The quiet economics of a season

If you’ve ever stood backstage on closing night and wondered who paid for all of this?, the honest answer is usually smaller than you’d think.

According to AACT’s 2023–2024 Community Theatre Trends survey, which gathered responses from 332 theaters across 48 states, 70.7% of community theaters operate on budgets under $250,000 a year — and the single largest group runs on less than $50,000. The “quarter-million-dollar season” is real for some, but it’s the exception. Most of this art form is made for the price of a used car.

Where the money comes from

The same survey found that half of community theaters rely primarily on earned income — ticket sales and class fees — while about a third run on an even mix of earned and contributed money, and only 14% lean mainly on donations and grants. The box office isn’t a nice-to-have; for most companies it is the budget.

And it mostly works. Coming out of the pandemic, three in four theaters reported a break-even or surplus year. But the margins are thin and thinning. Since 2019, 68% have seen expenses rise — royalties and rights especially — while ticket revenue hasn’t kept pace. Compared with 2019, 45% report total ticket sales have fallen, and over the past six years three-quarters have seen flat or declining season-subscription sales.

The part that’s harder to buy

Money is only half the ledger. The other half is people, and here the survey is blunt: while acting pools have largely held up — they grew for 40.7% of theaters this season — 45% reported a marked drop in tech and general volunteers, the crew and board members and the folks who hang lights and run concessions. Below a $100,000 budget, most theaters have no paid staff at all. The show runs on whoever shows up.

Asked to name their most critical challenge, theaters were clear: getting audiences to buy tickets came first, income second, and finding volunteers — actors and crew — third.

The two hardest things in community theater right now are filling the seats and filling the call sheet.

Seats and call sheets

The survey names audiences as the field’s top challenge and volunteers — actors and crew — as its third. They tend to sit at opposite ends of a producer’s worries, though they’re nearer to each other than that.

Filling a cast is partly a matter of reach — getting word to the right person at the right time. Every role left open pushes rehearsals later, which means more nights in the building, which means harder phone calls in week six, on a budget that, as we’ve seen, has no slack. It’s also a matter of keeping a company warm between shows, so that when the next audition goes up, someone is already there to answer it.

There’s a quieter thing underneath, too. Everyone who steps onstage brings a few people with them — a partner, a parent, the coworker who’ll drive an hour to see a familiar face under the lights. A fuller ensemble tends to mean a fuller house, not because anyone planned it that way, but because that is how small theaters have always drawn a crowd.

Which is to say the two hardest problems in a season — filling the seats and filling the call sheet — were never quite as separate as they look.

Sources

1. American Association of Community Theatre, Community Theatre Trends 2023–2024 (survey by Michael Cochran). https://aact.org/sites/default/files/spotlight/community_theatre_trends_2023-24.pdf