From Wednesday’s Wapo (free link):
American theater will always exist; only its forms will change. And the currently dominant nonprofit model is neither necessary nor even traditional. It’s a very recent invention. In the early 1960s, the Ford Foundation began funding regional theaters with a dual mission: to make theater available to audiences outside New York, and to provide artistic homes for playwrights, directors, actors and designers. A few years later, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) stepped in to boost funding. In 1965, there were 56 nonprofit theaters; by 2000, there were 340 — six times as many.
These losses and many others have inspired renewed calls for the government to save America’s nonprofit professional theaters. What strikes me about these calls isn’t that they’ve been sounded time and again to no avail. It’s that there are still people who believe that these institutions — struggling in cities big and small across the country — should be rescued in their current form.
That’s not to say that the government shouldn’t fund the arts. Of course it should, especially in times of profound crisis such as these. Art is a vital national concern: It gives us meaning, the food of the soul. And we’re going to need well-fed souls in the years ahead. But too many theaters have ceased to serve this function. The closings, cancellations and plummeting ticket sales — only worsened by the pandemic — attest to that. Theater leaders should read the writing on the wall instead of continuing to beat on a closed door.
. . .
darryll k. jones