This is Part 5 of WGLT’s weeklong series The Next Shift about workforce issues in McLean County. Coming Monday: A deeper dive into the nonprofit sector and the post-COVID landscape for social service agencies.
As news of forced closures and pauses among theater companies large and small trickled out this summer, a moral panic emerged.
Editorials opining on theater in crisis appeared in Axios, the Chicago Tribune, American Theatre and many, many more. A New York Times headline said, “American theater is on the verge of collapse.”
While the pandemic can be blamed for much of the carnage at the box office, a reckoning was perhaps inevitable well before that. Aging, predominantly white theater audiences forced companies here and everywhere to ask questions about what stories and characters they choose to present. At the same time, theater workers began demanding equitable pay, anti-racist organizational practices and better working conditions.
Is the local theater economy aligning with the red-level alert happening nationwide?
No, not really. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have work to do.
Is Bloomington-Normal theater “in crisis?”
Bloomington-Normal is relatively flush with theater troupes compared to other communities this size, and has thriving local music and visual arts scenes despite the pandemic placing serious pressure on the arts and artists.
Theater organizations have arguably had a tougher road climbing back after the pandemic.
“There’s a tremendous dichotomy between visual arts and performing arts,” said Doug Johnson, a painter and executive director of the McLean County Arts Center, which distributes Illinois Arts Council funds. Johnson is also a board member of Arts Alliance Illinois.
“Visual art waits for you to arrive,” he said. “[In] performing arts, people vote with their feet.”
Another difference is the nonprofit financial structure of performing arts organizations. Galleries and music venues are more likely to be for-profit ventures, while nonprofit theater troupes, like social service nonprofits, rely on a combination of earned revenue (typically box office receipts), grants, government funding and private donors.
More than three years after theater companies nationwide were forced to cancel live performances, most have not returned to pre-pandemic attendance. The Illinois Shakespeare Festival reported higher numbers than last year, but shaved the number of performances overall. Heartland Theatre Company is still rebounding. Coalescence Theatre Project has seen numbers fluctuate based on the show. “Crowns” was packed. “This Bitter Earth,” performed last April, had sub-optimal attendance.
Johnson recalls seeing a recent production of “Bright Star” by Prairie Fire Theatre.
“It was fantastic,” he said, “but the theater wasn’t as full as it should have been.”
Many nonprofit arts organizations have found 2023 even more challenging to navigate than 2020 or the tough two years that followed.
Pausing or pivoting to online in 2020 meant fewer expenses. Donors were generous, converting tickets to canceled shows into donations and making extra one-time contributions. Emergency COVID funds made it possible to float for a year or two. In the post-pandemic landscape, foundations like the Illinois Prairie Community Foundation — who had loosened the guidelines and allowed funds to be used for general operating expenses — reverted back to program-specific grants. Underwhelming box office returns mean less earned revenue. And charitable giving as a percentage of disposable income is at the lowest point in three decades.
It's a perfect storm that has forced dozens of closures, forced delays, layoffs and post-pandemic pauses, decimating the theater job market nationwide. New York’s Public Theater cut 19% of its jobs. Dallas Theater Center cut half its staff in the last year. Some estimates predict half of the theater jobs in Chicago are gone.
That hasn’t happened here, because there aren’t many jobs to cut.
Vocation or avocation?
“We have a lot of groups who are terrific and have a long history within the community, but they’re fairly cobbled together,” said Johnson. “It’s a semi-pro team.”
Coalescence Theatre Project, Prairie Fire and Heartland Theatre Company fall under the umbrella of “community theater.” Unlike the intentionally all-volunteer Community Players, they aspire to professional-level work and pay but are unable to meet wages and other requirements determined by the professional Actors’ Equity Union. Until a few years ago, Coalescence was an entirely volunteer operation. Now, they pay stipends to the production team and performers.
“It’s not what you’d expect to get paid from a job,” said Coalescence artistic and executive director Don Shandrow. “It is something that says we value and honor your work.”
Heartland Theatre Company has operated for nearly four decades.
“The experience of being in our theater, supposedly, is the reward,” said managing director Gail Dobbins. “It has been all of these years.”
A few years ago, Heartland budgeted to pay designers and other behind-the-scenes staff. This fall, they added an honorarium for performers, too.
“Some theater people might disagree with me, but if you’re engaged in theater and you’re a theater artist of any sort, you’re not doing it for the money,” Dobbins said. “So, we try to give them what we can in terms of a discerning audience and a full house.”
“They are surprised that we’re giving them anything,” said Shandrow, who uses they/them pronouns. But they also realize that lack of pay is a barrier to participation — regardless of desire or talent.
“If you set that kind of foundation, you bring in people who can afford to do it,” they said. “The demand to give them more is on me. We want to find ways to bring in people who love doing theater but find it difficult to do theater.”
Higher pay would be one way of doing that, but Shandrow also points to outside-the-box solutions like providing childcare for single parents during rehearsals.
“There are things that are fundamentally just right for us to do,” they said. “That aren’t oh-by-the-ways or wouldn’t this be nice. They’re things that are important.”
Can the Twin Cities support a professional theater?
MIOpera and Illinois Shakespeare Festival (ISF) are Bloomington-Normal’s only nonprofit professional theaters. ISF artistic director John Stark said the seasonal festival would be unlikely to succeed year-round — and certainly not without significant support from Illinois State University.
“I don’t see the support and the structure to be able to make that happen,” said Stark.
As a program in the Wonsook Kim College of Fine Arts, ISF gains tremendous resources and infrastructure from Illinois State: facilities, human resources, staff, IT, Microsoft Office accounts — heck, a fax machine, if they want it. That means more of the private donations and grant dollars they bring in can go toward paying Equity actors, many of whom come from elsewhere for the summer and stay in campus housing.
With an operating budget just shy of $1 million, Illinois Shakespeare Festival is a relative behemoth for the region. (For comparison, MIOpera’s budget is just under $100,000.) But they are modest compared to peer festivals across the country. Oregon Shakespeare Festival, for example, has assets nearing $96 million.
Much of the difference lies in having endowment funds, which Stark says is something ISF hopes to acquire in the future. But Oregon Shakes doesn’t have institutional support like Illinois State University — and their future is currently hanging in the balance.
“While being part of a state institution sometimes slows things down,” Stark said, “it is extremely dependable.”
Potential arts dollars are flowing out of Bloomington-Normal
Like all arts nonprofits, MIOpera relies on a combination of ticket sales, grants and charitable donations. Their recent move from Heartland Community College to the Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts (BCPA) was an attempt to entice patrons with easier access to bars and restaurants, and a significant increase in production capability.
The BCPA has also picked up the pace in its in-house programming, bringing more road shows through the 1,200-seat venue as well as the larger-scale concerts coming to Grossinger Motors Arena. The two city-owned and operated venues are big business (with a combined $6.2 million budget), but have little crossover with local artists; MIOpera is one exception.
“Arts companies are bypassing Bloomington,” said MIOpera artistic director Tracy Koch.
Families will travel to Champaign-Urbana, Peoria or Chicago to see major touring shows that skip the Twin Cities.
“Can you imagine if MIOpera could sell out every show and then the national touring groups got wind of that again?” Koch said. “There’s definitely a need and an audience for what we’re doing. We have to really look at the arts here and decide what we want to see.”
City, town and state investment
Bloomington and Normal invest money in the arts through a variety of avenues — many of which more directly benefit musicians and visual artists. Normal paid $32,000 this year to musicians for Make Music Normal and Uptown Circle concerts. They provide $5,000 of support to Sugar Creek Arts Festival. The city of Bloomington pays farmers market performers from vendor fees and put $29,000 toward supporting downtown events like First Friday, Music on the Square and Slow Art Day.
Theater artists don’t easily fit into these formats — they’ve tried it.
“It’s really hard to put theater out there, to put it into the community,” Dobbins said, recalling several attempts to put mini-plays in street festivals. Dobbins suggests one possible solution is a theater festival that imitates a pub crawl, with all the theaters offering short plays on the same day.
Connie Link Amphitheatre has been a more natural fit for theater than street festivals. In addition to youth programs, Coalescence Theatre Project performed “Once on This Island” at the outdoor venue.
Additional arts dollars flow to theater from the Harmon Arts Grant, which distributed $50,000 to 22 arts organizations this year, including Heartland, Community Players Theatre, Prairie Fire Theatre and MIOpera. The Illinois Arts Council’s Community Arts Access Grant added $7,500 to McLean County nonprofits including Prairie Fire and Heartland. Those grants generally range from $1,000 to $1,500 and fund specific community-focused programs. Six of the eight organizations who applied last year received grants.
McLean County Arts Center, which distributes the grant, expects a more than 25% increase from Illinois Arts Council next year
Johnson said he’s grateful, “but it’s still a drop in the bucket.”
Corporate donors, sponsors and individual givers
Corporate donors have been elusive to Illinois Shakespeare Festival. They pursued show-specific sponsorships for the first time in the festival’s history last summer. And the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Acts reduced the number of donors eligible for tax deductions for charitable giving.
Stark said he doesn’t negate the value of individual donors making small dollar gifts to their organization.
“We have dedicated, wonderful patrons and donors,” he said. “We love every donor that gives us $20. But it takes a lot of $20 to pay an Equity actor for a summer or to build a set.”
Koch’s mission has been to help the local community realize the value of the arts as a worthy charitable cause.
“People will come to a performance,” she said, “but that’s where it ends. I think in Bloomington-Normal what we as arts organizations are trying to do is show you that a performance doesn’t just last an hour and a half. You can be involved. Until our community sees that that’s important, professional theater will not be successful.”
This is still a story about jobs
As Bloomington-Normal’s theater troupes soldier on, each desiring growth in their own way, the arts sector has the potential to blossom — if we let it.
That could produce new jobs and infuse the economy with locals and visitors looking to eat, drink, park, play and stay. Moreover, the arts make all of our lives richer and our community more desirable — our jobs, whatever they are, a bit more tolerable.
“Ultimately, we have to say, ‘What are the things we value?’” said Johnson. “Do we value authenticity? Do we value a local voice? Do we value something that provides us with a palatable and sincere, genuine connection? Theater can do that. The arts can do that. Saying we’re willing to invest in those things — that’s the connective tissue that makes our community real.”
