Recession Takes Toll on Nonprofit Theaters : * Stage: An annual survey says about half of the nation's nonprofit theaters ended the 1990-91 season in the red.

By JUDITH MICHAELSON

March 26, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

New Theatre of Brooklyn closed in January, 1991, after seven seasons. Founder Deborah J. Pope is convinced the recession played a major role in her theater’s demise. “When you see patterns of attendance go down like we did, and when you see patterns of individual giving--which had always been up up up up--when you see that dipping down below the inflation level,” you know, she said.

There are two kinds of cultural institutions that can survive a recession, Pope suggested: the very large institutions with budgets of $1 million or more, which can cut back a production here, a program there, and the very small, newer organizations “fueled by blood and guts and idealism and just chutzpah”--as her theater had been.

But as a theater grows, “the unions start pressuring you, printers’ costs go up, lighting bills go up.”

Across the country the individual stories are different but the underlying motif is the same: According to the annual survey of Theatre Communications Group, the nation’s nonprofit theaters are “now firmly in the grip of the economic recession,” and about half of them ended the 1990-1991 season in the red.

For the first time since the survey began in 1973 audience attendance among a representative sample of 56 theaters was down from the previous year.

Peter Zeisler, executive director of Theatre Communications, a New York-based service organization for the nation’s 330 professional nonprofit theaters, said “the theater industry is not even treading water. We really took a step backward, and, remember, these are ’91 figures so ’92 has to be worse.”

At least six theaters in the fiscal year beginning July, 1990, closed, bringing the number of theaters that have died over the past five survey years to about two dozen--the highest for a five-year period, says the report’s author, Barbara Janowitz.

Janowitz, director of management services for Theatre Communications, called 1991 “a terrible year” and the number of institutions going under “staggering.”

In San Francisco, the 20-year-old Eureka Theatre Company, with an annual budget of $675,000, was forced to cease operations earlier this month. Debra J. Ballinger, producing artistic director, who insists the cessation is “temporary,” cited several reasons including “the recession and other related financial issues such as cuts in government funding.”

At 13-year-old Manhattan Punch Line, which is struggling to stay alive, founder Steve Kaplan explained that in better economic times, foundations and corporate givers used to “seed the garden” of cultural activities spreading the largess around, “but now because they have limited resources themselves, their idea is to make the stronger plants survive.”

Punch Line, which exclusively does comedy, is now down to a “bare-bones” operation, according to Kaplan. Instead of four productions a year, he’s now doing one, a festival of one-act plays scheduled for June, and Kaplan says he is thinking of “transplanting to Los Angeles.”

Punch Line’s last performance was last year’s festival “and we also produced a year of cabaret theater in a local restaurant,” Kaplan noted, but the “restaurant went out of business over the summer.” In recent months, three of Punch Line’s board went bankrupt.

“As theaters across the U.S. concentrate on surviving the economic downturn . . .,” the report notes, “they are paying for their survival in human and artistic terms--in the loss of full-time employment for artists, administrators, and production/technical personnel; in scaled-back touring activity that erodes the theaters’ outreach efforts and in reduced opportunities for developmental workshops and staged readings that are the source of new works for the American theater.”

Altogether, 184 theaters participated in the latest survey, and 90 of them reported deficits. Zeroing in on 56 theaters that participated in the survey over the past five years the report also found:

* Curtailed production and performance activity along with increased ticket prices contributed to the first attendance decline in nearly 20 years. Resident, booked-in and touring productions played to 3.6% fewer total audience members than the year before.

* Expenses grew 4.8%--faster than income, and outpacing the 4.5% inflation rate for the year. Income, falling short of inflation for the first time in the last five years, rose only 3.4% over the previous year. This gap accounted for a collective operating deficit of $2.5 million.

* Earned income, primarily from ticket sales, rose only 1.9%, significantly behind the 9% and 12.2% growth of the previous two years.

Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum, with a budget just under $10 million, had a deficit of $150,000 in fiscal ‘90-’91, reports Karen Wood, general manager, primarily from the falloff of business generated by its costume shop, “and that’s continued into this fiscal year.”

The recession is also affecting box office, she said: “People are going out less and they’re coming downtown less, and we’re feeling it.”

To offset the losses, the Taper dropped its Taper Too season this year.

Ironically, noted Zeisler, Hartford Stage in Connecticut is “flourishing” despite the region’s “terrible economic problems.”

In 1990-91, with a $3.6-million budget, income outstripped expenses by $80,000. Managing Director David Hawkanson attributes Hartford’s success to “the major belt-tightening” begun six years ago “after three tough years of operating losses and decline in attendance. . . . As everyone else was getting fat, we were getting lean and mean.”

The Bottom Lines: A 5-Year Look at U.S. Theaters INCOME:

In millions 1987:

Contributed Income: $59.8

Earned Income: $96.1

‘88:

Contributed Income: 64.4

Earned Income: 102.1

‘89:

Contributed Income: 72.3

Earned Income: 114.5 ‘90:

Contributed Income: 78.1

Earned Income: 124.8 ‘91: