For the first time in its 60-year history, Chicago’s off-Loop theater scene is shrinking. As someone who has worked in that scene for 43 of those years, I have this to say: Good.
Six decades of mostly boom years are a terrific track record, though the road has had bumps. The ambitious amateur theater scene of the 1960s blossomed into the 1970s Chicago theater movement. Successful theater that launched in the middle of that decade finished it with budgets trending toward seven figures, permanent spaces that accommodated audiences of 200 and subscription rolls in the thousands. When St. Nicholas Theater, pillar of the community since 1972, closed in 1981 because it overspent on a Christmas show, it was a shock but didn’t indicate a broader problem.
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In the 1980s came a wave of small theaters that would for the most part remain small: producing on stages the news media would compare to postage stamps, with seating capacities of only 100, and subscription rolls — if any — topping out in the low to mid-100s. Here was born the problem that underlies every problem Chicago theater currently faces: Since the ’80s, the number of companies in town has grown exponentially while the audience has grown only incrementally. In the mid-1990s, the edifice cracked. In a two-year span, a significant number of leaders in the community expired: Wisdom Bridge Theatre, Remains Theatre, the Body Politic Theater, National Jewish Theatre and Candlelight Dinner Playhouse.
[ Column: What happened to theater in Chicago? ]
These theaters were midsize in the true sense; their budgets were, very roughly speaking, halfway between the smallest and largest of Chicago’s not-for-profit theater companies. This collapse of the middle widened a gap among theaters, between a relatively stable number of large companies with multimillion-dollar budgets and a constantly churning larger number of small companies with more or less delicate financial situations. In the decades since, few theaters have bridged the gap and grown from tiny operation to large institution. You could count them on one hand: Chicago Shakespeare, Writers Theatre, Lookingglass.
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For the last decade or more, new theater spaces in Chicago have been likely to have fewer than 50 seats; several stop at 35. Right up to the pandemic, the number of theaters in town kept growing, while the size of new ones shrank.
This simultaneously robust and fragile scene was knocked flat by the 18-month shutdown necessitated by the pandemic; two years later, it still struggles to regain its footing. Theaters numbering in double digits have closed, some of them large. What to do?
What’s true in baseball is true in life. The way out of a slump is to focus on the fundamentals and keep playing. The important fundamental in this case: Stop blaming the audience. “The audience isn’t ready to come back,” theaters say, along with: “Subscription is a dead business model.” Evidence is clear that audiences are back at most in-person attendance events; in the case of not-for-profit resident theater, potential patrons choose to remain potential. Audience members are doing their job — deciding whether they wish to attend.
How did theaters break their bond with a crisis-affected percentage of their audiences? First, upon reopening, theaters worried people wouldn’t come. Many instituted loose COVID-19 policies so they wouldn’t have to turn anyone away: You must be vaccinated, unless you prefer to claim a religious or medical exemption, or if you have a COVID-19-negative test result that can be days old and therefore meaningless. These policies kept audiences away; theaters with strict policies — show us your vaccination card or you don’t get in, period — saw attendance increase.
Second, many theaters chose to program preachy shows that lectured about racial justice and other perfectly admirable causes, theatrical equivalents of diversity, equity and inclusion training. Audiences voted with their feet and went to other shows. Having failed to assure audiences that their venue was safe and having programmed plays that made the audience feel attacked, theaters concluded that low attendance was caused by online streaming and that declining subscriber rolls must reflect a flaw in the subscription model.
Not every theater made both these mistakes, of course, and the picture is more complex than a brief analysis can capture. But there’s underreported anecdotal evidence that plenty of off-Loop theaters remain in good shape. (Full disclosure: The theater where I work, City Lit Theater Company, is one of the anecdotes. We had a strict COVID-19 policy, and we continued to program the range of stuff we always do; our overall box office is up 25% compared with pre-pandemic figures, and we’ll have more subscribers this year than we had last.)
[ Roche Edward Schulfer: It is essential that not-for-profit and commercial theaters begin to work together ]
Chicago audiences are still here, and it is possible for a theater company to rejuvenate its bond with them. Has your budget shrunk by 35%? Figure out shows you’d like to do that you can produce with 65% of what you used to have, and get busy.
More theaters will close; many that don’t will be strengthened. To use hypothetical numbers, 100 theaters that each fill up 150 seats is a healthier theater scene — more able to pay real salaries, certainly — than 250 theaters that each only fill 60. “Que sera, sera,” the old song says, and what has always been true about theater in Chicago remains true today: It will be whatever Chicago’s theater artists and audience combine to make it.
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Terry McCabe is producer and artistic director of City Lit Theater Company.
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