01/02/2020
Friends,
I have wanted to write this for some time. I hope those of you who have liked this page will still read a post from it. This message is for all theatre lovers, but most especially to those of you who are an immediate part of this tri-state community.
By now, most of you know that the University of Southern Indiana has ceased to support New Harmony Theatre, and so there will be no 2020 season. Nor is there a plan to reconstitute the theatre in the future, so we may conclude that over 30 seasons of production are at an end and that Southwestern Indiana has lost its only truly professional theatre. It is a shame to see support dry up, but let’s understand that the University has experienced great pressure on its budget. The state controlled budget has, in my opinion, failed to keep up with the true cost of higher education, so USI has had to make hard choices, especially since USI Foundation determined that contributions earmarked to support the theatre did not keep up with its traditional level of support. These two bodies had their reasons, and the reasons are hard to argue with. At the end of the day, USI concluded that it lacked the resources to maintain the theatre. In fairness to USI, although theatre attendance had increased over the last two years, it never recovered to levels that existed prior to the recession of a decade ago. People cut theatre attendance out and then did not come back in sufficient numbers. It is also true that theatre culture in this area is not as valued as it is in other parts of the country. There is enough population to support a professional theatre, but numbers alone do not determine interest. Many factors do, and we have suffered a long period during which all but the most commercial arts have been dismissed, and sometimes scorned, as unworthy of preservation. In my lifetime I believe that I have seen respect for informed opinions decline as more people have begun to espouse the idea that they need have little deep knowledge about a work of art to determine that it is without value or relevance to them. Sadly, in the case of theatre, there are people who make these determinations without ever having attended any professional productions to begin with. Ours is an incurious era.
So New Harmony Theatre is now a casualty. Could we have avoided this outcome? I don’t know. Perhaps we could have advertised better. I was always shocked by the number of people I would encounter who did not realize that a decades-old local theatre was, in fact, a professional stage, holding auditions in New York and Chicago, and not strictly a community or college enterprise. Should we have moved the theatre from New Harmony to Evansville? There was never any consensus reached about that among our strategists while our most loyal subscribers appeared dead set against seeing production move to the state of the art Performance Center on the USI campus. So we stayed where we were until the very end. We will never know if having the productions in Evansville would have reestablished audience numbers.
I hate to think that this type of theatre will not have a future in this wonderful area of the country. I hate to think that when people consider moving here or investing in the area we will not be able to point to a New Harmony Theatre as part of the cultural foundation of Southwestern Indiana. So I will offer the following thoughts:
1. Any future effort to establish a theatre on the level of New Harmony, or with the aim of growing to that level, should be guided by an active board of directors, distinct from a foundation that supports many efforts and has its own system for determining where support should be placed. A non-profit theatre needs its own group of supporters, as do museums and philharmonics. USI and USI Foundation did a great job for many years, but without its own distinct and self-sustaining supportive group, a theatre may not be able to survive lean times.
2. We can’t say we want to have a professional theatre in the Tri-state without maintaining our subscriptions to that theatre. We can’t expect others to keep buying the tickets. We can’t wait to support only the play whose title we are familiar with. Theatres are not museums; they cannot produce the same 20 plays everyone has heard of over and over again as if they were exhibiting an art collection. You cannot love theatre with the expectation that you will love every production equally. We don’t expect that of every concert or film we go to see. Theatre exists for the inquisitive. It is meant to entertain, but it is also meant to challenge what we think we already know. If we want theatre here to resume at this level, we must be ready to subscribe to its season.
3. We have to get our friends and family to go with us. If you love theatre, share the love. Even if you have to buy the first tickets to get that brother-in-law to attend, if by doing that you create another audience member for the future, you have preserved your theatre, and you did so in a way that made it grow, that distributed the need for support among a larger population. There is no better way to ensure the future of theatre.
4. We must develop a love of theatre in the next generation. We must see to it that our children and our grandchildren are introduced to it and that we support their interest. Young people have to be shown that live performance cannot be duplicated by a film, no matter how spectacular the digital effects. They have to experience it. To love theatre is to consider supporting it not as an act of consumerism, but as a responsibility, an investment in our cultural heritage and our cultural future.
These are just my opinions, but I don’t think I am wrong to hold them. I hope someone comes along, even better, I hope a solid group comes along, determined to reestablish a professional theatre in Evansville or New Harmony. I hope all of you who read this will be ready to support them when you have that chance. I certainly am.
Elliot Wasserman, Artistic Director
New Harmony Theatre
