Lucy Gellman Photo
Ingui.
Long Wharf Theatre is facing the financial stress that theaters across the country feel as they remain dark during the Covid-19 pandemic. As a theater committed to social justice, it is also figuring out how best to play a role in the country’s reckoning with racism. But “we feel good about the future of Long Wharf,” said Managing Director Kit Ingui.
“We’ve had our eyes on our sustainability and survival long before Covid came,” she continued. Since last year, theater leadership had been working on “creating a model that would allow the theater to thrive and continue on. This crisis just reminded us how essential that work is.”
Before the pandemic, Long Wharf Theatre, like many theaters, was facing a tough economic landscape for the arts, an aging population of theatergoers, and a sense of needing to revamp the way the theater operated. As the Arts Paper reported in April, with the Covid-19 outbreak and government-mandated shutdowns, Long Wharf cancelled the rest of its season — losing, according to Ingui, an estimated $750,000 in revenue — ended seasonal contracts early, furloughed five employees, and eliminated eight full-time staff positions. https://www.newhavenarts.org/arts-paper/articles/two-theaters-navigate-a-new-normal
Padrón.
Now, with both of Long Wharf’s stages dark, Ingui and Artistic Director Jacob G. Padrón are looking to use the pandemic as a way to reshape the theater, both financially and in the role it can play in New Haven’s community. “If there was ever a time to refashion and reconstruct what a theater can do for the community, now is the time,” Padrón said.
“There has to be some cost reduction” overall, Ingui said. “As we are reckoning with a model that hasn’t provided much stability, we’ve been working on creating stability, and our hope is that you’ll see that over the coming months.” A leaner and meaner approach can make the theater more resilient to the problems that theaters dealt with before the pandemic — say, when a show doesn’t perform financially to expectations, or when a foundation grant doesn’t come in. At the same time, she and Padrón are asking: “What are ways that we can change the dollars we can spend without sacrificing the art?”
Part of the restructuring is about reducing overhead costs as well as rental and storage expenses, moving money “away from bricks and mortar and toward the creation of art,” Ingui said, with the “ultimate intention of making sure that we are compensating folks,” she added, “even if there are fewer folks.”
They are also looking into “maximizing the vibe of being in a full theater” by using Stage 2, Long Wharf’s smaller stage, more. “We really like that space,” Ingui said.
As Long Wharf’s leadership is thinking leaner in some ways, they are thinking grander in others.
“One of the things that we’re committed to is, how do we be more responsive to changes in the world?” Ingui said. “How do we actually think big in new ways? How can we be bold in our experimentation?” Padrón said. “How can be galvanize the community and be a part of a movement for equity and justice?”
Padrón was named artistic director in 2018 proclaiming just such a message. The current political situation has shown his viewpoint to be prescient. “We’re at a critical moment where art and storytelling have a role to play in terms of healing and reconciliation and rebuilding our democracy,” he said.
In May Long Wharf received a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in support of UNIVERSES, a New York-based ensemble of writers and performers of color “who fuse theatre, poetry, dance, jazz, hip hop, politics, down home blues, and Spanish boleros to create moving, challenging, and entertaining works for the stage,” according to Long Wharf’s official announcement. Over the next three years, UNIVERSES and Long Wharf staff will collaborate “to develop creative projects for and with members of the Greater New Haven community.” Long Wharf also finished collecting stories for this year’s iteration of the New Haven Play Project. Near-future activities include taking part in the Play at Home project, an initiative involving several prominent theaters across the country; a reading of The Good Person of New Haven, adapted from Berthold Brecht’s The Good Person of Szechuan; the continued development of the partnership with Collective Consciousness Theatre that Long Wharf announced in the spring; and, in the fall, taking virtual the Artistic Congress, a national initiative to improve inclusivity in the theater. The congress, Ingui said, will allow theater professionals to “talk about how art and activism can live side by side — and help rebridge and heal during a devastating year.”
Long Wharf is also planning deeper collaborations with the New Haven community. “We don’t have a lot of details and that’s by design,” Padrón said. “Kit and I thought to ourselves, ‘if we say that we want to be a theater company formed by the community, why don’t we just give ourselves over to the community?”
These ideas fall under the title of One City, Many Stages. “We’re one city, but we can conjure many stories,” Ingui said. “We want to create a movement in partnership with Collective Consciousness and other organizations throughout the city.”
Especially if pandemic restrictions mean that the theater must remain dark in the fall — which seems a distinct possibility — this may involve Long Wharf mounting productions in the fall that aren’t at the theater at all. “Rather than people come to Sargent Drive, we can come to you,” Padrón said. “Being itinerant,” making use of outdoor spaces, possibility including parking lots — “these are all the ways that a stage can bring people together. Storytelling and theater can happen anywhere.”
“New Haven itself has such a rich tradition of activism,” he continued. “Can Long Wharf be a leader in that movement?”
“I think you’ll see it next season,” Ingui said, “how we can really center community partnership.”
Looking at the parallel crises of the pandemic and America’s sharp reckoning with racism, Padrón noted that “some of the best theater comes out of the social justice movement. It comes out of a critical conversation that we need to have.” That great art and politics could go hand in hand was both obvious and crucial. Padrón nodded to Hamilton and its overt political viewpoint, or to a play like Tony Kushner’s masterpiece, Angels in America, among countless others. “When you look at the body of work, it comes out of a moment like the one that we’re in,” Padrón said. “Theater and art cannot be neutral,” Quoting author and activist Adrienne Maree Brown, he said, “I think you are either advancing or regressing justice.”
Moreover, the goals of social justice can be met, Padrón said, while retaining the theater as “a space that is joyful…. The theater can do all of it. It can be a space to hold all of it.”
