By Bob Abelman

Providence-area professional theaters have fared better than most in terms of surviving and rebounding from the pandemic.

The arts were decimated in the wake of COVID-19. Since the initial shuttering of venues in March 2020, it has been reported by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics that over 1.4 million arts related jobs nationwide were lost. And according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s Small Business Pulse Survey, arts, entertainment, and recreation enterprises are among the most likely to take longer to recover from the pandemic due to the in-person nature of their programming.

“To non-theater lovers,” wrote actor Joel Grey in an opinion piece in The New York Times shortly after the worldwide outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, “lamenting the closing of Broadway in the face of so much widespread suffering may seem, at best, frivolous. But for many of us, this tragedy has been made that much more devastating by having to face the nightmare without the laughter, tears, and sense of community that a night in the theater delivers.”

Since the shutdown, Broadway has nearly bounced back to pre-COVID levels.  The total gross for the 2022-2023 season reached nearly $1.6 billion, which is a marked improvement from the previous two seasons but still below the pre-pandemic total of $1.8 billion in 2018-2019, according to new data from the Broadway League. Attendance reached 12.3 million, above the previous two years’ totals but also below the 14.8 million in 2018-2019.

But elsewhere, particularly among the nation-wide network of professional non-profit theaters, too many permanent closures have been announced and numerous attempts at reopening were stalled by Delta and Omicron variant surges.  And this year, as most theaters offer a full season of productions for the first time since the pandemic, there have been significant layoffs at New York City’s Public Theater and Dallas Theater Center among others, pauses in programming at L.A.’s Mark Taper Forum and Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre Company to name a few, and emergency fundraising at theaters that include Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Westport Country Playhouse.  Off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway theaters are also struggling, with ArtsJournal citing the combined effects of smaller audiences, shifting philanthropic patterns, rising wages and costs, and labor shortages.

A balancing act

Providence-area professional theaters have fared better than most in terms of surviving and rebounding from the pandemic.  Local artistic and executive directors, who have been interviewed for this article, credit several factors.

One is that Providence-area theaters were particularly proactive in their pursuit of financial assistance to stay afloat during the pandemic.  In 2021, for example, many obtained a piece of the $16.25 billion Shuttered Venue Operators Grant (SVOG) that was established by Congress late last year.  Others were fortunate to get a PPP (Paycheck Protection Program) loan and some money from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities, and the Rhode Island Foundation.

But the most significant factor, suggests Trinity Rep Executive Director Kate Liberman, is that the local theater scene is “a well-balanced artistic ecosystem.” A variety of professional venues – including a provider of Broadway shows on tour, a Tony Award-winning League of Resident Theatre (LORT) member, companies that can accommodate Equity contracts for cast and crew, and a few small, scrappy houses where everyone in front of and behind the proscenium arch gets some payment or share of the ticket sales – coexists here.

Many have been a part of this community for years, which is another contributor to their survival.  Trinity Rep – the above mentioned LORT company – was first established in 1964 and Warwick’s Gamm Theatre – a mid-sized company operating out of “larger and larger garages,” notes Artistic Director Tony Estrella – is enjoying its 39^th season.  They help anchor a sense of stability within the local theater community that is often hard to find elsewhere.  Although there is no centralized, downtown cluster of theaters – like Cleveland’s Playhouse Square, Chicago’s Loop, and Boston’s Theater District – the Providence Performance Arts Center (PPAC) has been bringing theatergoers downtown for more than 45 years, which has no doubt fed other area theaters.

Interestingly, many of these theaters’ movers and shakers, including Burbage Theatre’s Artistic Director Jeff Church,  graduated from a theater program at the University of Rhode Island or Rhode Island College.  Some, including Gamm’s Estrella, went through Brown University/Trinity Rep’s graduate conservatory training program.  Others, such as Mixed Magic Theatre’s co-founder Ricardo Pitts-Wiley, were past members of Trinity Rep’s company.  As such, they tend to have their fingers on the pulse of Rhode Island/New England sensibilities, program their seasons accordingly, and look to hire locally for their productions.

Despite its relatively small size and homegrown brain trust, the Providence-area theater scene is artistically diverse and offers something for everyone.

“We do epic stories in an intimate space,” notes Estrella, with Edward Albee’s masterful three-act play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? up next (Jan. 25 – Feb. 18) at the Gamm.

Church recognizes Pawtucket-based Burbage Theatre Company’s brand as the area’s “irreverent theater company,” which has been “telling compelling, socially relevant stories” for the past 12 years.  Case in point: Stephen Adly Guirgis’ The Motherf**ker with the Hat – a “high-octane verbal cage match about love and addiction,” says Broadway.com – has been scheduled for later in the season (May 23 – June 16).

Says Providence-based Wilbury Theatre Group’s Founder/Artistic Director Josh Short, “our productions reflect a hearts-and-bones passion, biting humor, brave experimentalism, and signature idealism.”  They are also inspired by the collaborative process demonstrated by their namesake, the super rock group The Traveling Wilburys, where the likes of Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Tom Petty, and Roy Orbison put aside their respective egos to focus on the collaborative process of making art. This will be on display in Wilbury’s next production, Taylor Mac’s shyly subversive black comedy Hir ​(Jan. 18 – Feb. 4).

According to its mission statement, Trinity Rep provides eclectic, bold, and original theater intended to “reinvent the public square with dramatic art that stimulates, educates, and engages our diverse community in a continuing dialogue.”  Its upcoming production of Orlando Hernández’s La Broa’ (Broad Street) is inspired by the history of the Latinx community in Rhode Island (Jan. 18 – Feb. 18).

South Kingstown’s Theatre by The Sea’s long-term success and ability to survive and recover from the pandemic, notes owner Bill Hanney, is grounded in a full summer stock line-up of classic Broadway musicals – a known and highly popular commodity.  This season opens with one of the longest running shows on Broadway, A Chorus Line (May 29 – June 22).

While Theatre by The Sea offers Broadway classics, the Providence Performing Arts Center “shares sparkling Broadway gems” – the most outstanding and brilliant shows to have been staged on Broadway in recent years – says J.L. “Lynn” Singleton, President and CEO of PPAC.  Moulin Rouge: The Musical is currently on stage and runs through Dec. 31.

Pawtucket’s Mixed Magic Theatre was founded in 2000 and presents a season of three plays during six months of each year.  The creed of the company has always been “First think diverse” with an emphasis of staging works by and with artists of color for audiences of color. The performance space was undergoing repairs during the pandemic, reopened briefly in 2021, and it is undergoing repairs once again.  It is hoping to begin a new season of shows, says Artistic Director Jonathan Pitts-Wiley, in early 2024.

Teatro ECAS, under Francis Parra’s artistic direction, is the premier Latinx theater in New England, presenting classic and contemporary works by Hispanic playwrights in Spanish with English subtitles. Two plays were in rehearsals when COVID hit: La Dama Duende (The Phantom Lady) by Pedro Calderone de la Barca, and Soltero, Casado, Viudo y Divorciado (Single, Married, Widowed and Divorced) by Roman Sarmentero.

Billed as a captivating play about magic and destiny, La Ternura (Tenderness) by Alfredo Sanzol, has been announced for later this season (March 21-31).

 Compromises and new considerations

Survival is one thing but post-pandemic sustainability is another.

Across the country, rising costs are a top concern for theaters, according to survey results from the national organization Theatre Communications Group.  “Labor and materials are affected very much by inflation,” said Teresa Eyring, executive director of the TCG. “There’s also just an increasing need to make salaries and wages more competitive perhaps than they have been, because there’s been an enormous amount of transition in the theater field.”

All Providence-area theaters that make their own art share this concern and feel the pain.  Now more than ever, it is essential that they get rears in the tiers by maintaining the subscription base they have cultivated over the years and attracting show-specific audiences to their doors.

Thus far, these theaters report that subscription levels have been down compared to before the pandemic, but they have been rising every year since.  General attendance has been down as well, with too many subscribers and more casual theatergoers still hesitant to return to live theater.  Only Theatre by the Sea and PPAC, with their lineups of Broadway musicals, seem to be pandemic proof in this regard, though PPAC Director of Marketing P.J. Prokop reports that many productions that went on tour before the pandemic hit are no longer in play due to the attrition of talent and the rising cost of production and transportation.

“Since the pandemic,” notes Trinity Rep’s Liberman, “our biggest competition has not been our friends at [local theaters]; it’s been Netflix and Hulu, and we need to find art that is compelling enough to get people off their couches to see it.”

Trinity Rep’s response was opening its 2023-2024 season with two shows in repertory with the common theme of the Salem witch trials, made popular by Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.  They were Talene Monahon’s The Good John Proctor and Sarah Ruhl’s Becky Nurse of Salem.  And this year’s A Christmas Carol, a long-standing holiday tradition, was adapted with the pandemic in mind.  Says Stephen Thorne, director of this year’s production, “I just feel like after the pandemic, we cannot get enough joy. The joy in this play is not the kind of thin, instant gratification joy, but the kind of actual joy that comes from the beauty of living.”

Other Providence-area companies aimed at being more cost efficient. Some, like Wilbury, are scheduling fewer plays coupled with pay-what-you-can ticket prices to inspire attendance.  Others are offering plays that require smaller casts and limited sets, such as Burbage Theatre’s BLKS by Aziza Barnes. Theatre by the Sea is hoping to bring back shows cancelled in 2020 for which sets have already been built.  In 2021, they briefly brought back Mamma Mia!

Several theaters reopened with gripping, royalty-free original works written by local or in-house playwrights, including Gamm’s A Lie Agreed Upon (a timely rewrite of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People) by the theater’s artistic director Estrella, Teatro ECA’s Impacto Desproporcionado, by the theater’s artistic director Parra, and Mixed Magic’s A Kwanzaa Song by the company’s co-founder.  “Local playwrights, local actors, and local themes will pretty much be our focus in 2024,” says Mixed Magic’s artistic director Pitts-Wiley.

Some theaters have also begun changing their show times. Shows that previously started at 8 p.m. often begin now at 7 p.m. or 7:30 p.m. in an effort to entice older audiences back to the theater and to make working conditions better for theater artists.

In addition to productions, many area theater organizations provide community outreach and educational programming and several administrators said participation is back to pre-pandemic levels. PPAC, for example, offers Disney Musicals in Schools, ARTS Showcase, From Books to Broadway, Next Stop BROADWAY®, and others. In addition to the general educational benefits for students, the programs pay teaching artists, expose families to area theaters, and hopefully inspire the next generation of theatergoers and theater artists.

Moving forward

As theaters continue to adjust to new realities, there are now new opportunities to discuss collaborations that include sharing resources like scene shops, engaging in nontraditional ways of supporting each other such as bartered cross-promotion in playbills, and engaging in creative partnerships with each other and with the immediate community that allow for greater risk-taking.

“During the pandemic,” says Wilbury’s Short, “we did all kinds of crazy stuff rather than shut down”  The company engaged in outdoor productions in collaboration with WaterFire Arts Center, who had the outdoor equipment, and did productions in collaboration with local drive-in movie theaters where audiences in their cars could watch live performance with large-screen projections and listen to the audio on their radio.  “Coming out of the pandemic,” adds Short, “we are reminded to remain innovative and connected to the people around us.”

In this spirit, Trinity Rep could form some kind of promotional or pragmatic collaboration with Teatro ECAS  regarding its upcoming production of Orlando Hernández’s La Broa’ (Broad Street), which draws from the true tales of Latinx Rhode Islanders who have made this place their home.  Other area playhouses could reach out to currently stageless Mixed Magic Theater and offer a performance space to help kick-start their return to live theater.

The new year offers new production opportunities as many vintage plays and musicals enter the public domain, which means they are no longer subject to royalties.  They are also open to repurposing, remixing, revision, and reinterpretation without approval of creators’ estates, so local theaters can imbue them with their unique brand of irreverence,  brave experimentation, community engagement, and diversity-first staging.

In short, local theaters can come together and engage in conversations in ways they have not had historically or with any frequency as an industry and as a community.  Nothing says “seize the day” better than a worldwide pandemic.

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Bob Abelman reviews Providence-area theater for The Boston Globe and Motif magazine. He is the former theater critic for the Austin Chronicle and the author of two theater-centric fictionalized memoirs, All The World’s a Stage Fright and its sequel, Murder, Center Stage.