In early 2025, Los Angeles was burning. As the fires raged, Center Theatre Group, the city’s largest theatre company, turned its spaces into evacuation shelters. Later, CTG sent teaching artists to county care camps as artists began work on a commissioned verbatim theatre piece called the LA Wildfires Project.

Meanwhile, a nearby student production of Shrek Jr. was no match for Altadena’s Eaton fire, which destroyed the auditorium where it was meant to play. As parents tried to figure out where they were going to live, students kept asking: Can we keep working on our show? 

“The parents we talked to, and their teachers, were like, ‘They just need something to focus on,’” said Desai, speaking at Milwaukee Repertory Theater to 63 regional theatre leaders from around the country and Canada last week. “So we brought Shrek Jr. to the Ahmanson Theatre.” Thus did 60 middle-school students from Altadena and Eliot Arts Magnet make their debut on one of the city’s biggest stages. The show went on.

Resilience and a refocusing on the art form itself were major themes, paired with practical advice, at an early March gathering titled “From Crisis to Catalyst: Transforming the Regional Theater Landscape.” Milwaukee Rep executive director Chad Bauman called this three-day event a “convening,” an opportunity for artistic and managing directors to talk together, in person, about “really big strategic issues.” Most attendees were members of the League of Resident Theatres (LORT), with a separate, side convening of the American Theatre Critics and Journalists Association (of which this reporter is a member).

As a bonus, the Rep got to show off a major new $80.1 million renovation of its theatre spaces, which opened to the public last fall, with productions of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson, Milwaukee Rep trustee Ayad Akhtar’s McNeal, and an opening preview of the jazzy Fats Waller revue Ain’t Misbehavin’. Akhtar also gave the event’s keynote speech.

Akhtar grounded his talk in theatre history, citing institutions that were “offering (the) community a vital vision of the present, and proceeded to build a relationship around this search for the pulse of (their) time,” he said. “That’s what theatre can do that no other live form can do: It can bring the vital and new into the room with an immediacy that is transformative. It’s the thing that makes what we do irreplaceable.”

Bauman’s goal with this event was to get “artistic, education, and managing leaders (to) come together to talk about impact in civic life,” he said. While Theatre Communications Group, the publisher of this magazine, will hold an annual conference June 10-13 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Bauman noted that TCG has “many different constituencies. They are trying to serve a much larger audience than we are,” he said. “We are trying to serve at this conference just the artistic and executive leaders from North America’s largest leader companies, which I think have a very specific role to play in the overall ecology.”

Bauman was motivated by the fact that “the field in general—the 1,900 professional theatres in the United States—is exceptionally strained, the most strained I’ve ever seen in my career,” he said. “We were thinking about what we could do as a company to share resources, share learning. What if we could have a space where we bring everybody together—artistic, managerial, and journalists—to talk about what we can do collaboratively, to strengthen the field and get through this moment of crisis?”

In December, a New York Times piece called the numbers for regional theatres “grim,” citing a survey from SMU DataArts at Southern Methodist University that showed attendance falling 19 percent and income down a whopping 37 percent between 2023 and 2024. Reporter Michael Paulson cited 72-year-old Milwaukee Rep as an outlier in this trend. In November, Come From Away broke company records for revenue, likely in part due to the Rep’s newly aggressive dynamic pricing. Rep subscription renewals are already pacing ahead of this time last year, Bauman said.

An ‘Annie’ for Every Company

Many of the same leaders who came to Milwaukee meet on Zoom every other week to share challenges and successes—an extension of a weekly call that began during the Covid-19 pandemic. For theatre leaders like Michael Barakiva, artistic director of the Cleveland Play House, a trip to Milwaukee offered a rare in-person opportunity, one valuable enough to overcome his social anxiety.

“The answer for every regional theatre’s prosperity is radically local,” Barakiva said. “I really wanted to hear what other challenges artistic leaders were facing right now. I wanted to hear how they were solving them, not because I think there’s a silver bullet or you can photocopy it, but to think, ‘Oh, this is how they’ve assessed their really local landscape and how they’ve engaged with it,’ and maybe that will inspire us to figure out how to do the same in Cleveland.”

The Rep invited a handful of theatre leaders to lead sessions and gave them free rein with subject and panelists. Mara Isaacs, a Broadway producer of Hadestown, The Inheritance, and Gypsy, and the founder of Octopus Theatricals, hosted a panel about funding new work, a 90-minute session that was dominated by one of its panelists, author and investor James Rhee.

“We want to train theatres to think of themselves like incubators,” said Rhee’s co-panelist, composer Frances Pollock, who works with the Cultural Innovation Lab at Yale University. “We want to train them to methodically scale up projects so that you de-risk the projects, and you put capital in that’s appropriate at every step of the way.”

Pollock cited a Connecticut initiative that invests specifically in commercial ventures at theatres.

“In the same way that Goodspeed was so successful and has been so benefited by the global brand of Annie,” Pollock said of the East Haddam theatre where that global juggernaut originated, the goal is to “create a system of cultivating brands that the theatres can stay attached to, which then becomes passive revenue for them.”

Other sessions highlighted entrepreneurial leadership in nonprofit theatres and what engagement means beyond the usual talkbacks and book clubs. Jennifer Uphoff Gray from Forward Theater in Madison, Wisconsin, gave a brief overview of World Premiere Wisconsin, which brought more than 50 theatre companies together in 2023 to produce new work across the state.

“I think, post-pandemic, these jobs have only gotten harder,” said Kim Motes, executive director of Chicago Shakespeare Theater. “There’s more complexity to this work. There are degree programs in arts administration, but there’s nothing like on-the-job (training). In real life, in real time, there are issues, challenges, situations we’re navigating, and that’s where colleagues are really important.”

Motes said she has noticed in Zoom calls the signs of burnout on her passionate younger colleagues, who may take on new leadership roles only to leave the industry just months later.

“How do we ensure people are set up for success, that they’ve got a network of colleagues to touch base with?” Motes said. “You’re running a small business, an entrepreneurial business. We’ll do 11 productions this season. We’re putting out 11 new products into the world. What company, what for-profit company, puts out that many new products in a given year? We have to prepare people for these jobs.”

Tell the Story

Arguably, the most lasting and valuable advice theatre leaders may take away from a gathering like “From Crisis to Catalyst” happens outside the main events, at pre-show dinners and post-show drinks at the St. Kate hotel bar.

Meanwhile, mid-session, the questions were big ones: What is each theatre’s role and responsibility to engage with politics and current events? How can theatres mitigate risk enough to avoid relegating their most adventurous work to the smallest stages? How do theatre companies as institutions grow their audience among a generation that is inherently, and justifiably, suspicious of institutions? What does sustainability look like, as opposed to sponsorship? And how do theatres continue to incorporate principles of equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility while not alienating donors? 

“How can the work I do show up to serve the public good?” asked Tinashe Kajese-Bolden, co-artistic director of Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre, on a panel about engagement. “I can’t alienate half of my constituents. I can’t collapse into silence and I can’t implode into spectacle.”

In a follow-up email, Kajese-Bolden elaborated on this theme: “Atlanta is not monolithic. It is politically mixed. That tension is not a liability. It is the work. My leadership challenge is not about speaking into an echo chamber; it’s about holding space where people who disagree can sit in proximity.” She added: “I do think we are in a moment where institutions are being scrutinized—sometimes rightly so. But if we hollow out institutions entirely, we lose the very infrastructure that allows sustained civic response. The challenge is not whether institutions should exist. It’s whether we can evolve them fast enough to remain trusted.”

Other theatre leaders at the convening talked about challenging their own assumptions. BJ Jones, artistic director of Northlight Theatre, said on the same panel that his theatre has “one leg in Skokie and one leg in Evanston” as Northlight builds “a brand new theatre from the ground up,” set to open in the fall.

“It’s a growing moment for us, a learning moment for us,” Jones said. “We’re already in the schools, we’re already talking to a lot of the social institutions and we partner with them, but it’s only going to grow. …Walking around downtown outside of the offices, there are people on the streets. There are restaurants. We didn’t have that in Skokie. I always thought, ‘We’re really going to energize Evanston, help downtown grow.’ But what I realized is that they are going to energize us, and that is going to impact our art.” 

Theatre leaders talked at length about their own growth as challenges keep coming. And Desai, who led L.A.’s East West Players before taking the helm of Center Theatre Group, recalled the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.

“As a new artistic director, I was like, ‘We need to set up food banks,’” Desai recalled. “Different theatres were doing different things in response. My board chair at the time said, ‘What we are is a theatre company, and what we’re good at is storytelling. You need to figure out what we can do with storytelling to meet the moment.’ That stuck with me.”

Now, he continued, when there’s a situation that requires an emergency response, the best approach is to “segment the way we respond at different times. I don’t think any of us is going to get through a season without some sort of crisis.” In the midst of everything that occurred in L.A. last year, which included not only the wildfires but curfews imposed during stepped-up immigration enforcement actions and protests, Snehal said, “I was so proud that we didn’t miss a rehearsal, and we only had to cancel two performances, and people still showed up.”

Lindsay Christians is the food and culture editor of the Cap Times in Madison, Wisconsin.