At the 2024 Tony Awards, one of the many producers who took to the stage when Stereophonic won Best Play was Adam Greenfield. He is the artistic director of Off-Broadway's Playwrights Horizons, which premiered Stereophonic last year before the show transferred to Broadway. In his brief remarks on the Koch stage, Greenfield said: “Every play nominated in this [Best Play] category tonight came from an Off-Broadway theatre. Playwrights Horizons stands very proudly among our peers. And if a culture of risk-taking new work is important, then we need the support of our city to maintain that.”
A few days after Playwrights Horizons won that Tony Award, the theatre announced it would lay off five employees, as part of a restructuring of the organization. They also made two new hires, including a new managing director, Casey York, to work alongside Greenfield in running the organization. Playwrights Horizons, which has a long history of premiering industry-changing new work (such as Sunday in the Park With George), can be seen as a microcosm of the current state of New York theatre. On the stage, the work continues to be artistically inventive and boundary pushing. But backstage, the act of producing is rife with challenges—including rising costs, decreased revenue, and lower audience attendance.
On top of that, New York City theatres are experiencing a seismic shift. Leaders at nine of the city's largest theatres are retired or have retired, with new faces coming in to replace them. Playwrights Horizons is one. Roundabout Theatre Company is currently run by Scott Ellis, who had to quickly step in last year after longtime leader Todd Haimes passed away. Longtime Lincoln Center Theater leader André Bishop will retire in 2025. Carole Rothman, of Second Stage Theater, recently stepped down after 45 years at the organization. Other companies undergoing (or recently had) leadership changes include Manhattan Theatre Club, HERE Arts Center, New York Theatre Workshop, Classic Stage Company, and Signature Theatre Company. All of these institutions are power players in the NYC theatrical landscape, responsible for premiering numerous works that go on to Broadway, win awards, and become part of the American theatrical canon.
Considering that leaders tend to stay in their positions for decades, this much turnover at the same time has the capacity to radically redefine the New York theatrical landscape—as the proverbial torch is passed to a new generation of leaders.
“I think change is good,” says Chris Jennings, who just wrapped up his first season as executive director of Manhattan Theatre Club (who was nominated for three Tony Awards this season for their plays). “How I've approached coming into Manhattan Theatre Club is, I'm coming in wanting to create positive change while honoring what has come before. And I hope for that, with all of the transitions that are going on throughout the community.”
In contrast to a typical Broadway house, where theatres are owned by large companies and are rented out to individual productions, the aforementioned companies are non-profits—many of them Off-Broadway. They program a variety of shows each season in limited runs. They are usually overseen by an artistic director (who oversees the programming and is the face of the organization) and an executive/managing director (who oversees the finances). Because of their not-for-profit status, a majority of their revenue comes from grants and charitable giving, allowing them to take more risks because they do not need to turn a profit from ticket sales.
Even theatres that own a Broadway house (namely Lincoln Center, Second Stage, Roundabout, and Manhattan Theatre Club) do not have the same profit-driven pressures that their commercial counterparts do. They also do not have as high of a ticket price.
At the same time, post-pandemic, their existence has felt especially precarious (part of an industry-wide struggle post shutdown).
Kristin Marting recently stepped down from running HERE Arts Center, the two-theatre complex she co-founded 31 years ago. “I feel like our whole field is kind of in free fall, so it's a little bit scary for everybody right now about where the field's going,” she says bluntly. “I think it's a really interesting time for new leaders to think about what works and what doesn't work, and to think completely fresh.” HERE just announced that instead of one artistic director going forward, it will instead have a team of four co-directors.
Every outgoing director has had to lead their theatre through the pandemic shutdown, when they could not produce, and then having to rebuild after. Admits Marting: “I definitely am in that fatigued place now. In a way, this last year has been harder than the pandemic was."
The challenges are many, but one factoid brings it all into stark relief. Previously, if HERE were to charge audiences full price to cover the entire cost of a production, each ticket would have cost $150 to $175. Nowadays, with rising labor and material costs, each audience member would have to pay $350 to $450. The theatre has to raise money to cover the cost of producing and to offset its low ticket prices (HERE’s tickets range from $35 to $100, with a $10 rush option).
Non-profits raise money in a variety of ways, from individual donations to large grants from private foundations and government entities. Industry-wise, foundation giving has decreased, and the COVID-19-era emergency grants have expired. This leaves many theatres with six-figure financial holes they are struggling to fill. Marting estimates that in the next season, HERE is going to lose about $110,000 in foundational support.
Nationwide, theatres have also had a tough time getting audiences to come back to the theatre. From the outside, Signature Theatre’s 2023–24 season was successful—they had their best ticket sales since reopening. But the theatre has also had to cut down on the number of shows it produces per year due to rising costs (because Signature owns its space in midtown Manhattan on 42nd street, it's also had to shoulder rising utilities costs). The company's been renting out its spaces to generate revenue.
Prior to the pandemic, Signature was programming in all of its theatres and "operating at almost full capacity," says Paige Evans, who stepped down last month after running the company as artistic director since 2016. That hasn't been the case since coming back from the shutdown, where longtime audiences have not returned in full force. "It's much harder to bring in new people than it is to keep loyal attendees coming back," admits Evans. "So I think that's both a challenge and an opportunity. But I think it's exciting. And I do notice that there are younger people in the theatres—it's generationally diverse, as well as racially and ethnically."
For these leaders stepping down, the hope is their successors can, in Evans’ words, “rethink how we approach running an institution and producing theatre" in an arguably more challenging and expensive landscape than their predecessors. "There's got to be some kind of consolidation," says Evans. "In the New York theatre landscape, there are a lot of theatres. I just don't think the ecosystem at this point is going to be able to support all of this. So I think theatres need to come up with innovative new ways of collaborating and partnering."
One person who’s excited and ready to go is Patricia McGregor, who just finished up her second season as artistic director of the Tony Award-winning New York Theatre Workshop. It’s been a successful time for NYTW, which was a producer on the Merrily We Roll Along revival (that show ran Off-Broadway before transferring a few months later). When she talks about this current moment in the field, there is a palpable energy in her voice. “I like a challenge,” she remarks. “It is a time that requires innovation. And steadiness and a real love for the form.”
To help offset costs, NYTW is producing fewer shows than it used to; next season only has four productions. McGregor has been looking into partnerships, such as co-producing with other theatres to help shoulder the costs. Next season, a play set in Gaza, A Knock on the Roof, has two producing partners attached to it.
Those partnerships have also been key for the theatre in attracting new audiences. For one show this past season, Merry Me, NYTW hosted events with local businesses, including at bars and a queer supper club. “We made these non-transactional experiences that invited local partners and communities, and we saw something like a 37-percent uptick in new single-ticket sales,” says McGregor.
A common refrain in the leaders who spoke for this article is the need to rethink how theatre is marketed. Whereas in previous decades, a theatre could rely on the same core audience showing up at every show, these days, “there's not a silver bullet” for attracting an audience and getting them to come back, says MTC's Jennings. Not to mention that due to the diversity of playwrights being produced today, each show won't necessarily attract the same audience. For the 2023–24 season at MTC, the audience for Jaja’s African Hair Braiding was different from the audience at Prayer for the French Republic. In fact, at Jaja’s, 77 percent of the ticket buyers were new to MTC, the highest ever for the theatre.
“Instead of doing the traditional marketing that has been done a lot in New York, we shook things up, and we did things differently,” says Jennings. “We were allocating our advertising dollars outside of Manhattan to the outer boroughs, to the subways—really trying to meet audiences that we think would connect to the work. Social media is a thing and building an audience of influencers that spread the word—we don't have any paid influencers but we really connected to the influencers.”
For Jaja’s in particular, MTC also hosted affinity nights where a majority of the audiences were Black, Jennings shares. “We created affinity nights so that when you come, you're in an environment with your peers and you feel comfortable with in this space. And I think we're seeing positive results.”
MTC also did a livestream of Jaja's for its final week of performances, though Jennings admits that with the additional costs associated with streaming, that option isn't necessarily a big money-maker for the theatre: "It's not something that the theatre is going to make money on. All it does is going to be a, best case, breaking even. But it's going to extend the life of the work."
For these new leaders, there is an optimism for the future coupled with an acknowledgement of the present. They are honest in not quite knowing what the answer is to solving the myriad of challenges their organizations are facing—there’s no attempt to prescribe one answer or solution. Instead, in today's landscape, being able to think fast and act nimbly is paramount. For McGregor, what keeps her positive every day is her own personal mission, what she considers a “call to service” to make sure a diversity of artists are able to make work and have it seen by a wide array of people.
“I always joke that maybe one day, I'll move back to Hawaii and be a florist,” she says wryly. “Theatre has an important place in our culture. Making it accessible to more people is not just a financial strategy—it's like libraries, or roads, or any civic resource. It should be accessible to a lot of people like running water. I want art to be as accessible to people as really good running water. And it takes a lot of work to let people know that it's out there for you. But I want to open the faucets.”
Despite her fatigue, when asked what advice she has for the next generation of theatre leaders, HERE’s Marting does not hesitate with her answer: “Look to the artists. The artists are the ones with the vision. They're the ones that are making incredible things, that are not giving up, that are not in a place of futility. They're still in a place of synthesis and creativity and vision…So despite the problems, despite the money, despite all of the institutionalized decentralization and dismantling and revolutionizing that needs to happen—the art is still inventive, amazing, inspiring, and the source from which we can draw everything we do.”
*This article has been updated throughout after publishing. A previous version of this story had the number of leadership changes at eight, it's actually nine. And NYTW's 2024–25 season has four shows, not three (one has not been announced).
