—And we?
—I beg your pardon?
—Where do we come in?
—Come in? On our hands and knees.
Samuel Beckett, playwright

According to statistics published in the New York Times and Fortune, more than $3 billion was spent last year on “everything from Bach and the Beatles to Shakespeare, Shaw, the opera … Peter, Paul, and Mary … Monet and Melville.” Consumer spending in the arts jumped 130% between 1953 and 1960—about “twice as fast as spending on all recreation and better than six times as fast as outlays for spectator sports.”

The information contained in the following tables is only the rawest of raw material, to be approached with awesome cautiousness. They are by no means comparisons of theatres, since often the same figure will mean different things to different theatres. Salaries, for example, in one instance may include the pittance paid to non-Equity extras, in another there may be no non-Equity to pay. Foundation grants may throw box-office percentages off. A proper sorting job would have required a particularly active computor—and it is being done by the 20th Century Fund for publication next year.

The figures have been gathered bit by bit from all over. In every case they have been checked with the director or business manager of the theatre involved, but only with imagination, intuition, and a certain amount of brashness can they be interpreted.

During the past ten years, a theatre modelled more on European patterns than on anything to be found in North America has arisen in Canada and has established itself in the principal cities—Vancouver, Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal, and Halifax—from coast to coast.

This European look is not surprising: of 11 Canadian Artistic Directors, five are European by birth, three are French-Canadians whose first influences in professional theatre came from France, and only three are English-speaking Canadians whose first experiences in theatre were “North American”—of these, one has been strongly influenced by observation of the English repertory system and a second by the work of the Berliner Ensemble; the third is a rugged individualist who runs Canada's only frankly profit-seeking producing organization. All the other theatres are non-profit organizations administered by professionals under the guidance of volunteer Community Boards of Governors.

Recently, while touring with a New York road company, I performed at a number of universities across the country. I saw splendid, expensive facilities at schools which are doing little either to train students for theatre work or to nurture future audiences. And I saw ambitious and active departments making do with whatever was around when they began their programs years ago. There is little correlation between the money spent on theatre programs and the uses to which facilities are put.

At the South Bend Campus of Indiana University, where theatrical activity is limited and where few students attend what productions there are, our road company played in an exquisite theatre with a costly lighting system so complex that the head of the theatre department confessed he had difficulty making use of it.

It is commonly assumed by those who discuss the theatre's present economic difficulties that there were no serious problems before 1929, when the talkies and the stock market crash brought prosperity to a sudden halt.

Actually, activity on the road began to drop sharply about 1910 and in the mid-twenties reached a point not far above the present level. Though the fact is sometimes acknowledged, the decline of the road is rarely seen in relation to the later decline on Broadway. I suggest that we ask whether both might have been brought about by the same causes.

The question has not been asked because it appears to us in retrospect that the economy of Broadway was sound in the years when the road was declining.

The theatre is an anachronism. Once the only form of dramatic entertainment, it now survives as a handicraft industry. What the assembly line did for automobiles, movies and television have done for drama. Like hand-woven sweaters, theatre has become a luxury that can be afforded only by a very few. And because its essence is live actors performing before a live audience, attempts to mechanize it are vain. Costs per spectator, and consequently ticket prices, will always be higher than movie admissions—and the aesthetic results more uncertain than in film. It is therefore a myth to suppose that the live theatre will ever be “popular.”

A number of other beliefs about the theatre are likewise myths. Articles proclaim that the “theatre is dying” or “costs are pricing the theatre out of existence.”

I know what wages beauty gives,
How hard a life her servant lives,
Yet praise the winters gone:
There is not a fool can call me friend,
And I may dine at journey's end
With Landor and with Donne.
—W. B. Yeats

The report of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Inc., published as The Performing Arts: Problems and Prospects (McGraw-Hill, 1965), is the product of two years’ labor by a committee. The report's porridge-like prose shows that each member of the committee exercised some editorial judgment. Yet the document is distinguished for its effort to reach beyond diagnosis toward some prescriptions.

The assessment of the theatre's current economic situation offered by the report is predictable: “ … no one expects Broadway to collapse. … But Broadway as we knew it … is being challenged, its audiences are turning elsewhere.” According to the Rockefeller report, the theatre's future lies outside New York, with non-profit professional groups. The report further concludes that “the non-profit performing arts should not be expected to pay their way at the box-office.”