State of the Arts: Theater
by Marianne Combs
Minnesota Public Radio
December 21, 2001

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Minnesota is nationally and internationally recognized as a theatrical center. While it continues to grow in size and diversity, many theater professionals say there are many things Minnesota could do to further improve the theater scene.

	Barbara Berlovitz performs the role of Medea at Theatre de la Jeune Lune in Minneapolis. Jeune Lune has a reputation for performing challenging works that engage the audience at every level, whether it's acting, staging, costumes, lighting, or sound. Photo courtesy of the Guthrie Theater

Theatre de la Jeune Lune is rehearsing Mozart's opera Cosi fan Tutte. Artistic Director Dominique Serrand has just returned from a trip to Paris, and he's feeling inspired to make exhilarating theater.

"What makes an exhilarating piece of theater? Well, it's when the talent on the stage is fantastic, it's when the imagination is extraordinary, where the text is irrelevant and relevant at the same time, where the experience that we walk into is not just for a few of us but for all of us," says Serrand.

There are several ways to judge the health of theater in Minnesota: There are the artists—Are they making a living? Are they getting the training and financial support they need to do their best? There's the audience—Are enough people coming to see theater? Who are they? There's the quality of the theater—Are theater companies producing creative, entertaining, challenging work?

Guthrie Theater Artistic Director Joe Dowling says Minnesota theaters could always use more money, but overall he's pretty happy.

"Of course there are things we can do better, and we ought to do them better," he says. "But I suppose it's a difference of seeing this glass as at least half full and heading toward the 3/4 mark and worrying if we're not absolutely full we're not fulfilling our destiny."

Dowling has good reason to be optimistic; the Guthrie is set to break subscription records this season. It's also on its way to building a new Guthrie complex with three stages on the Minneapolis waterfront. Guthrie shows get regular press coverage and the theater enjoys community support. But it's a different story for most other theaters.

Director, dramaturge, and publicist Sarah Gioia has her hands in many projects. She has to in order to make ends meet. Most of her jobs are with small theater companies, which she loves.

"Not to be cliché, but size doesn't really matter—some of the really big places put out really bad work, and some of the smaller places put out amazing work," says Gioia.

Gioia says the number and variety of theater companies in the Twin Cities amaze her. She points to two she works with regularly, Fifty Foot Penguin and the Directors Theater. She says because of their size, neither could survive in New York. Unfortunately, she says, the large number of small companies in Minnesota creates a venue crunch, particularly for smaller, cheaper, spaces.

"It's just too bad that you have to be spending your money on space—which is sort of the least interesting part, often, of the process," she says. What I would love is more places that are 350 to 500 instead of 500 to 1,300 a week just to open it up to more people."

As with most things, the bottom line is crucial; companies struggle to manage the business—funding, marketing, producing. The Minnesota Fringe Festival tries to act as an incubator for small theater companies. The Fringe provides the marketing and space new companies can rarely afford. But Executive Director Leah Cooper says she wishes there was a better way to teach the nuts and bolts of running a theater.

"Universities could do more to produce fledgling producers and directors in the business of theater," she says. "Many students come out understanding acting and set design, but they don't understand the financials—there's a shortage of producers and directors to take hold of the big picture."

Cooper moved to Minnesota just a few years ago from Los Angeles. She says the L.A. theater audience is drawn from a narrow section of the community. Theatergoers in California tend to be wealthy, highly educated, and older.

"In Minnesota, it's everybody—our own audience demographics show an even distribution of all age levels, all income levels, all educational backgrounds. I can have a conversation with my plumber or doctor about a show they saw last weekend," says Cooper.

Across town, at the Playwrights Center, Executive Director Carlo Cuesta agrees.

"It amazes me that, in 2000, 2.3 million theater seats were filled, and we have a population of 2.9 million in the metro area. I mean it just amazes me—a large portion of the population that lives in the greater Twin Cities area went to the theater in 2000. And that's because the work is diverse; that's because the work has meaning for those people," said Cuesta.

The Playwrights Center works with over 250 playwrights in Minnesota, helping them to develop new dramatic works for local and national audiences.

	The Guthrie Theater, first opened in 1963, it is credited with almost singlehandedly inspiring a surge in regional theater nationwide. Now to expand its performance space and better serve its audiences the Guthrie is launching a campaign for a new theater complex on the Mississippi waterfront. Image courtesy of the Guthrie Theater

Pioneer Press theater critic Dominic Papatola says the Minnesota scene offers audiences a remarkable variety of shows and performance styles. He says this breeds competition, and there aren't enough local avid theatergoers to fill all the seats.

"Aesthetically I think the Twin Cities theater company is doing just great," he says. "But if I could wave a magic wand, I would just try to make more people interested in theater. I just wish people would decide that, 'Know what? The worst piece of theater is still way better than seeing Temptation Island II.' " Papatola says if he could do anything for the theater scene he'd make audiences feel a sense of ownership for theater companies the same way they feel ownership for sports teams.

"I just wish people would get as incensed about the possibility of a theater closing down as they do about the possibility of a ball club owned by a billionaire getting contracted—whatever the hell that means," says Papatola.

The sports analogy appeals to Neal Cuthbert, director of arts programming for the McKnight Foundation in Minneapolis. He feels the way to get more people interested and involved in the theater is to improve coverage by the media. He says you do that by making the arts section look more like the sports section.

"The arts infrastructure is exactly the same as the sports infrastructure," Cuthbert says. "And, if you look at the coverage in the sports section, it's thorough, it's compelling, it's engaging, it's energetic, it's exciting, and it's because there are all these people that are involved with it. There are just as many people involved with the arts."

Cuthbert would like to see an arts section featuring daily commentaries, profiles of theater at the high school, college, and community level. Cuthbert says many Minnesotans don't realize that the breadth of its theater extends well beyond the Twin Cities.

Minnesota Association of Community Theaters board member John Skaalen estimates, of the approximately 400 theaters in Minnesota, only about 150 are in the Twin Cities. And, he says, many of those theaters in greater Minnesota are doing wonderful work, like the Commonweal Theater in Lanesboro, the Paul Bunyan Playhouse in Bemidji, the Grand Marais Playhouse, and the Duluth Playhouse. But he'd like to see local businesses and banks around Minnesota collaborating with the local theaters to help fund and promote their work. This would free them from worrying about filling the house, allowing them to try challenging their audiences with new theater.

"For me that's where it's really at, that's where the actors are learning, and that's where the audience is being really pushed, too, to be faced with ideas that... maybe they don't entirely agree with or maybe they hadn't thought of before. In the theater, that's where... you see a dancer flying through the air in a different kind of lighting—'Oh, my word! Where did that come from? Who had a dream like that?' And it turns your imagination on," says Skaalen.

But the hard reality is dreams can be hard to turn into a living. Acting can be a risky business. Guthrie Theater veteran Sally Wingert says she's happy to have had regular work over the past 20 years.

"I'm 43. I have a son in high school and another son that's finishing up his elementary school years. I'm married, I own a home, I have a car, my husband has a car, we live a very solid middle-class life. That in and of itself is testament to the fact that you can make a living at theater in the Twin Cities," she says. "Is it as stable as other professions? No. Am I still always looking for the next job? Yes. But I figure there's this sort of trade-off—security versus absolute joy," says Wingert.

Wingert says she's never seriously considered leaving Minnesota to try acting elsewhere. She says it's partly because Minnesota is home, but also because there are so many different theater companies that allow actors to try different things.

"The down side of that is that some of the most experimental and perhaps most challenging work pays squat and so if you've got rent and food to buy and gas to put in your car you have to figure out this compromise and my solution is: Let's fund the hell out of the arts," said Wingert. "You know I'm still agog that we are so miserly with the arts in this country—we just hear these lavish tales of other industrialized nations giving scads of money to their arts organizations. Why did that happen in America? That we insist that the private sector take care of all of this?"

Wingert would like to see the state supporting theaters.

"I can hardly afford to go see theater that I'd like—I can't imagine people that are on a tighter income coming in and seeing what we do. We need to lower ticket prices and we need to subsidize it. Everybody should be able to come."

There are privately funded programs providing subsidized or even free tickets to schools and other groups. But back at the Playwrights Center, Carlo Cuesta says he's worried by changing trends in corporate support. Some corporations have pulled back their giving, or decided to focus funding in other areas. Some local companies have become part of national conglomerates unlikely to continue past support of local arts. Cuesta says Minnesota risks losing a lot if it doesn't support and nourish its artists.

"I'm very concerned that we are not thinking as progressively as we could and I don't just mean that within the theater community I mean that of our leaders. I'm very concerned that we're not a growing community we're a community that has grown and matured. I think if we're not careful we will lose our artists, because somewhere along the line the Minnesota miracle would have disappeared."

The week before Thanksgiving 2001, the city of St. Paul launched its Raise the Curtain campaign, encouraging Minnesotans to buy tickets to see shows in St. Paul. Organizer Jeff Nelson calls himself the "St. Paul Arts Guy." Rather than subsidizing the arts, he'd like to see more collaborative efforts, like the Raise the Curtain campaign, that help theaters to reach audiences.

"We spent a relatively small amount and got a large return, using resources in a way that creates a synergy between government and arts organizations. I think that's what we need to be doing because it's going to be really hard to squeeze more tax dollars out of the state and local government, just because everybody is going to be belt-tightening. So let's be creative and work together," says Nelson.

Nelson says one of the things the city is doing is making investments in venues for small theaters that will attract young theater companies to downtown St. Paul.

"Today's small theater company is tomorrow's mid-size theater company, and while 50 people coming to see one show might not have that great an economic impact, that theater could grow into the next Park Square, Jeune Lune—we would love for them to be in St. Paul," says Nelson.

Back at Theatre de la Jeune Lune, Artistic Director Dominique Serrand is still thinking about his trip to Paris.

"I was truly overwhelmed to see four very different pieces in Paris, artistically just extraordinary—absolutely extraordinary pieces in terms of everything—the ensemble, the acting, the directing, the idea ... And these were very dark pieces, and it was sold out every night—people were just amazed at what they saw. I don't have that opportunity very often here. So it's not a bad statement; it's just that that's what I want to see," says Serrand.

Minnesota can take a lot of pride in its theater. There are so many inspired actors, playwrights, and directors. But the coming legislative session may drastically reduce planned funding to arts organizations in order to make up its $2 billion budget shortfall. And with the private funders and audiences tightening their belts, it may become more difficult for smaller theater companies to survive. As Guthrie Director Joe Dowling says, when evaluating the Minnesota theater scene some see the glass as 3/4 full while others see it as not full enough. Other theater advocates say it's also a matter of preparing for the future by protecting and nurturing what we have today.