Critic’s Notebook: Southern California’s nonprofit stages take a commercial turn

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What’s good for institutions isn’t always good for the arts they’ve been built to serve. Veteran theater critic and Yale Drama School professor Gordon Rogoff wrote about this paradox in “The Management Game,” a 1981 essay that confirms the old saw about the more things change. …

The thrust of Rogoff’s argument is that “to be nontraditional in art is also to be nontraditional and even improvisational in organization.” Yet the resident theater system that’s been devised to allow the theater to flourish as an art form inevitably ends up servicing its own structural interest. ‘The result,’ he argues, ‘is plain to see by now: buildings too costly to maintain, many of them inflexibly designed and run by a team of managers devoted to selling subscriptions...”

All of this describes our current situation perfectly, yet the observation that seems particularly prophetic is the one Rogoff makes about the blurring of commercial and nonprofit interests: “In short, the big federal, state and private money was going to not-for-profit theaters that were expected to hold their own in a profit-making world. They didn’t have to make money at the box office, but they had to behave as if they did. At every stage of creation, organization, and management, they had to reach certain prescribed levels of success.”

This hit-making mentality has been taken to a new level in recent years, and in a critic’s notebook in Sunday’s Arts & Books, I challenge the leaders of Southern California’s most prestigious nonprofit theaters to rethink the current Broadway-or-bust mania and to recall the values on which their institutions were founded.

Ideals may be bad for business, but theater managers can stand regular reminders of them as they attempt to reconcile bottom-line reality with theatrical dreams.

-- Charles McNulty