We can’t always claim that articles in American Theatre directly make change in the field we cover. But in August 2022, after reading and discussing an AT op-ed by Michael J. Bobbitt titled “Boards Are Broken, So Let’s Break and Remake Them,” the entire board of directors at A Contemporary Theatre (ACT) in Seattle announced that they would resign (with the exception of three leadership positions required by law). John Langs, who was ACT’s artistic director at the time, said that the board’s decision was the result of months of “deliberation and difficult conversations.” They discussed two key elements from Bobbitt’s article: that most boards no longer represent the communities they serve, and that most had not resolved the tension between creative vision and fiduciary responsibility.
Bobbitt’s article came on the heels of a year that will forever linger in our cultural memory. The global Covid-19 pandemic shuttered many public spaces across the country, forced the nation’s workforce into work-from-home mandates, and put the brakes on arts and culture industries across the board. Theatres, music venues, museums, and concert halls were all forced to close doors to the public. Then, in May 2020, the agonizing nine-minute video of George Floyd being killed by police in Minneapolis led to a racial awakening that sparked protests and activism across the nation.
Out of these circumstances, a long overdue movement emerged within U.S. theatres— some of it under the banner of the conversation-starting document We See You, White American Theater, though that wasn’t the only such effort—to reexamine racial inequities within the industry, reassess compensation for staff and artists, and wrestle anew with critiques of leadership staff and boards of directors who were overwhelmingly white and in many ways disconnected from the artists and communities they were intended to serve.
Bobbitt’s January 2021 op-ed, which called for the dismantling of nonprofit theatre boards as they were constituted, to be replaced by a different, better model of governance, sent shockwaves through the industry. Then the artistic director of New Repertory Theatre in Watertown, Massachusetts, Bobbitt questioned whether the extensive hours he had spent working on “board stuff” were really worth it, and if the work itself was in service of the organization or in service to the board. He questioned whether theatres’ boards—which in many cases he felt had become filled with people who had little knowledge of the theatre industry or craft—should have decision-making power over theatre companies. (U.S. law requires nonprofits to have at least three board officers, but does not mandate that boards take the form they do at most nonprofits.) Ultimately, he questioned whether the fundamental idea of nonprofit boards, these self-made and self-appointed social clubs with topline authority and no oversight, were rooted in white supremacy.
The combination of the Covid pandemic lockdown and the WSYWAT document offered theatres around the country an ideal opportunity to look inward and consider making major changes. So, it’s worth asking now, what has changed since then—and what hasn’t?
Cynthia Huffman is chair of ACT’s board of trustees. She’s been on the board for eight years, and was one of three members who held their positions after the mass resignation. She said that an assessment in 2022 determined that ACT’s board was not as effective, informed, or engaged as it should be. “We decided that the board we had then was too big to be efficient and effective,” Huffman recalled, and that its members didn’t necessarily have “the right set of skills. So that’s when we all resigned.”
After the members stepped down, they were allowed to reapply. The rebuilding of the board was done carefully, looking to reflect takeaways from Bobbitt’s article. The new board was slimmed down—they planned for it to be no bigger than 15 members, down from their usual 20, but they started with nine. They also reworked their board committee structure, moving away from a typical hierarchy that might include a governance committee, a finance committee, a fundraising committee, and a gaggle of subcommittees, leading to a number of additional committee meetings outside the standard board meetings. These, in essence, are what pushed boards toward becoming what Bobbitt called “social clubs”: bloated committees and sub-committees that spin out of control and create an environment where the time commitment needed to be a board member becomes so inflated that only retirees, stay-at-home spouses, and/or wealthy people are able to participate.
“What we needed was a small, nimble board that could be really well informed, really well engaged, and make big decisions quickly,” said Huffman. “We did away with all committees. We have a finance work group that regularly meets with the staff finance team to look at things. But board members don’t have to participate in two or three committees. We meet once a month for three hours. The first hour of the board meeting is the general housekeeping stuff that you just have to take care of, and then we have two hours to devote to really deep, serious conversations about the challenges we face and what to do about them.”
Even without going through the kind of complete board overhaul that ACT did, theatres around the country are seeing changes in board function in recent years. In Washington, D.C., Mosaic Theatre saw its founding artistic director Ari Roth step down in the fall of 2020 amid claims from some on his staff that his leadership style followed patterns of “white supremacist behavior” (which Roth vigorously disputed). Cathy Solomon, Mosaic’s current board chair and a board member at the theatre since 2017, recalled the executive committee of the board at the time being in crisis mode and meeting weekly.
“We had to come up to speed on what We See You, White American Theater meant,” said Solomon, who also served as head of the search committee that found Roth’s replacement, current Mosaic artistic director Reginald Douglas. “I think we did.”
Solomon, who joined the board only two years after the company was founded in 2015, said that she’s seen the board evolve since those early days. “At the beginning, it was a working board,” said Solomon, meaning that they wrote bylaws alongside Roth, helped create public programming, and solicited donations from friends. On its face, the idea of a “working board” may sound engaging and active. Indeed, Mosaic’s initial board members were asked to do a good deal of hands-on work, like assisting with programming, out of necessity. Board members with tangible skills—lawyers, for example—were asked for pragmatic support. (Lawyers on nonprofit boards can’t officially represent the organizations, but they can provide legal advice.)
But as Bobbitt’s article pointed out, this kind of hands-on board can sometimes be problematic. When board members get involved in internal functions like programming, you may be essentially allowing people who are not artists or have little experience in the industry to have a say in creative decisions.
Mosaic now has a “supportive structure” within its board, which means it functions to help move ideas and initiatives from the artistic director forward, with programming and creative decisions all coming from the theatre’s staff. For instance, in response to industry demands and internal leadership changes in the wake of the pandemic lockdown, the board formed a committee to work specifically on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), and money was dedicated to improving working conditions for staff. They ensured the lowest-paid workers received raises to make livable wages and worked to close the gap between the lowest- and highest-paid employees.
“That was huge,” Solomon said of the organizational changes. “We had to work through the finances and decide how much deficit we are going to approve during this period. The board had to agree to all those things, and we still had to keep the lights on.”
Ideally, it is the board’s role to find ways to support the initiatives of executive leadership, not make their own plans. While these changes may seem slight or insignificant, they are a big part of what Bobbitt asked for: agency in the hands of creatives, with board work supporting the needs of staff—not the other way around.
Over in Texas, Dallas Children’s Theater’s board uses a process of gap analysis: analyzing and determining their organizational needs, then looking to find board members who can fill in the gaps to support those needs, said executive director Samantha Turner. Since one of DCT’s missions is to serve children, for example, Turner said they look for board members with matching skill sets. “Hot on my list is anyone who’s working for a business that’s marketing to children,” said Turner. “I would love to have that expertise on our board to help guide us in our decision-making.”
One issue Turner has noticed over the recent years is atomization. After Covid began, the board stopped meeting in person as much as they did pre-2020. She acknowledged the benefits and flexibility provided to board members with remote meetings, but she added concern that board members may begin to feel disconnected from the theatre.
“Building community among each other is harder,” Turner said, “and we need to work at resolving that, fixing that. I don’t have the answer to that, but everyone’s just busier than ever.”
A connection to the theatre is especially important, since cohesion and balance on boards is going to play a key role moving forward. Since 2020, theatres around the country have scrambled to respond to equity issues even as they face rising material and delivery prices, increasing the cost to do business. Many theatres, including Mosaic, have decreased the number of shows they produce each season or forged new partnerships to share costs between companies, particularly as funders’ priorities have increasingly shifted away from the arts.
“The corporations in Seattle now are doing little or nothing to support the arts, and my understanding is that that’s pretty true across the country,” said ACT’s Huffman. “A lot of people are switching their philanthropic goals.”
At the same time, some boards have moved away from donation requirements for their members, deprioritizing the recruitment of rich board members in an effort to diversify membership in response to the industry’s demand for equity. Historically, board members have been able to receive perks, like favorable placement in board hierarchy, based on how much they donated. Add that factor to the bloated committees and subcommittees, and you have an environment where the commitment needed to be a board member, and the rewards for doing so, are accessible and attractive only to wealthy people. It’s easy to see how a board might lose its focus on a theatre’s mission.
At ACT, the board decided the best way to combat these trends was to tear down and rebuild. They removed the required financial commitments from their board members and made it clear in their trustee handbook that signifi cant donations couldn’t secure an officer’s position on the board, and that no special status would be awarded to members based on their donations.
Still, as lagging ticket sales remain an issue for many theatres, board members are being asked to do more fundraising now than ever before, and the need for those members to be able to fund-raise within their own communities has become critical. For Mosaic, a company with a strong focus on human rights and social justice, having board members who can help foster relationships in the community to generate financial support is just as, or more, important than the money board members themselves can contribute.
Put another way: Back when nonprofit boards were more like social clubs, the ask for more funding could live within the board itself. But with support-style boards, made up of people with diverse incomes and backgrounds, the ask for funds needs to be broader. So does the outreach for new board members. At DCT, board recruitment is intentionally a diversity-oriented process, with much more thought put into what a prospective board member can bring to the board other than money. A greater emphasis is placed on expanding the theatre’s community and helping to find new supporters.
In Seattle, Huffman sees possibility in connecting to younger supporters. She said she’s seen the older generation of arts supporters begin to be replaced by a new generation of donors more focused on causes like public health and human services or fighting climate change. As Huffman notes, the arts are not separate from these concerns.
“The arts serve a very important factor in those other causes,” said Huffman. “We have the ability to tell the climate change story. We have the ability to help young people, the trans community, the LBGTQ community. They’re interrelated. We have to help people who have the capacity to support multiple things realize that all of these things are critical to the future of our communities.”
ACT now finds itself in a unique position. With its board now at nine members, the company recently announced a merger with Seattle Shakespeare Company—meaning ACT will once again dive back into rebuilding its board.
There’s no formula for the perfect board. Boards now need to be nimble, as ACT originally sought, able to respond to demands for equity and the increasing costs of doing business amid major shifts in funding. But they also need to be engaged, able to offer tangible support through unique expertise (lawyers at Mosaic, youth marketing experts at DTC), as well as connections in a theatre’s community. The days of glorified social clubs are gone. Theatre boards, no less than theatre staffs, are operating with all hands on deck.
Mike Davis (he/him) reports on theatre in Chicago for WBEZ.
