All the world’s a stage. Just pay your rent.
This post originally appeared on my Substack
The latest theatre to close in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic is the Lark Theatre. Known for promoting early-career playwrights, it announced on October 5 it would be closing after nearly thirty years of being a pillar of the Off-Broadway community.
This is part of a larger trend that the small venues of the New York theater community are facing right now as they begin to recover from the pandemic. Artists are eager to return to the spaces that have been shuttered for a year and a half. And while theaters are excited about the desire for their spaces, they are also dealing with their pandemic-related costs.
The Lark cited its inability to meet its fundraising goals, but also faced threats by its landlord of doubling the rent on its space. In the announcement, the Lark said it, “has never been beholden to a physical place”.
The sentiment of theatrical art not being burdened to a traditional venue was a hot topic during the pandemic, as many theatre companies found new ways to produce art without endangering audiences and performers. Many artists took the route of Zoom theatre, while some had other ideas.
"Voyeur: The Windows of Toulouse-Lautrec" led audiences through the streets of New York as performers did vignettes in the middle of the West Village and store-front windows. The cast would outnumber the show’s audience every night, which was limited to eight people for COVID-19 safety.
“'Voyeur' grew out of this insistence that there had to be a way to make theatre safely and make it live," said Mara Lieberman, the executive artistic director and lead writer for Bated Breath Theatre Company. The show was a realization of her mission to bring live theatre back to the city while traditional theatre venues were shut down.
It became a sign that the theater community could and would persevere through the pandemic, despite the new challenges. It garnered positive reviews and articles from the likes of The New York Times and The Washington Post. It ran for 356 performances, ending in July 2021, the longest run of a live show during the pandemic.
Despite the swell of good press and word of mouth about "Voyeur," whether to keep the show running became a cost-benefit decision. "It was time to move on,” said Lieberman. The pandemic presented many unforeseen problems; it became "like playing a game of whack-a-mole,"
When asked about the possibility of bringing the show back now that the theater is returning to a sense of normalcy, Lieberman said that she wasn't sure. Most likely it would become a hybrid show that merges outside elements with a more traditional indoor theatrical experience.
The obstacles of theatre’s return have led to numerous legislative proposals both statewide and federally, with the most pressing being a commercial rent stabilization bill that would put in place protections against how much a landlord could raise the rent on commercial tenants, such as theatres. With a new City Council taking office in January 2022, if the bill does not pass into law before then it will have to start over in finding support in the Council.
Theaters make 41 percent of their revenue from ticket sales and venue rentals, according to a 2019 report from the New York City Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment. This revenue stream was almost completely dry for theatrical spaces during the pandemic.
This is the norm for smaller theater venues living with the realities of producing art alongside the pandemic. In another report from SMU DataArts, performing arts not only lost 18 percent of annual revenue in 2020, but they also had a 3 percent rise in expenses, most related to COVID safety requirements.
“Our costs have gone up to a certain degree, you know, basic costs related to COVID and COVID protocols have increased and created new line items and budgets that had not existed before the pandemic.” Said Erika Feldman, General Manager of the Daryl Roth Theatre. These costs include COVID-compliance training for staff, thermometer guns, and disposable masks just to name a few.
These costs are out of an abundance of safety and concern for the theater staff, the artists who use the space, and audiences. Feldman added, “we have a plethora of hand sanitizer anywhere you could go in this building.”
Feldman noted that even with higher operating costs for the theater itself, the rent for artists to use the space is remaining the same; there is a feeling that right now in the Off-Broadway community, that artists don’t need to deal with higher prices as they are also recovering from the pandemic.
The same SMU report also states that “The performing arts are further hampered by lower levels of Working Capital, only having liquidity to cover 2.1 months of expenses at the start of the crisis.”
This has become an issue for smaller venues that don’t own their spaces and now face the threat of back rent from landlords. At a September 19 City Council meeting for the Committee on Small Businesses, which includes a commercial rent stabilization bill that would help small theaters, several members from the theater community testified that the most pressing issue threatening small theaters is back rent.
The struggle between landlords and theatre owners is not a new one, as space is always so hard to come by in New York. The Chain Theatre lost its Long Island City venue in 2016 when the landlord unexpectedly broke the lease to turn the land into luxury apartments, leaving the Chain without a space to produce its art. Today, the Chain has a new space in Midtown but is still at the whims of its landlord unless new protections are put in place.
These smaller spaces are integral to New York theatre as they continue to be champions for young and diverse theatre makers attempting to make new and interesting art. Without these spaces, the artistic community loses an essential part of its structure.
The mounting struggles raise the question: Will small theaters survive without physical spaces? For the Off-Broadway community, the issue goes beyond rent. During the September 17 council meeting Olympia Kazi, of the NYC Artists Coalition distilled the problem, “We’re talking about life and death: The life and death of our neighborhoods; the life and death of our culture.”