Hold your horses
Long Wharf Theatre’s new model is rooted in tradition
Legend has it that William Shakespeare got his start in show business by holding the horses of patrons who rode to the theater. If true, that precedent should warn against assigning overqualified company members to deal with issues of parking. Even after Shakespeare got promoted to actor and playwright, his company still faced three vexing challenges related to audience accessibility — location, location, location.
In 1597, after an epidemic had shut down all of the London theaters, the lease ran out on the company’s original venue, which was remotely situated anyway. Rather than continuing to pay the exorbitant rent to stay at an awkward site, it went mobile.
It amped up the practice of bringing shows to new audiences in a variety of local venues scattered around the city and beyond. It performed in pubs, palaces and colleges. “Comedy of Errors” and “Twelfth Night,” for instance, played in law school auditoriums.
The company also opened two new hub locations, one across the river (called the “Globe”) and the other in a found space nearer to downtown.
The business model ultimately made it the most successful acting company of the period. Otherwise, it is like the dramatic poet
who was its erstwhile equestrian valet, “not of an age, but for all time.”
What’s the takeaway from this history? Theater must honor its traditions, one of which is dynamic change.
Long Wharf Theatre is an inspiring success story of the regional repertory theater movement that came into prominence 60 years ago.
Looking back on that movement, Peter Zeisler, who co-founded the Guthrie Theatre in 1963 and created the League of Resident Theatres (LORT) in 1966, asked: “Has there ever been such a radical change in the form and structure of the theater in so short a period of time?” (Spoiler alert: There hasn’t.)
Far-seeing young artistic directors like
Jon Jory proffered a transformative vision of decentralizing the American theater from
New York and bringing it to smaller cities like New Haven. He and others across the country saw a diversity of potential new audiences in underserved communities and regions.
Assisted by grants from the Ford Foundation and the newly created National Endowment for the Arts (founded in 1965, the same year as LWT), those communities responded with subscriptions and donations. They saw the future, and it worked: In 1961 there were 23 such theaters operating nationally; today, there are more than 1,000.
Now young visionaries (and some older ones,too) see the future at work in new opportunities to decentralize and diversify.
That future includes new audiences from communities within the city or the region itself. Pursuing an array of new strategies toward that objective under artistic director Jacob Padrón, Long Wharf Theatre seeks to create “revolutionary partnerships, artistic innovation and radical inclusion.”
Knowing from theatrical history that partnership, innovation and inclusiveness flow from readiness to welcome change, who will want to say now: “Hold your horses”?