What Local Stages Owe Their Communities: A Conversation About Theatre and Civic Life

I asked five artistic directors of regional theatre companies the same question: what do you think your theatre owes the community that supports it? The answers varied in their specifics and converged in their underlying assumptions in ways that seemed to say something both about the people who lead these organizations and about the shared understanding of regional theatre's purpose that has developed, somewhat informally, across the field.

The answers were, in every case, more complex than I had expected.

Patricia Gould, who has led the Brookline Repertory Theatre for nine years, said she thinks about the question in terms of what a theatre makes possible rather than what it provides. "We don't owe the community entertainment," she said. "We owe it an occasion. A reason to come together in a room and pay attention to something at the same time. That sounds simple, and it turns out to be very hard to do well."

"Theatre at its best reminds a community of something it already knows about itself but hasn't recently had occasion to say aloud. That's not a small thing."

Richard Okoro of the county community theatre expressed a similar view through a different frame. His company works primarily with amateur performers drawn from the communities they serve, and he thinks about the relationship between stage and audience in terms that are more granular than most professional artistic directors would use. "The people in our shows are your neighbors," he said. "When you watch them, you're watching your community perform itself. That has effects we don't always know how to measure but that I believe are real."

Several of the directors I spoke with raised, unprompted, the question of access — specifically, the question of who their audiences are and who they are not, and what obligations flow from that observation. The regional theatre audience, as more than one director acknowledged, is not a representative cross-section of the regional population. It is older, more affluent, and less diverse than the communities that surround the theatres these directors lead. All of them expressed a view that this was a problem. They varied in their conviction that they were doing enough about it.

The conversation about what regional theatre owes its community is unlikely to reach a final answer, which is perhaps as it should be. What seems clear from these conversations is that the question itself — the ongoing, unsettled examination of purpose and responsibility — is part of what keeps these organizations alive to their own situation. The theatres that have stopped asking it, several directors suggested without naming names, are the ones that have stopped being interesting.