Day Four at the LCT Directors Lab

Today's highlight was a ninety-minute talk with Bernard Gersten, the executive director of Lincoln Center Theater. Bernie has worked in the theatre for fifty years, as a sweeper, carpenter, stage manager, associate producer, you name it. He had a long tenure at The Public with Joe Papp before assuming the leadership of Lincoln Center Theater with Gregory Mosher. (The current artistic director is Andre Bishop, who will talk with us next week.)

Gersten is a pragmatic man who loves life and loves his job. The LCT doesn't really have a mission beyond "be excellent" and Bernie navigates his world with slogans like "fuck it, just do it" and "chaos within reason."

Here are what I consider his points worth noting and that reflect his way of thinking.

He said that both commercial and the non-profit theaters have roughly the same success rate financially, i.e., that 80% of productions lose money. In both types of structures, producers intend to produce plays that people want to see, and that most audiences don't care which is which. The difference between the two worlds is that in the commercial theatre world, success is measured financially and in the non-profit theatre, success is measured artistically. This is not to say that money doesn't matter in the non-profit theatre, but that it is (and should be) philosophically peripheral to the organization's intent.

As readers of this blog probably know, most non-profit theaters offer fixed seasons that they sell to subscribers in advance each year in order to raise a "float" of money with which to begin each fiscal year, and to develop audience loyalty. Gersten noted that one result of this model is that being a subscriber means having a social identity as such that may have little to do with the theater's programming. He and Mosher strategically rejected the subscription model when they began in 1985. Mosher felt like he had been the victim of subscription seasons at the Goodman in Chicago, which he ran before moving on to LCT. He didn't want to run a theater where, in the lobby, a man would say to his female companion, "What are we seeing tonight, dear?" That is to say, he wanted to run a theater in which the audience all really wanted to be there on any given night to see that particular play.

So instead, LCT has a "membership" model to help attract audiences (like the RSC and the RNT in Britain, and like museums and public radio in a way). Members pay a yearly membership fee which gives them the right to buy highly reduced priced tickets in advance of everyone else. When they started it was $10 per year and $10 per ticket. Now it's $50 and $40/$50. The membership fees raise a much smaller "float" for the theatre than a subscription model would, but affords LCT the opportunity to extend the runs of plays that prove popular with audiences, since they don't have to move on to the next play "in the season."

LCT's first extended run happened with John Guare's "House of Blue Leaves" when it was moved from the 300-seat Newhouse to the 1000-seat Beaumont to Broadway. Since LCT can (and has) improved their box office results through extended runs, their earned-to-unearned income ratio is roughly 68%/32% which is very high in the non-profit world. But it affords them the opportunity to follow their artistic instincts more freely. If LCT did not extend the runs of shows that sold well, Gersten said that ratio would be about 50/50. (I did the math, and that 18% difference in the case of LCT would be about five and a half million dollars that they would otherwise have to raise each year.)

LCT has produced on Broadway and even at Brooklyn Academy of Music in order to keep shows running in its own space when necessary. Apparently, some people have objected to this from time to time. Gersten said that like the British Empire, Lincoln Center Theater is wherever they say it is (!)

He said that actors enjoy working in a repertory format when it happens (as during the three-play Stoppard cycle Coast of Utopia), but that they "don't mean it" when they say they want to do that permanently. [Though, it is clear that the current success of South Pacific may make another COU-like, ambitious repertory project possible in the future.]

At Lincoln Center Theater the board of directors (required by law of public charities who pay no taxes) plays no role whatsoever in show selection; it is the sole responsibility of the artistic director. There's no "artistic advisory committee" of the board, which is true of some institutions. Gersten said that Andre Bishop makes artistic decisions by instinct and experience, by which I assume he meant to imply that Bishop did make artistic decisions in response to outside pressures. The board's only jobs are advocacy and fund-raising.

He thinks the Vivian Beaumont is "the best" theater in the country because it is a thrust stage (which is the most natural way to listen to a play), accommodates 1000 people (which means you can sell alot of tickets), and still feels intimate (only 20 rows).

He said not to underestimate the role of luck in success. "Luck and smarts." He spoke of the current big production "South Pacific" being lucky in that it deals with (and this production highlights) race relations during World War II at a time--now--when an African-American may become President. He feels that this has struck a chord and that that is why sales are solid into 2009. He also said that the show's sound is not amplified--which makes me want to go see it. It sounds good in the hallways when we are on break.

One participant asked him what the LCT "brand" was if it didn't offer an identifiable and predictable season each year. He said that a brand is just a kind of cliché, and "fuck that". If LCT had any "brand" it was that of the mission of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts as a whole, which is "be excellent." One could counter that "Lincoln Center" is itself a brand that aids in the theater's success, but it is worth noting that the Gersten/Mosher-Bishop era is the only one to have lasted more than a few years. The LCT was even dark for a number of years. In the early sixties when Elia Kazan and Robert Whitehead ran the company temporarily in Washington Square while the building was under construction, the board did not understand their support function and fired Kazan and Whitehead because they lost money. Gersten said the theatre loses money because it is by nature, "extravagant."

Gersten believes that the sheer existence of a particular theater is a measure of its success, just like in the case of an organism, or you and me. But this is the part I liked best (of course). Beyond sheer existence, a theatre has one main function: to earn the trust of the artists who work in it. He offered an analogy: if running a theater is like a trapeze act, the artists are the "flyers," and the theater's management are the "catchers." Artists won't let go of the trapeze bar and fly unless they know that the people who run the theater will be there to catch them. And people go to the theater to see artists "fly."

He also said that every theater in history rose and eventually fell, but not to worry about the existence of theater in general: it will outlast us all. All-in-all I found him talk refreshing, progressive and old fashioned all at once.

The directors of the Macbeth projects for next week (of which I am one) met with Anne. In addition to going over some logistics, she encouraged us to "be ourselves" and do as we pleased, and to present whatever we wanted at the end of the week (including just holding a discussion about what we did). She did ask us to keep the focus on our work with actors.

Our second Oedipus choral rehearsal was this evening and Styxx from Zimbabwe was finally on hand to work with us. The goal has been to experiment with representing the chorus through movement and sound. The chorus is what makes an ancient Greek play what it is. I think most of us were frustrated last night, but it was fun tonight. Although most of us don't move especially well, a good many of us can act pretty well and make a difference participating in a group situation like this. I was not shy. A fair amount of what we did started with a premise that led to a group "improvisation" in terms of it's organic outcome. This demonstrated to me that directors generally are quite sensitive to unfolding action, as we achieved good results quite easily. The "happy dance" took on a life of its own.

At O'Neal's later, I learned about a "hot seat" exercise I liked (interviewing actors in character to deepen understanding of a play's circumstances and shared & unshared information among characters), and something more about "moment work" developed by the Tectonic Theater Project. "Moment work" sounds like it would be about some emotional, actor-oriented experience, but it is a way for the actors to create the production around new, developing text (including influencing design) moment by moment. This was the method used to create The Laramie Project.