Rocco Landesman: What does an 'over-supply of theater' really mean?

By Barry Johnson

Rocco Landesman, the chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts, made a number of inflammatory  comments at last week's new play conference in Washington, DC, enough to create quite a little firestorm. Most of the discontent among the theater professionals at the conference was channeled toward Landesman's contention that since American theater couldn't increase demand, it would have to limit supply. Which everyone rightly interpreted as close some theaters down. Needless to say, if you're running a theater company, these aren't the words you want to hear tripping lightly from the lips of your NEA chairman.

That wasn't the worst part for me, which arrived in a follow-up interview by the New York Times, when Landesman suggested that foundations and government agencies might have to decide to re-allocate their resources, directing their money to fewer institutions. The implication of this remark is that agencies and foundations will work together to pick winners and losers in order to correct the oversupply. (If they didn't, they'd be working at cross purposes -- if Meyer Memorial Trust cut off Portland Center Stage and the Oregon Arts Commission didn't, then Center Stage might survive to create that nasty oversupply of theater stuff, for example.)

I instantly reached for most inflammatory term I could think of for this concerted action -- Theater Death Panel. Hey, when Rocco's fireballs fill the sky, I reach for my own Molotov cocktail. Fair is fair.

Now I've had a little more time for reflection and research, and I've decided that Landesman was conflating two different critiques of American theater. Yes, one is that whole oversupply issue (which I personally think is crazy -- a "binary" reduction of a complex situation, as Travis Bedard suggests on the 2AMt theater blog). The other is his belief that the great regional non-profit companies have grown too ambitious financially and in reaching for the gold of Broadway (where Landesman has been a significant force for the past few decades) have become less ambitious artistically -- and less connected to their communities.

These are contradictory enough to generate almost any response from the audience. The first argues from a market-based analysis of supply and demand. The second argues that the market has been too important for the country's largest non-profit theater companies. So which is it?  Do we want our non-profit theater companies to be cold-blooded capitalists, filling their theaters with as many suckers as they can? Or idealistic theater flower children chasing their rainbows and butterflies and following their own artistic bliss? Because you can't have it both ways.

We'll deal with the second part first.