Folks getting all bent out of shape, it’s not difficult to understand how or why they ran their theaters into the ground…
@14 Thanks for noting the board development resources out there. Seattle Works has a class starting Tuesday night for people thinking about joining a nonprofit board. So many people join not really understanding the role. Class is called “The Bridge” – Tues 6/14, 6/28 & 7/12 6-9pm. http://www.seattleworks.org
United Way and Shunpike are also great resources.
http://www.uwkc.org/partner-with-us/nonp…
http://www.shunpike.org/programs/arts-bu…
@14 Thanks for noting the resources out there for board members.
Seattle Works has a class for people considering board service – The Bridge. Next round is coming up soon Tues 6/14, 6/28, 7/12 6-9pm. http://seattleworks.org/AboutUs/index.ph…
United Way and Shunpike also great resources:
http://www.uwkc.org/partner-with-us/nonp…
http://www.shunpike.org/programs/arts-bu…
How to blow life into a out dated out performed out stimulated pastime?
web cast! big background screens for scenes! a multitude of light effects!
Republicans were wowed when W Bush’s microphone came out of the floor?
Technology they all screamed!
Its like a restaurant as atmosphere is a big first thing to overcome! then the food and service and then finding some one who is not a total jerk who would not burn down an entire city just to keep whipping a dead horse to keep feeding their kids macaroni and bologna 24/7?
the theater should be doing all age events for bread and butter and having old geezer events one weekend a month.
Anyone who liked this article should immediately go out and watch Slings and Arrows, a three-season Canadian TV series about running a theatre festival. Pretty hilarious:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387779/
SOUNDS like closed loop management that primarily concentrates on closed loop management. The lack of anybody here talking about the fucking audience speaks volumes. Really, guys melting down because of chairs and garabge bags and how to mop the fucking floor and such kiddy shit really isn’t tolerated in very many professional environments. True or not, this just serves to paint this segment of Seattle as a petty, immature, shrill, and, sadly, small hearted, bunch of figurative inbreds. Seattle stage “Artists” and “Arts Professionlas” become so concerned with who is sniffing whom’s butt and their “standing” that the forest vanishes into the tress and hubris and rot and Seattle mold soon fill the spaces, as it always will left unchecked. This is typical Seattle Arts (capital S, capital A) bullshit, creamy and putrid, and (alas) sad, as usual. it must be the lack of sunlight that creates these creatures. The fucking audience in Seattle is what is important; you know, the readers, the viewers, the listeners, the regular folks who make it ALL happen. A fucking tempest in a fucking teapot; the sound of one hand clapping. yawn, urp.
I’m really GLAD I don’t know any of these folks, they really seem like a bunch of narcissistic assholes.
Cornish has just hired a new President who was Provost–head academic officer–at CalArts. Under her reign, faculty rights/governance collapsed. No one from Cornish asked us as to her performance. The rule of thumb with art/academic institutions is: ensure management types have a safe haven. Perhaps people just need to radically deflate their expectations of what art and culture provides to society. It is amazing how afraid most people are to make a critique of aesthetic powers-that-be….
what happened to my first comment? In any case, the reason why people in the arts are reluctant to speak is not difficult to figure out: the charge of anti-professionalism is hurled at anyone who is impolite. Politeness ensures silence so that the management types can continue to change/trade positions, from one institution to the other. E.g. the incoming President of Cornish was Provost–chief academic officer–at Calarts, where faculty governance evaporated under her reign. Yet no one from Cornish asked us as to her performance: as long as the arts are privatised, even if invoking the public for legitimation, the managerial dimension will become more dominant. Control and domination always trumps reality….
This is one of the best articles on Seattle art I have yet to read. It explores bottom line issues that no one wants to talk about. Including money losing art-for-art productions, box office incomes that don’t cover costs, and the sacrificial money raised by board members.
However, this article doesn’t raise some of the deeper issues facing contemporary arts.
Art used to be to be a beacon. A lighthouse beaming light through the fog of a distant strange shore. But now, it’s mostly a social event. The art itself has become unimportant.
A big part of this problem is the “mafias” that control the arts. One of the mafias is the pseudo-Marxist art critics who value social criticism over artistic expression. Another mafia is people with sexual and racial preferences who favor each other, regardless of talent.
I know this statement will be accused of being elitist, sexist and racist. But in the arts, the reverse is the practical reality. All anyone has to do is look at attendance. A couple of plays a season about marginal situations can expand awareness. But season after season of preaching plays is going to turn anyone off.
When the social and racial agendas that are important to critics and insiders become more important than artistic expression, audiences will stop attending. And regardless of pointing fingers, that’s what happening.
In my biased opinion, the Empty Space Theater produced many of the best plays I’ve ever seen. And I lived in NYC for nearly two decades, where I went to a lot of plays, including off-off Broadway productions and avant-garde productions in the streets.
Seattle’s non-profit boards are not the problem. It’s the content of the art. A brilliant play and a few good actors, with low-budget production, will always pull an audience.
Bottom line: for theater, if there’s no audience, or the costs exceed the draw, it’s bad art. The proof? The Bard was able to get his big points across in crowd-pleasing cost-effective productions.
Obviously, he didn’t have to compete with TV and movies. But contemporary theaters have to. So work harder. Say what the media can’t say. Take full advantage of the opportunity. And then we’ll come to the show.
@67, @70, etc: Anybody who thinks the problem is that nobody came to see shows at the Intiman is just dead wrong. Also, any and all references to the “good old days” of theater (‘The Bard was able to blah blah blah) are just idiotic. Theater was a popular entertainment form before television. Any examples culled from that era are apples-to-oranges. Finally, as to the “I’m really GLAD I don’t know any of these blah blah blah” type comments: So sorry to hear we won’t be enjoying your company at the theater, asshole. Enjoy staying home with your fritos and porn!
I’m speaking only as someone who attended one performance at the Intiman Theatre, yet had experienced Bartlett Sher’s directing ability through the Idaho Shakespeare Festiveal plays he directed several summers in Boise, Idaho. Because of his reputation, I decided to purchase a ticket to see All The King’s Men, a musical version, no less, a few years ago even though I was not excited about the play itself. I was wanting the Intiman experience. The Barlett Sher experience. Imagine my horror when the play started and one of the first musical numbers used the “n” word again, and again, and again. I looked around the audience to see if anyone else were as stunned as I was, and many were, but I was angry enough to get up, leave the theatre, and demand my money back, more as a means of notifying theatre of my displeasure than anything, although the cost of the ticket was not inconsiderable. I was told to contact the managing director at a later date, so I did. I received a very unsatisfactory response, esentially telling me that I was a hick (a misrepresentation of someone who has attended plays in such “rural” settings as London, Paris, Rome, Stockholm, Milan, LA, and San Francisco) and for not understanding the artistic integrity involved in choosing to use the “n” word. I was told that there had been community outreach by the Intiman Theatre to reach consensus with the use of the “n” word. I realize that theatre should challenge audiences and often break down barriers to understanding, but in this case the only challenge was to remain seated.
I’m speaking only as someone who attended one performance at the Intiman Theatre, yet had experienced Bartlett Sher’s directing ability through the Idaho Shakespeare Festiveal plays he directed several summers in Boise, Idaho. Because of his reputation, I decided to purchase a ticket to see All The King’s Men, a musical version, no less, a few years ago even though I was not excited about the play itself. I was wanting the Intiman experience. The Barlett Sher experience. Imagine my horror when the play started and one of the first musical numbers used the “n” word again, and again, and again. I looked around the audience to see if anyone else were as stunned as I was, and many were, but I was angry enough to get up, leave the theatre, and demand my money back, more as a means of notifying theatre of my displeasure than anything, although the cost of the ticket was not inconsiderable. I was told to contact the managing director at a later date, so I did. I received a very unsatisfactory response, esentially telling me that I was a hick (a misrepresentation of someone who has attended plays in such “rural” settings as London, Paris, Rome, Stockholm, Milan, LA, and San Francisco) and for not understanding the artistic integrity involved in choosing to use the “n” word. I was told that there had been community outreach by the Intiman Theatre to reach consensus with the use of the “n” word. I realize that theatre should challenge audiences and often break down barriers to understanding, but in this case the only challenge was to remain seated.
@74 – he means Norwegian
@45 – as a “full-time pendant” where do you hang at the university?
@too many to count – I am SHOCKED that so many arts’ world people do not know “it’s” from “its”
@Brendan Kiley, reporter – this article is a sausage. It was absolutely delicious to ingest but I am wary of knowing how it was crafted.
Carry on.
Brendan, you inspired me to finally share what I would like to see happening over at Intiman:
http://seattlest.com/2011/06/15/open_let…
Have a lot more detail kicking around my head, but figure people can only listen to so much of my rambling.
Awful article. People do not trust you, Brendan Kiley, to represent them fairly, that is why they will not go on the record with you. Let’s keep Narver, Faker, and Wagner out of this, leave them alone….As a private donor to 15 arts organizations in Seattle last year (mostly the small and mid-sized groups) and a board member myself, I am sick of the blame the board comments. These people support the arts in so many ways.
I recommend reading ‘Third Sector Management, The Art of Managing Nonprofit Organizations’ by William B. Werther, Jr. and Evan M. Berman. It should be required reading for all new nonprofit board members, and might have prevented two nasty hostile takeovers in non-arts nonprofits I used to belong to. No organization is immune from conflicting egos, poor communications, differing goals, economic fluctuations. What might work in for-profits can destroy the cohesion of a non-profit. Business management techniques have to be applied in a measured fashion so they don’t run roughshod over the quirkiness that inspires and drives a group.
This requires cooperation and humility as well as ambition. It was a ‘surgical strike’ that killed the goose that laid the golden egg.