1. Stage Money: The Business of the Professional Theater (review)
Anne Beggs
Modern Drama, Volume 54, Number 4, Winter 2011, pp. 570-573 (Article)
Published by University of Toronto Press
DOI: 10.1353/mdr.2011.0046
For additional information about this article
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2. Others confront specific precursors, turning over and sometimes over-
turning their propositions. Bruce McConachie, for his part, offers an exeg-
esis of R.G. Collingwood and his critics to see how empathy influences
narrative. In the latter part of his essay, he plays “historiographical detective
to sleuth out” (397) how Matthew Buckley accomplished this in his recent
work on French Revolutionary drama. That he chooses speculation instead
of asking Buckley himself indicates a prevailing preference for abstract
lucubration over empirical inquiry. Shannon Jackson offers a close
reading of Ric Knowles and Miwon Kwon in order to “tease out some of
the conceptual convergences within theatrical and visual art historical
methods at our present moment” (241). The result is an undeclared resta-
tement of Lessing’s Laocoo¨n with “performance” standing in for “poetry.”
The only essay fully devoted to pictures is also one of the best. David
Wiles’s “Seeing Is Believing: The Historian’s Use of Images,” with its
close scrutiny of three familiar examples – diagrams of the theatre at
Thorikos, the title page of Alabaster’s Roxana, and Hogarth’s rendition of
The Beggar’s Opera – can serve as a model of iconological analysis. He
begins by pointing out that, since sensory aspects of past theatre-going
can never be recaptured, the historian comes to prefer the social dimen-
sion. He poses the salient question: are we seeing what we are culturally
conditioned to see? or are we hard-wired as human beings to see the
same thing as our ancestors did? Despite some debatable obiter dicta –
“[w]hile photographs capture moments, paintings typically construct nar-
ratives” (232) – Wiles’s questions are applicable to historiography in
general.
In its selective interests, the book itself “represents” the current state of
play in anglophone theatre history. There are, however, two regrettable
lacunae. It lacks an index, either topical or of proper names. And few of
the contributors show much interest in what would seem to be central to
the idea of performance: actors and the craft of acting.
TIM DONAHUE and JIM PATTERSON. Stage Money: The Business of the
Professional Theater. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2010.
Pp. xiii þ 173, illustrations. $24.95 (Pb).
Reviewed by Anne Beggs, Colgate University
Whether on Broadway or in a storefront used by an experimental company,
practising theatre requires finances, budgets, and management. Stage
Money offers a thorough and, at times, thought-provoking analysis of the
myriad structures for producing and funding theatre, reminding us that
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3. the process of page-to-stage is never solely an artistic endeavour. Donahue
and Patterson carefully demonstrate how American theatre is, indeed, as
economically complex as any other industry. The seven chapters of their
book focus on financial and legal structures, management, goods and
labour pricing, and distribution, with an “intermission” at the end of
each chapter that offers an in-depth look at an industry case study.
There is an essential difference between commercial and not-for-profit
theatre, and it is in their description of for-profit theatre production that
the authors really provide detailed insight into how and why the commer-
cial theatre endures. Stage Money explains the differences among a corpor-
ation, a limited-liability partnership, and a limited-liability company;
outlines the legal definitions of options, royalties, and subsidiary rights;
and provides intro-to-microeconomics descriptions of market mechan-
isms, small-business development, and investment options. Well-designed
and easy-to-read graphs present statistics such as revenue distributions,
rates of return, and cost–revenue relationships depending on operating
leverage. We are reminded of the nitty-gritty of production costs, down to
what is covered in a commercial theatre lease (in case you were wondering,
you get the house staff, heating, and a house drape, and that’s about it).
Not-for-profit management organization and regional theatre budgets
are discussed, but the authors do not match the level of detail, in their cov-
erage of not-for-profit financing, that they provide in the commercial-
production sections. Excellent graphs chart the average percentages of
earned and unearned income, but the process of not-for-profit fundraising –
in particular, the complex and essential public and private grant system
that sustains the American theatre – is not given the same amount of
attention as are the structures of commercial investment. Stage Money
does adequately review the importance of the audience in the economic
superstructure, and we are reminded that the question of who is going to
the theatre is always an industrial factor. General theatre attendance
statistics as well as theatre subscription percentages provide useful
large-scale indicators of the strength of the consumer.
Although the difference between commercial and not-for-profit theatre
is easily defined, the definition of “professional theatre” is not so easily
settled. As the authors point out, there is no universally accepted determi-
nant of professional status. Salary, union membership, audience size, and
ticket prices are all variables that make the line between professional and
amateur a muddy one. Community theatres often have larger budgets
than do ensembles of Equity actors and SDC directors, and performers
and technicians can make a decent living on non-union national tours.
Even the licensing company Dramatists Play Service admits that there is
no clear guideline. (Their Web site FAQs explain that they “review” each
application to determine its status as professional or non-professional.)
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Modern Drama, 54:4 (Winter 2011) 571

4. What we thus delineate are networks of exhibition, and Stage Money out-
lines the trade associations that are arbiters of professionalism. It is a
useful source for an introductory history of theatrical distribution and exhi-
bition; particularly interesting are the case studies on the Chitlin’ Circuit
and the rise of Steppenwolf as one of the giants of American theatre. In a
commercially competitive environment like Las Vegas, brand names are
key, and like it or not, we cannot ignore the importance of marketing and
branding in the theatre industry (and of course, Disney, as the authors
note, has mastered the art of vertically integrated production and
distribution).
Also useful is the reminder of the power of unions in American theatre,
one of the few industries left in which labour continues to exert leverage.
Minimum director, designer, and performer rates for different contracts
are provided, and a case study “intermission” highlights the complex
labour history of Actors Equity, in particular. Union power notwithstand-
ing, the authors don’t gloss over the brutal truth that “[a]s long as there
are so many potential actors – and directors and designers – with the
drive to practice their art, their average earnings will remain meager”
(103). The financial plight of the playwright is not given nearly as much
attention, however, other than brief outlines of optioning and royalty
pools. Readers might have benefited from more background on how
those producing the raw product – script and music – maintain a living,
as well as on the loopholes and pitfalls that the American dramatist navi-
gates within the industry.
In general, Donahue and Patterson don’t spend much time on the
business of drama, and the key system of play circulation is not given
much attention. They do rightly assert that the not-for-profits do the
“heroic work of the U.S. theater: high-risk research and development”
(133) and discuss some of the key regional centres for new-play develop-
ment. While they chart the “feeder” system of not-for-profit play develop-
ment that issues in Broadway productions, the symbiotic relationship of the
two kinds of production is not given equal scrutiny: certainly, most regional
theatres in the United States would not survive without offering, again and
again, the latest hot titles from New York. Nationally, annual regional
theatre seasons tend to be fairly homogenous, and even titles listed as
New York season “flops” (34) are likely to wind up on the next season’s
annual top-ten “most produced” list. The artistic and financial symbiosis
of the regional and New York theatres is, perhaps, a key factor behind the
difficulty of sustaining a regionally specific dramatic art outside of commu-
nity-activist theatre (a subject that is not in the scope of this study, most
likely due to its generally “non-professional” status as theatre).
While the authors take care to remind us that evaluations of artistic merit
and purpose are not the subject of their analysis, they do begin their study
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5. with the pragmatic declaration that “America gets the theater it pays for”
(xii). In Stage Money, Donahue and Patterson provide a useful and much-
needed summary of the concrete economic structures that support the
American theatre.
WORK CITED
“FAQs: Obtaining Permission.” DPS. Dramatists Play Service. 26 June 2011 ,http://
www.dramatists.com/#..
D.J. HOPKINS, SHELLEY ORR and KIM SOLGA, eds. Performance and the City.
Performance Interventions Series. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2009. Pp. xiv þ 269, illustrated. $90.00 (Hb); $29.00 (Pb).
Reviewed by Sabine Haenni, Cornell University
Performance and the City productively puts theatre and performance events
in dialogue with urban theorists, such as Walter Benjamin, Michel de
Certeau, and Henri Lefebvre. Focusing mostly on western/anglophone
cities (New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Austin, Berlin), the collection
is divided into four sections and announces itself as “the first in a series
of collections that will explore a variety of performance trends in cities
across the globe” (7).
Not least because it starts with a section on post-9/11 performances in
New York, Performance and the City emphasizes the need for personal
intervention in an alienatingly hegemonic urban space. Marla Carlson’s
opening essay on audio-walks in Manhattan persuasively argues how
such walks “fed a need to feel visible and to find some ground on which
to stand” (25), “to insert oneself into the urban landscape in order to
build new emotive contours based on layers of memory – lived memory,
imagined memory, postmemory” (28). The essay sets the tone for a
number of contributions – by D.J. Hopkins, Shelley Orr, and Rebecca
Schneider – that insist on the need for and political importance of per-
forming personal rather than orchestrated memory. In the wake of 9/11,
such alternative possibilities for engaging Manhattan were certainly key,
although ten years later, this reviewer, at least, could not help sense a
tinge of the historical rather than the contemporary.
Thus, the shift from the personal to policy issues in the second part of
the collection comes almost as a relief. Ric Knowles provides a useful over-
view of multicultural performance in Toronto, making a case for the speci-
ficity of this particular city, even as it compares itself, with global reach, to
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