Providence Black Rep is Working to Stay Out of the Red

On November 4^th at 5:03 p.m., The Providence Black Repertory Company's Artistic Director Donald King sent out a mass email that stated, in part: "In order to face the challenges ahead, Black Rep has made the difficult decision to furlough five staff positions and suspend two main stage productions for the remainder of the season."

The timing of the announcement was particularly bittersweet, as that evening Black Rep was hosting a non-partisan election night party and fundraiser. The good news: the U.S. elected Barack Obama to be our next president. The bad news: Black Rep could not see a way to continue its theater season.

There will be an enormous creative vacuum in the Providence art scene if our communities do not step up and support Black Rep. This season's first production of Bug, by Tracy Letts, was as good as any regional theater production I have seen. The productions that are currently affected by the suspension are A Time of Fire by Charles Mulekwa (February 5-March 8, 2009) and Gem of the Ocean by August Wilson (April 9- May 10, 2009).

I recently interviewed Don King so that I could better understand what changed for Black Rep and how it plans to deal with its current fiscal crisis. We began our conversation with a tour of the unfinished space on the second floor of 276 Westminster St., which Black Rep hopes will, one day, be its main-stage theater.

A condensed and edited transcript of our conversation follows:

Randy Rice: So I got your email and it is important to me that what happens here at Black Rep does not go unnoticed. I really want to know what changed for Black Rep in that you thought you were going to produce a full theater season and now you may not.

Donald King: What happened is that the world changed. I came to the cold, hard reality that the cavalry was not coming to save us. That, with this this collapse of the economy, this major bailout, [Black Rep] was not receiving the amount of corporate support we needed to produce our season.

RR: Was there financial support that went away?

DK: No. We were never getting the corporate support that we needed. We were scraping by and running our theater season at a loss believing that our comprehensive [fundraising] campaign would help lighten some of the burden. I specifically designed Sound Session, our seven day musical festival, to support our theater season. I had hoped that it would generate $75,000 to $100,000 a year to do that. It hasn't done that yet. We have been running Sound Session for five years. I have reason to believe that this year we may be able to do that.

RR: Last year, for the first time, Sound Session made a profit, right?

DK: Right. So we are on our way. But in the larger economy, major banks are laying off hundreds and thousands of people. Foxwoods just announced they were laying off 700 people. Like those organizations, I needed to look at laying off people. I initially thought that I may have to reduce staff seven people, but I ended up only having to reduce staff by five.

RR: Five out of how many employees?

DK: Five out of sixteen full-time employees. There are another twenty-five folks who work here on a part-time basis, as artists, as café staff, as bartenders. Those [part-time] positions have not been impacted. It is still a significant blow because many of the staff [furloughed] helped us produce theater at the quality and caliber that exists here at Black Rep.

RR: Your announcement was particularly troubling to me as your last production Bug was arguably one of the best pieces that I have seen at Black Rep. It was great theater. You came off of this really tremendous artistic piece and then had to suspend the season.

DK: Unfortunately, it did not do tremendously well commercially. It didn't make us any money. What is important for you to know is that we did not eliminate our relationship with Megan [Sandberg-Zakian, the director of Bug and former Associate Artistic Director of Black Rep]. Megan will continue to be connected with Black Rep. She has a brilliant career ahead of her and as far as I am concerned she will direct here [at Black Rep] every season that she wants to.

RR: That's good to know.

DK: The business side of the theater department could not continue to function with the model we were operating under. That had nothing to do with Megan. It is extremely difficult for us to identify corporate support that is needed. Megan is still working with us to create a model that will allow us to create theater that doesn't cost us as much as it currently costs us.

The unfortunate reality for me as executive director is that if I didn't make decisions to reduce staff, we could severely impact our organization‘s ability to survive. Changing Black Rep's relationship with Megan was one of the most difficult decisions I had to make in my entire career. It still makes no sense to me [that we couldn't keep her on staff]. She is super-smart, super-talented and understands and has supported my vision for Black Rep since she has been here. She has also done a great job positioning us as a pretty significant player in our local theater community. Though I am not sure if beyond that community people understand that we have been producing theater that is equal to the caliber of the other regional companies.

RR: I know that some past criticism of Black Rep is that you are, essentially, a non-profit nightclub. With the theater season suspended, are you worried that criticism might be true?

DK: I think that we are far from just being a non-profit nightclub.

When I have heard that criticism, I ask "What nightclub in this town takes young people from some of the poorest neighborhoods in this community, rehearses them on a weekly basis, teaches them music appreciation, introduces them to music that they may never have heard of from the African Diaspora, pays them to rehearse and then pays them to perform on a live stage every Saturday?" "What nightclub in this city has produced a seven-day music festival that brings over 50,000 people into the center of downtown and generates commerce and business for the restaurants and hotels?" "What nightclub in this city has done that and has done it at a loss for four of its five years?" "What nightclub has educational programs?" "What nightclub produces a publication like ‘Black Notes' with all of the humanities-based discussion and dialogue?" "Aside from our theater program what nightclub does any of those thing that we do, at a loss, to serve this community?"

If people know about all of the programs we do here at Black Rep and they still think that we are a non-profit nightclub, they should be ashamed of themselves. A lot of that criticism, in my opinion, is provincial. It took people from outside our city to come in [and look at our programs] and say to our state Arts Council "The café part of Black Rep makes sense."

RR: How much corporate sponsorship does the Black Rep receive annually for it theater program?

DK: Black Rep receives between $5,000 and $10,000 a year in sponsorships for our theater season, max. I can raise $125,00 for Sound Session. Sound Session is newer. Sound Session is only five years old. Our theater season is thirteen years old and I haven't been able to raise that kind of money. Citizen's Bank, who we love, supports our theater season and our Latin Jazz Series.

One of the reasons that we get 50,000 people at Sound Session is that one of our sponsors, Bank RI, pays for a billboard on Route 95. We are so thankful for the support Bank RI gives Sound Session. It would be great if we could get corporate sponsorship like that for our theater program. Then, you would see an increase in attendance.

We are aggressively working on trying to figure out how produce theater that doesn't put the entire organization in jeopardy.

RR: So what has to change?

DK: Part of what has to change is that we can no longer continue to produce shows that continue to show a loss up front. This may mean a reduction in artist fees, director fees, production costs. We try really hard to pay artists that work here a living wage. The people that work for us, the people in our community are not wealthy people who can do this as a hobby. If artists are going to come here and rehearse and perform they need to be compensated. For the remainder of this season, if it continues, I may ask people to work for less than they would usually work for here. We need to continue to pay our artists living wages.

We really need to look at sales and marketing. We need to find the funds somewhere to hire someone to work in our box office. As you just pointed out, our last show Bug was a great show with decent attendance, but a sales and marketing person would really be able to help us figure out how long that show needs to run in order to make its money back.

Another thing we are looking at is ‘presenting' works as part of our season. As we learn how to produce more, we would also find creative ways in which to present. When we started Black Rep two of our first shows were presentations, The Huey P. Newton Story, which we did at PPAC and had three to four hundred people, two nights in a row. Monk and Bud ran for eight weeks when we first opened Black Rep. Those shows did extremely well for us because we did not have the burden of producing them. All we had to do was sell tickets.

Our mission is to produce and present works within the African-American tradition. What we are going to be looking is going out nationally and finding shows that we think would do well within this community and present them. Presenting them would give us an opportunity to develop our audiences and sales and marketing. We will not stop producing our own work. We are exploring whether or not the model of doing some presenting will provide us with more resources to produce at, maybe, break-even. If we can present at a profit and produce at a break-even, combined with Sound Session, this may be a ways to make this organization work more efficiently. All of this is theoretical right now.

RR: Presenting, as opposed to producing, is less staff-intensive, less artist-intensive and ideally more lucrative. Is it less artistically fulfilling for the organization?

DK: It depends. Some of the stuff that that comes out of, say, Brooklyn Academy of Music or The St. Louis Black Repertory Company that I would be honored to have as a part of our season. I was proud to present the two shows that we presented early on.

There are other ideas that Megan and I are looking at to increase the volume of theater that we are doing. We are looking at the possibility of more one-acts or shorter runs. We are looking at [curtain] times. Do we want to look at producing some shows at 10:00 p.m. for the people who come out to the café? We are looking at ways to present more theater. Everything is under consideration.

RR: When do you think that Black Rep will be making a decision about when or if you will continue your theater season.

DK: We have subscribers and we want to honor. Many of our artists have expressed a willingness to work at reduced pay to make sure it happens. I think that within 10 days we will be able to make an announcement about the suspension of the theater season. On the record, it is likely that Time of Fire is going to happen. Later today, Megan and I are meeting with folks from Brown University and Rites and Reasons Theatre. They have all expressed an interest in making sure that play is produced. Then we go on to figure out whether or not we can produce Gem of the Ocean.

For more information about the Providence Black Repertory Company visit www.blackrep.org