The Other Side of Summer

Stuart Miller, American Theatre

Snakes on the sidewalk. No, it’s not a new Samuel L. Jackson movie. The snakes are real, and are just one of the seemingly endless challenges facing summer theatre companies and festivals as they struggle toward recovery after 2020. Snakes—and skunks and bears, oh my—are showing up in theatre communities as their habitats shrink, giving the artistic and managing directors of these companies just one more thing to worry about.

Theatre is suffering from “long Covid,” said Utah Shakespeare Festival executive managing director Michael Bahr, speaking not literally about the virus but about its long-tail aftereffects. Added Utah Shakes artistic director John DiAntonio, summer theatres are “being tested about how essential our art is to our community.”

Morgan Manfredi, managing director of Creede Repertory Theatre in Colorado, agreed, saying the pandemic not only led to burnout, it “laid bare everything theatres have been struggling with for years.”

Oregon Shakespeare Festival staved off financial ruin only with a blast of emergency fundraising; in Wisconsin, American Players Theatre ran a deficit for the first time in 30 years and expects to do so for at least five years; and in Massachusetts, the Williamstown Theatre Festival severely curtailed its season after controversy exploded over staffers and interns feeling abused and exploited.

Bahr said that many theatres, including his, were excited to simply jump back in as the Covid crisis eased, but soon found “fissures in the system. This crisis showed us where the leaks were, but we didn’t immediately take the lesson that you can’t continue doing business as usual.”

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