NYR: The Show Can’t Go On

[MezzA101]

Posted: 4/24/25 at 11:06am

In the past half decade, whole strata of this intricate New York support system have been smashed. First, there was a drip-drip-drip of crisis: as costs everywhere rose, city, state, and federal monies faded away once COVID-era bailout efforts came to an end. According to a forthcoming study by the service organization A.R.T./New York, post-pandemic audiences for nonprofit theatre remain down eleven per cent, and, just in the year from 2022 to 2023, corporate giving dipped eighty per cent. Consequently, we’ve lost directing labs, nearby retreat centers for theatre and dance, and support spaces dedicated to new writing. There has been less ferment, less activity, less art. Already, financially strapped venues are producing far fewer shows—according to the Times, in the past five years, the number of Off Broadway productions eligible for the Lucille Lortel Awards has dropped by half.

 

And then, when the need seemed greatest, several private philanthropic foundations pulled out the rug. Three of the largest arts funders in the United States—the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Doris Duke Foundation, and the Ford Foundation—stopped supporting many components of the arts infrastructure in New York that they helped create. Their reasons were various, but the upshot was the same: extreme turbulence, which has affected organizations big and small. There were deep program and operational budget cuts at the Public Theatre, for instance, and Playwrights Horizons, where such critically acclaimed productions as Michael R. Jackson’s “Strange Loop” and David Adjmi’s “Stereophonic” premièred, lost underwriting for new play commissioning, as well as general operating support. The tiny rooms where such shows develop got hit, too. “It seemed like everybody lost their subsidized rehearsal space funding from Mellon at the same time,” Risa Shoup, a co-executive director from A.R.T./New York, told me.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/the-show-cant-go-on