Reinvented Actors Theatre debuts with ‘A Steady Rain’
Theater doesn’t get much more strippeddown than “A Steady Rain.”
The 2007 play by Keith Huff is about two Chicago cops telling different versions of the same horrific story. All the piece really needs to come to life onstage is a couple of ace actors and a pair of chairs.
“I think I let Anthony add a table,” says Actors Theatre artistic director Matthew Wiener, referring to Anthony Runfola, who directs the company’s season-opening production.
The back-to-basics drama is a perfect vehicle to introduce a reinvented, refocused and leaner Actors Theatre to its audience, which has come to expect quality productions of contemporary work with a bit of an edge. “Off-Broadway — Just Downtown” as the company’s slogan has it. Performances of “A Steady Rain” begin Friday, Oct. 25, at the Playhouse on the Park in Phoenix.
Nine months ago, Actors Theatre, one of only a half-dozen professional theaters in the Valley, was on the verge of shuttering. Already on thin financial ice, it had just learned that two charitable foundations would not be renewing grants that had totaled an average of more than $200,000 a year.
“That is what pushed the board to decide, ‘Do we close, or do we pause?’ ” managing director Erica Black says.
The board members voted to pause. That meant canceling the remaining two shows of the season and laying off six staffers, leaving only Wiener and Black. As the skeleton crew, they arranged the company’s exit from its headquarters in a vintage house in downtown Phoenix as well as from its costume
To call these changes a restructuring would be a massive understatement. This is more like razing a building and designing one from scratch. Yet Wiener and Black are upbeat about the future. While acknowledging that the company has let go of some important assets, they are focusing on the opportunities to evolve, both at a philosophical level and in the nittygritty details of how they do business.
“One thing we’re trying to put more time and energy into is understanding our core base and talking with them differently,” Wiener says. “We’re trying to have a little bit more — not transparency. More
For starters, he explains with tongue only slightly in cheek, “When people call to buy tickets, I talk to them.”
For the 2013-14 season, Wiener has planned four shows in four venues. Meanwhile, he and Black are searching for a space to renovate into a new home, an “adaptive reuse” project that they envision as a thrust stage, with the audience on three sides, for a more intimate experi- ence than a traditional proscenium theater.
That goal represents Actors Theatre 2.0. Consider the current vagabond season as the beta test. And there are a lot of new business practices that need testing.
The magnitude of the transition is starkly clear in the financial numbers.
In its last full season, Actors Theatre’s budget was $1.1 million, down from a high-water mark of $1.7 million in 200506. For 2013-14, it’s planning on about $630,000.
The cuts were painful for a company that prided itself on providing a living wage to artists, such as a costume-shop manager who now only gets contract work on a show-by-show basis.
Yet, every cloud has its proverbial silver lining.
“It was tough to have to cancel shows,” Wiener says. “But the response we got from the community was tremendously energizing. … We never really had a way to integrate volunteers into our operation, and we’re discovering all sorts of people with different gifts.”
Leaving Herberger
Leaving the Herberger Theater Center might have been the biggest decision of all. Owned by the city of Phoenix, the venue is a brand name in itself, giving an instant boost to ticket sales, and has top-flight technical capabilities, including lighting, sound and fly systems.
On the other hand, rent and labor costs at the Herberger were more than double what Actors Theatre will be paying at such venues as the Playhouse on the Park. Moreover, now the company will be able to tap into secondary revenue streams such as box-office fees and beer and wine sales.
“In business there’s all this distance between the product and the customer, and that’s a lot of people making money in the middle,” Wiener says. “So we’re trying to bring Actors Theatre closer to the patron.”
The split with the Herberger wasn’t just momentous for Actors Theatre. The venue also lost a major source of income, says David Ira Goldstein, artistic director of Arizona Theatre Company, one of two remaining resident troupes there, along with Center Dance Ensemble.
“It’s bad for the Herberger, it’s bad for Arizona Theatre Company,” Goldstein says. “There was nothing I loved more than going downtown to the theater and seeing two buzzing audiences in the lobby. As Greg Falls, my mentor from ACT (A Contemporary Theatre in Seattle), liked to say, ‘Theaters are like grapes. They grow best in bunches.’ I’ve always found that to be true of any thriving theater town.”
Even so, count Goldstein among those who think Actors Theatre will thrive under its new business model with a smaller footprint.
“Actors Theatre has a strong mission and a strong vision,” he says. “They are devoted to literate plays and exciting theatricality. People in the Valley don’t have a doubt about what kind of plays, what kind of values, what kind of professionalism to expect from Actors Theatre, and that’s not dependent on place.”