Chris Jones: What happened to theater in Chicago?

CHICAGO — In March 2019, a group of Steppenwolf Theatre leaders gathered at the offices of Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill, an internationally renowned architecture and design firm that had designed the Jeddah Tower in Saudi Arabia and the 120-story Wuhan Greenland Center in China. Not coincidentally, the firm had also worked on The Yard theater at Chicago Shakespeare, a $35 million project that opened in 2017.

They were hardly the first globally famous architects to work with a Chicago-area theater. In 2016, Writers Theatre in Glencoe opened a $28 million theater, designed by the renowned architect Jeanne Gang and located in a leafy suburb with a population of just 9,000 people; Writers had made its bones in the back of a bookstore but the Gang commission was announced at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Steppenwolf was spending more than $54 million on its new theater-in-the-round, a 50,000-square-foot expansion including classroom and rehearsal spaces. Gill said he and his firm had “approached the project in the way that you’d think about a play.” “The ultimate idea,” he said at the time, “is that there will now be a village of architecture at Steppenwolf that works as a full ensemble.”

Like the projects it succeeded, Gill’s eloquent words reflected a formidable level of ambition. Three new, world-class theater buildings with a cumulative total cost of $117 million! Chicago theater, it seemed at that moment, was seeing an inestimably thrilling explosion of growth.

But the landscape of the Chicago, and the broader American, theater, has changed so much since 2019 it is almost unrecognizable.

Both of Steppenwolf’s top leaders in 2017 — artistic director Anna D. Shapiro and executive director David Schmitz — are no longer with the company, which reports it has since lost some 20% of its subscription audience. Neither is Writers Theatre artistic director Michael Halberstam. Nor are Chicago Shakespeare executive director Criss Henderson and artistic director Barbara Gaines. In fact, leadership at top Chicago nonprofit theaters has almost all changed over, almost all at once.

Meanwhile, Victory Gardens has gone dark in all but name, leaving the previously restored Biograph Theatre as an empty eyesore in a prime location. The Royal George Theatre, a long-standing venue with a clutch of differently sized spaces, is being redeveloped for condos. Stage 773, once a storied off-Loop venue known as the Theatre Building, is now a bar and art exhibit. The much-admired Lookingglass Theatre, which operates in a rent-free space on storied Michigan Avenue, has put out an existential SOS. Even the beloved Midnight Circus, which has toured Chicago’s parks with eye-popping talents, says it is now “out of options” to continue.

The House Theatre of Chicago has gone dark. So have, since that day in Gill’s office, such theater companies as the 16th Street Theater, Akvavit Theatre, Aston Rep Theatre Co., Awkward Pause Theatre, Black Button Eyes Productions, BoHo Theatre Company, Broken Nose Theatre, Brown Paper Box Co., Chicago Theater Works, Chicago Mammals, Dog and Pony Theatre, Eclipse Theatre, the longtime First Folio, GayCo Productions, Gorilla Tango Theatre, Interrobang Theatre Project, Irish Theatre of Chicago, The New Coordinates, Provision Theater, Quest Theatre, Red Tape Theatre, Refuge Theatre Project, Right Brain Project, Route 66 Theatre Company, Side Project Theatre, Sideshow Theatre, Stockyards Theatre Project, Strange Tree Group, Underscore Theatre Co., Vitalist Theatre, Waltzing Mechanics, WildClaw Theatre and the Windy City Playhouse, the last of which used to run crowd-pleasing shows for months at a time. This is not even a complete list.

All over the city, albeit with some exceptions, theaters have been weighing the pros and cons of letting their difficulties be known without looking like they are asking donors to throw money at a lost cause.

On June 30, Lookingglass announced it would reduce its full-time staff from 24 to 10 employees and pause programming until at least the late spring of 2024. The number of shows, and the length of their runs, have been reduced almost everywhere. Steppenwolf has slated no mainstage shows between Dec. 3 and March 14, 2024, once its peak season (a spokesperson says guest programming likely will fill those spots). Court Theatre’s 2023-24 season features just four Chicago shows running for little more than three weeks each after opening night, a far cry from the theater’s heyday. With that limited potential gross, the theater has to support its full-time staff. Even if it sells every ticket and extends, its income prospects have become limited.

How did we get here?

These are Chicago’s most famous theater companies, replete with Tony Awards and long records of artistic brilliance. What the heck happened?

Firstly, this is a national problem. Theater is struggling everywhere.

Job losses and programming pauses have been reported at such illustrious institutions as Oregon Shakespeare Festival (Schmitz made his exit earlier this year after leaving Steppenwolf), Center Theatre Group in Los Angeles (which canceled a previously announced season) and, most recently, Theatreworks Silicon Valley (which recently said it needed at least $3 million just to stay afloat).

Second, Chicago has lost a lot of theaters because it had a lot of theaters to lose.

In a city like this, known for the youth of its artists, some churn has long existed as artists move away and the companies they founded fade away with them. But that clearly doesn’t explain the bloodbath of the last four years.

Beyond that, the answer to the question of what happened is, to put it mildly, a bitterly contested space. But the panic is real.

Part of the issue here is the complexity of America’s theater landscape, as mirrored in Chicago. Companies run the gamut from nonprofit, community-oriented, avowedly anti-capitalist organizations with fundamentally social missions focused on political change, to high-cost commercial operations in the very capitalist business of producing profitable live entertainment. Often, their needs are divergent. And the former typically is contemptuous of the latter.

Where the audience is

Theaters have become fond of phrases like “the audience is not yet back,” and blame also has been attached to the purported loss of the theatergoing habit during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as audience members’ newfound preference for in-home streaming.

There is some truth there. High-quality TV shows like Hulu’s “The Bear” have made inroads with the former theater audience. Painfully for the theater, the massive improvement in TV mostly has flowed from theatrically trained writers and actors, who then compete on the opposing team on an unfair playing field. One widely acclaimed episode of “The Bear” even featured a chaotic and traumatic family dinner party, not far removed from a strikingly similar scene in Tracy Letts’ iconic Steppenwolf play, “August: Osage County.” Although “The Bear” is centered on a restaurant and chefs, it often has felt like its true gestalt was Chicago theater; it featured similarly intense acting and drew from themes that Chicago playwrights have been writing about here for years. For less reward.

When Letts wrote “August: Osage” in 2007, Steppenwolf had that aesthetic space to itself; now it has new competition. Adding to these woes, the domineering rise of team-written, long-form TV has made audiences more impatient with exposition: it’s more relaxing to watch characters you already know have their Season 5 adventures than to have to get to know a whole new crew who may or may not appeal.

“Not yet back” may be overly optimistic. There is evidence audiences are very much back at live entertainment, just not at most nonprofit theaters. The concert giant Live Nation posted record-breaking revenue of $3.1 billion in the first quarter of this year — up 73% from the same period last year — with nearly 20 million tickets sold. Concerts are very much back, and more than just Taylor Swift. People got out of the habit of flying, too, but leisure airlines have had a record-breaking summer. Restaurants mostly have recovered and have raised their prices to boot.

Many have called for more government support for theaters, even though the arts received historic amounts of public funding during the pandemic (by typically dismal U.S. standards, at least), an infusion that does not appear to have helped long-term. In most cases, the money has already been spent, often on keeping administrative staff employed. For those with explicitly social missions, such as working with resource-challenged young people, a strong argument can be made for public support. But it’s tougher for mainstream institutions coping with a sudden lack of demand.

What’s on the stage

Recent years have also been a time of great social and cultural change. Demonstrably, audiences have rejected much of the post-pandemic programming, which has focused on ideologically similar plays. Progressive artists see these shows as essential acts of both diversification and political necessity — and fair enough, artists deserve such freedoms. But they often have been stymied by the consumption of theater being a stubbornly voluntary act, and by attendees not being the audience they hoped to reach.

Similarly, a rhetorical war has been waged against older audiences and retirees, open-minded and politically liberal as most of them would claim to be, whose gray hairs have traditionally occupied many seats. They have both the time and the resources to engage with the existential questions theater asks, or used to ask. Many theaters look past the actual age of their audience, serving up plays about problems that people over 40 typically regard as transient, because, as one ages, the head turns to matters of mortality, as Shakespeare well understood. Younger audiences have proved especially hard to reach not least because nonprofit theater can be reluctant to engage with popular culture.

Writers with what are now riskier points of view have largely been excised from the theater. If Second City lampoons Joe Biden, it is with kid gloves on — a huge change from the apolitical satirical creed central to that theater’s original mission. To produce the outspoken conservative (and household name) David Mamet in Chicago now would take courage.

Only occasionally have theaters taken their cue from “Barbie,” a movie that shrewdly turned the kind of massive pre-awareness that makes engaged people go to the movie theater into an opportunity to deliver a feminist message to a warmed-up and receptive audience.

Subscription question

There are other pressing issues. Most Chicago theaters still operate on an outdated business model: years ago, the late Danny Newman of the Lyric Opera preached the gospel of subscription seasons, multi-ticket packages that ensured patrons came back several times a year. But those were the days before variable pricing and easy resale, when subscriptions were the best deal ever to be available in the marketplace. Today, patrons know cheaper tickets will be on offer before showtime. Subscriptions, as they were once understood, are nearly dead in the water.

Theaters know this — they just have to read their falling subscription numbers — but they find it daunting to free themselves from the seasonal model, even though it means they have to close hit shows, and keep failed ones running. The Goodman Theatre hit this problem with “The Who’s Tommy,” which was grossing record-breaking numbers, but had to make way for actor conflicts and previously scheduled programming. Compounding this problem, theaters typically produce seasons of shows that are often aimed at different demographics, meaning each then has to be marketed to a new group of people.

Arts coverage

Chicago is relatively well-served by arts journalists, at least as compared with most Midwestern cities. But there is no question that the decline in local newspapers hit American theaters hard.

Twenty years ago, a potential audience would happen upon a review when reading a print newspaper. These days, arts coverage has both lessened and become more tightly channeled, even in Chicago. There is no shortage of online material for superfans of the theater, or for Broadway geeks looking for gossip, but people have become much harder to reach.

Anger made public

But the problem least talked about, is that this famously supportive and compassionate industry has allowed what once were internal disputes, such as debates over hiring, programming and the allocation of scarce resources, to spill over into the public sphere.

Anger over compensation is intense. In the Washington Post, writer Monica Byrne recently took the atypically successful Milwaukee Repertory Theatre to task for paying its artistic leader $273,843 — a nice salary, for sure, but by point of comparison, striking writers and actors have been noting Hollywood executives who each make more than $27 million a year for a job that hardly is 100 times more work, or reflective of 100 times more talent and experience. In essence, Byrne’s widely shared article calls for an end to the nonprofit theater’s high-cost flagships.

“Instead of a world in which you pay astronomical prices to see another tired revival from the mezzanine,” she wrote, “imagine there are a dozen theater cells in your area, performing new work in backyards and parks and city squares and empty storefronts.”

Such halcyon language is appealing, but those “tired revivals” that people are supposedly watching from the mezzanine are now mostly apocryphal. They’re actually rarer than new work and the ticket prices are usually the same.

And why is it that these sentiments rarely are expressed in other art forms? You don’t typically read of community orchestras, or local musicians, calling for an end to, say, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Rather, they revere its long-standing excellence.

Not only have theater leaders been attacked in public, sometimes by attackers who are themselves questionable, so have nonprofit boards of directors, volunteers who are bound by laws in their roles that detractors rarely acknowledge. These posts are far less desirable now. Yet for all their imperfections, board members typically are a theater’s biggest individual donors.

Fierce competition

By no means can all of the problems be laid at theater’s own door. Big tech has made home entertainment immersive, audiences struggle now to turn off their phones (a real problem), and new competition, not least from theatrically savvy bars and restaurants, is everywhere. TikTok serves up seemingly free content that precisely matches a consumer’s subconscious desires; no theater can (or would) target like that. And younger audiences often come with less arts education than previous generations and thus less of an immediately shared language.

There also are success stories and theaters bucking the trend. Hit shows at all levels and loyal audience members are still there. And, for sure, negativity can be self-fulfilling.

Getting back together

It’s clear that the relationship between institutions and the freelance artists on whom they rely must be healed. And that’s going to be hard.

Most U.S. theaters (unlike major orchestras and many European companies) don’t permanently employ actors or designers and often have no more than one director. Thus freelance, unionized artists feel only limited loyalty to institutions and are free to raise their voices in opposition to them, as many have. Moreover, compensation for these theater artists historically has been poor in Chicago, to say the least. This is a systemic problem; that $117 million that went into new buildings could, after all, have gone into artists’ salaries.

Except, of course, that is not how the real world works. New buildings are more appealing than operating expenses, both to public and private funders. That’s why Lookingglass is able to renovate its space even as it struggles to afford to program anything there. (It’s also why we have new stations yet few trains.)

From its conception, the regional theater movement was organized around artistic directors and artistic homes: one well-paid, talented person whose taste and guidance was thought able to lead an entire community. These leaders often sought new buildings, which became markers of achievement in an industry where permanence inherently is elusive.

The best artistic directors have been justly beloved, allowing artists and audiences to participate in the unfolding of a great, decades-long vision, wrought alongside partners and changing with the times. But younger artists have now resoundingly rejected that model, a consequence in part of the nation’s broader ideological and generational splintering. And while you can do theater without buildings, you cannot do it without artists.

Simply put, the theater has to face these uncomfortable truths and sort itself out internally before it can expect to thrive again. That requires some drastic change from what has of late been a rudderless Chicago theater community, lacking in bold, public-facing leadership. One helpful model is the restaurant industry, which has a powerful lobby and typically presents a united front to its customers and the politicians on whom it relies for help. Chicago theater now needs to focus more on its audience, both present and aspirational.

For their part, though, those who have long loved Chicago theater now have to decide how much they value what has been one of the city’s greatest assets and reason itself to choose to live here. There is much on the line. And greater attendance would help, to say the least.

One truth above all else calls for support, tolerance and understanding on all sides. Long characterized by passion, dedication and commitment, Chicago theaters were hit hard by a pandemic that unleashed chaos and trauma and that no one could ever have predicted.

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