After months of meetings and forums, letters and counter letters, a little public complaining and a lot more clandestine bitching, Seattle Fringe Theatre Productions (SFTP) has finally made an ultimatum: If it doesn’t get $120,000 by January 15, America’s oldest continuously producing fringe festival will close forever. Now everyone’s looking for someone to blame.
Fringe artists–who have only been paid 10 percent of what SFTP owes them from 2003’s Seattle Fringe Theatre Festival–have demanded the resignation of board president R. David Persson, saying the current board mismanaged the festival’s finances. Fringe insiders, on the other hand, are mumbling that past staff and board members are to blame for making solid artistic decisions at the expense of financial viability. (For example, the new FringeACT Festival cost more than it made, and moving the regular fringe festival to September–a move The Stranger also advocated–attracted excellent touring shows but significantly hurt attendance.) Others point to ACT Theatre, saying its budgetary black hole devoured grant money intended for FringeACT in 2002, leaving co-producer SFTP with a fatal financial burden.
Still others say that SFTP is simply the victim of a nasty confluence of events–bad economy, falling attendance, evaporating grant money, and increased expenses. “The organization could have handled any one or two of these problems, but all of them in the same year was too much,” said Kibby MacKinnon, who served as executive director of SFTP from 1998 to 2001. “This has always been a fragile organization that could so easily be knocked into a rut.”
Whatever caused SFTP’s fall, it’s clear that communication problems and misunderstandings have injured efforts to keep the organization afloat.
An open letter from fringe artists, for example, states that “SFTP is part of the Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals… [whose] box office money is never part of the sponsoring organization’s budget. The money belongs to the artists.” Holding the Seattle fringe to Canadian standards–where, by comparison, the arts are showered in a gold dust of government and corporate sponsorship–is unrealistic.
So is firing the board president. While the catharsis of a symbolic decapitation has its value, there just isn’t enough time to find, train, and incorporate a wealthier, more experienced president. “I’m doing everything I can to pay the artists,” said the much-maligned president Persson. But people don’t want to throw money at a sinking ship. From the beginning, SFTP should have clearly articulated its plan for saving the organization using facts, figures, and anecdotes. Now it’s probably too late. “I understand the anger and the frustration out there–it should be there,” said SFTP executive director Andrew Haines. “But we have to keep looking for solutions.”
At this point the biggest solution is finding money. Since the SFTP crisis became public, the organization hasn’t received the donor money it needs to stay alive. Things are tough all over.
“Making theater right now is as hard as I’ve ever seen,” said MacKinnon. “It takes everything everyone has to give–expecting any less is fairly foolish.”
