cc >> Jeanan Yasiri Moe: This is
Entrepreneurship in Society. It is a course that's offered
through the University of Wisconsin School of Human
Ecology. I'm Jeanan Yasiri Moe.
As we begin today, I'd like to extend thanks to our partners in
producing this course, the UW Office of Corporate Relations,
the UW College of Engineering for their technical support, and
financial support that is provided from the Ewing Marion
Kauffman Foundation based out of Kansas City, Missouri.
Today I also want to thank our media partners, Wisconsin Public
Television and their University Place crew for taping today's
lecture. We're very pleased to introduce
a special guest today, Jennifer Uphoff Gray, artistic director
of Forward Theater Company based here in Madison, Wisconsin.
Forward is a new enterprise to Madison, very popular as
Jen will tell us, and they have performances that are based in
Overture Center. The enterprise was started in
2009. Jen recently directed
"A Thousand Words," "The Farnsworth Invention,"
"Moonlight in Magnolias ," "In the Next Room,"
and "Why Torture is Wrong," as well as
the "People Who Love Them" for Forward Theater Company.
Her other credits include working with the national tour
of Copenhagen, associate director of "Copenhagen,"
"Cabaret," "The Blue Room" starring Nicole Kidman,
and "The Life on Broadway ." Her off-Broadway work
includes productions in both New York City and South Korea.
Jen holds a degree in dramatic literature and stage history
from Harvard College, and she joins us today to talk about the
intersection between artistic endeavor and entrepreneurship.
Please join me in welcoming Jennifer Uphoff Gray.
[APPLAUSE]
Jennifer Uphoff Gray: Thank you so much.
Everyone can hear me? Good.
Well, I am going to talk to you a little bit today about Forward
Theater Company and our founding here in Madison three years ago
and a little bit about the advanced planning and thinking
and strategizing that went into both the formation of our
company and our subsequent growth.
I will start by saying that it had never been a career plan of
mine to start a theater company. I loved theater as an adolescent
and went off to college, however, planning to go to law
school and become Wisconsin's first female senator.
So I thank goodness every day for my parents who did not freak
out when I called them from Harvard to say I'm not going to
law school, I'm going to pursue a career in the theater.
I'm sure some of you can imagine how that might have gone, but
they were great. And I went, after school, spent
a dozen years directing in New York City before moving back
here in 2005 with my family and beginning a freelance directing
career here. If you'll let me indulge in a
little theatrical metaphor, I'm going to set the scene for the
conditions here in Madison in 2009, actually, March of 2009,
almost exactly three years ago when we started Forward.
So Madison Repertory Theatre, which was Madison's only
professional theater company, closed in the middle of its 40th
anniversary season for a variety of reasons, and in the previous
six months leading up to that, two other professional theater
companies in southern Wisconsin had also closed: Milwaukee
Shakespeare Company in Milwaukee and the New Court Theatre in
Beloit. And, as I'm sure you're aware,
that was when the economy was really going in the tank
quickly. And arts groups all over were
struggling, and a group of theater professionals that live
in southern Wisconsin gathered, literally, around the kitchen
table and said what can we do? If we don't do something, if
somebody doesn't do something, there's going to be no work for
theater professionals in southern Wisconsin, and
everyone's going to have to leave or give up the field.
And that was certainly what we were hoping would not happen.
So this group that gathered, we were playwrights, directors,
actors, technicians, designers, and we were trying to pool our
histories in the theater, both in southern Wisconsin and
nationally, and our experience with different companies in what
had worked and what had not worked to see if there wasn't a
way that we could create a company here in Madison that
would be uniquely suited to this community but tap the lessons
that we've learned in places all over the country.
And by the time we all got up from the table, Forward Theater
Company had been born. We'd named ourselves, we'd come
up with an initial plan for the first few months, and we'd
developed a mission statement. And our mission was pretty
straightforward. It's to create and artistic home
for Wisconsin theater professionals that expands and
enhances the cultural and economic life of the greater
Madison area. So what does that mean?
Basically three elements to that.
The first is this idea of creating and artistic home.
So what do we mean by that? Well, step one was to build on
the assets that we already have here in the region.
There's a vibrant community of theater professionals that have
chosen to make their homes in and around the Madison area.
There's actors, designers, playwrights, some of whom work
in Spring Green at American Players Theatre half the year.
There's a very dynamic theater professional community in
Milwaukee, Beloit as well, and some who live right here in
Madison either affiliated with the university or not.
And there's an incredibly avid audience base for theater here
in Madison. And folks support a broad
spectrum of theater from community theaters, national
touring companies, APT, campus theater, etc.
There's a world-class facility for the performing arts here in
Madison at the Overture Center, including the beautiful
Playhouse theater which was home to the Madison Repertory
Theatre, a 335 seat thrust configuration space with really
state-of-the-art technology. And there's incredible
professional training programs in this area through
the UW-Madison's Department of Theatre and Drama, Edgewood,
MATC, the Bolz Center here on campus for arts administration.
So there's a lot of new professional theater talent
that's being educated right here in town as well.
So we wanted to be a home base for those artists who wanted to
build a life here in the Madison area or to continue their life
here in the Madison area and to continue their careers in the
theater as well. That's the home base part.
The next part is expanding the cultural life of the Madison
area. So there's a lot going on here.
Overture Center, community theaters, educational theaters,
music, opera, dance, visual art, writers, etc.
And all of those things are very well represented in this
community. I think there's an incredibly
high amount of art that happens for a city this size, but there
was no local professional theater once the Rep was gone,
and that was a pretty gaping hole we thought, not just for
the professionals who wanted to do that kind of work, but, more
importantly, for the audience that would be interested in
seeing that kind of work. So if you look for theater
companies outside of Overture and outside the professional
realm, there was plenty, but there was a very specific thing
that wasn't available. So when we were first meeting
around that table, we were focusing on that missing link,
professional, locally produced theater.
And different people could define that in different ways,
but we defined it as theater that showcases the talents of
people who've dedicated their professional lives to the craft,
who've built the experience and the credentials working in the
theater. It's theater with a very high
caliber of physical production in terms of the design elements,
the sets, the costumes, the lighting, things that you can
really tell the difference in a professionally staged
production. And it also means access for
Madison audiences to the great new plays that are coming out of
New York, on and off Broadway, out of Chicago, out of Seattle,
plays that wouldn't be available for an amateur company to
produce for a number of years but that are part of the current
cultural conversation in the country.
So looking at what Madison audiences could find and what
they couldn't find, we set a couple of goals for that first
year. One was that we were going to
present a broad spectrum of work that would reflect our position
as the only professional company in town.
We didn't want to overly limit ourselves to a very specific
type of theater. We also set very pragmatic
financial goals to start that first season with a full
production, a couple of special one-night events, and to grow
very carefully and responsibly in our fiscal planning so that
we could be around for more than one season.
And then our third goal was to open and then, more importantly,
sustain a dialog with our community and with the audience
and to make sure that we were constantly checking in to be
sure that we're serving a need and that that need may evolve
over time and we need to be continually listening to make
sure that we remain responsive and open to the patrons who come
to see our work. So we've done that in a couple
of ways. We started that very first year
with an open forum that we hosted at one of the public
libraries, and we basically said anybody who wants to come and
ask us questions or hear from us about what we've been doing,
show up and talk to us, and it can be about the plays we
choose, it can be about the ticket prices, when and where we
do our performances, what have you.
And we've been doing one of those every year.
We do talk backs after every performance.
We do pre-show lectures. We do all kinds of other
outreach events in order to make sure that we're continually
talking to the audience. And I have to say, I love this
city. I love this community.
The engagement, the level of engagement in those
conversations has been just incredibly high, and sometimes
two-thirds of the audience will stick around for the talk backs
after the show, and it really gives us a wonderful opportunity
to hear directly from the audience how they're responding
to the work that we're creating. So creating a home base,
expanding the cultural life, the other part of that was expanding
the economic life of the greater Madison area, and it's really
important to understand that the arts do that in very, very
concrete ways. There was a federal study done a
couple of years ago that said there are about two million
Americans who will list their profession as artists, and there
were a couple of other interesting observations from
that report. Compared to other US workers,
American artists tend to be better educated and more
entrepreneurial. American artists have learned to
be creative not merely in their chosen fields but also in how
they manage their lives. From global exports to local
investments, the new American economy depends on imagination,
innovation, and creativity. Those are the skills that
artists develop and nurture and promote.
So artists will gravitate to those areas and communities that
have employment possibilities from cultural institutions and
who have creative industries, and it becomes this snowballing
effect. You attract artists, they help
build the economy that helps create more opportunity for the
artists. And the city of Madison and its
surrounding communities have been, I think, very aware of the
importance of the creative class in our community's development.
So they've been supportive in many forms ranging from the
establishment of the Overture Center and through local
granting and long-term municipal planning.
So we've got this great physical plant with the facilities here
in town, but now the city is looking a little more at how to
nurture the infrastructure that can help support arts
employment, arts opportunities. So, in terms of what we've been
doing with Forward and our contributions to the local
economy, it's really pretty inspiring for us to think about
because, of course, this buy local mantra that we hear so
much about applies just as much with your entertainment dollars
as it does with anything else. And even just in our very first
season when we did that one full production, we hired, what, I
think 70 local artists or service people or craftspeople
to work on our shows, and about $75,000 went directly back into
the local economy because of our focus on hiring local talent and
using local businesses to provide the goods that we needed
in our productions. Now, that number has grown
significantly since the first year.
We're in the middle of our third season now, and it's about
$400,000 that's going into the local economy and that's just
the direct contribution. It doesn't factor in things like
the city of Madison collecting on parking fees downtown and
State Street businesses collecting from people dining
out before or after the show. So we're really committed to
continuing to think of what our role is here in the city and the
ways in which we can help the local economy to grow because
that makes our job easier. It makes it easier for us to
fund raise and find audience members that we can identify.
So one thing that I would love to tell you a little bit about
in terms of our planning and how we built the company is this
idea of when we started the company learning from things
that we'd seen in other theaters and arts groups around the
nation. And what had we seen work and
where had we seen companies get into trouble.
And, inevitably, when there was trouble it stemmed from two kind
of interrelated problems. First is that age old issue
where communication breaks down. And in the arts it's when it
breaks down between the artistic management and the financial
management of a company. And the other sort of related
problem that we'd seen over and over again is the problems that
arise when the artistic goals and the financial
responsibilities get out of balance.
We were a pretty pragmatic group getting together around that
kitchen table, and we all felt really strongly that if you
ignore the financial realities of the world in which you're
creating your art, you aren't going to be creating that are
for very long. But we also felt that if you
focus only on the bottom line and don't think about doing
exciting, bold, challenging, creative work, your audience
isn't going to care so much about what you're doing.
And so we didn't want to see happening with Forward what we'd
seen in many other companies where these two competing needs
get out of whack, and then, inevitably, it leads to the
downfall of the company itself. And we thought, well, is there
something we could do differently?
You can say, well, we won't let that happen to us, but that
doesn't tend to be a very effective strategy in the long
run, and what we ultimately came up with is an operating
structure that we think is pretty unique, at least we don't
know of anybody else working like this.
And our company has a three-legged governance
structure that we're really very proud of here in season three.
It's been working very well. And in a lot of ways I like to
think we're sort of modeled on the federal government and the
checks and balances. So you've got your staff, headed
by myself, currently, as the artistic director, and we're
sort of the executive branch. We're responsible for the day to
day operations, the day to day decision making of the company.
And we have our board of directors, and they're sort of
our legislative branch. They have the power of the
purse. They're responsible for the
long-term fiscal and legal oversight of our company and
making sure that we have the resources that we need, making
sure that we're making decisions in a fiscally responsible way.
And then we have this third branch that's the sort of unique
part of Forward. And we call it our advisory
company. And that company is made up
mostly of the people who were around that table that first
night. It's professional theater
artists that live in and around our community.
And they are like the judicial branch.
They're responsible for artistic oversight of the company and
making sure that Forward doesn't become a group that's just what
I want to see on stage because we're trying to serve a broader
community, not one artistic vision.
And we'd seen companies where you can get an artistic director
and saying I want to do an entire season of Chekhov, and
maybe that is a good idea for your community and maybe it's
not. And we thought you really need
to have more voices involved, particularly in a community like
this one where there's going to be only one professional
company. If you're in New York and
there's 35 professional theater companies, yes you want to
narrow your niche a little bit more than that.
But for Madison it really seemed that we wanted to have a much
broader spectrum of artistic taste and input.
So in addition to having those three branches we've mandated
different paths of communications between them.
A member of the board of directors sits ex officio on our
advisory company and vice versa, and we've put in some very
specific responsibilities. The advisory company has to vote
in favor of the proposed season each year.
They also, the board can't fire me without talking to the
advisory company about it. Ultimately, they can do it if
they want to, but they have to hear from the artists and hear
what the artistic ramifications of those big decisions might be
before they can take action. So that's something that's been,
I think, a very progressive idea that we've implemented, and it
seemed to suit this community very well, and I think the
responses to the programing choices that we've made has born
that out, and that's definitely been as a result of the
conversations we've had between the three branches of our
company. Another thing we've been working
really hard on since our founding is collaborative
partnerships with other organizations around Madison and
around the state. This season so far everything
we've done has been as a result of a partnership.
We opened with Farnsworth Invention in the fall, and that
was a partnership with the Department of Theatre and Drama
here on campus. We just closed in February a
production of a world premiere script by a Madison playwright
called "A Thousand Words," and that was done in conjunction
with Milwaukee Chamber Theatre, and the production was developed
here, ran here for three weeks and then moved to Milwaukee and
ran as part of their season. That was a great way for us to
share our costs and also bring the work to a much wider
audience. And just last weekend we had the
first part of this season's new play development series which
was a new script about the bombing of Sterling Hall on
campus that was created by the Wisconsin Story Project.
And so doing those kinds of partnerships has been another
way that we've been trying to tap the other creative voices
and the other established institutions here in our
community both to reach a broader audience, to piggyback
onto established structures that those organizations already had.
We're still very brand new in terms of our infrastructure.
So that's been a great way for us to get our work up in a way
that's feasible for us. So one thing that's important to
know, professional theater is very expensive.
It costs a lot of money to put on.
And one reason that we've been able to have the level of
success we've had so far is that there's been such community
investment in what we're trying to do, and not just from the
very generous granting institutions and individual
donors and corporate sponsors who've been incredibly helpful
in getting us up off the ground, but from the artists themselves
who have all been working for less money than they would make
somewhere else, some place more established, because they're
invested in this idea of creating an artistic home here
in Madison. So we've committed on our end
to paying everybody a little more every season until we're
paying rates that are comparable to other companies,
but there's no question that without the investment and
personal commitment from the people that you see on stage and
the people doing the design work and the staff of our
organization we wouldn't be able to do any of this.
So one quote that I do want to share with you that was very
influential for us when we were first getting started was from a
writer named Chris Jones who wrote a piece in the Chicago
Tribune about six months after the economy started to really
plummet. And he wrote, "The arts help you
see the transience of crisis, remove you to more pleasant
spots, help you believe that everything will be all right.
And they get you all fired up and ready to take a risk.
And the arts that matter most in the Midwest are the arts that
live in the Midwest. They are our sources of
education, enlightenment, and, perhaps most important of all,
pride in our hometowns. For the arts that live in your
town don't just invite passive consumption, they demand an
intoxicating blend of listening, participating, conversing."
And that was something that we felt really strongly about.
There was no end of the number of people who thought that we
were insane for trying to start a non-profit arts group in the
midst of the worst recession in decades, but I think because
that was the context, I think that's the reason that we've had
such a successful first three years that we have.
I think people have recognized that they need the arts and they
need thoughtful, provoking, challenging arts to get
everybody thinking and to get everybody engaged and fired up.
So I think it's, in some ways, served us well that we were
getting going during a recession.
What I would really love to do is actually turn it over now to
your questions because that's the sort of overview of what
we're doing, and I'd really love to tailor any other information
I give you to what you would like to know.
The students know that I hand off the microphone
to whoever raises their hand and has a question.
I'm going to start by asking the first one, as I suggested
I might, Jen. You talked about kind of the
genesis of Forward Theater Company and folks getting around
at a kitchen table and such, and then you also just described
developing the mission of the organization and the key
components associated with that, how important was that process
of developing the mission, coming to consensus on those
points, to helping you achieve what you really intended to
deliver in the end? >> That's a great question.
Well, it was very important. Our mission statement has not
been rewritten in our three years of existence, which I
think is not that typical because we really tried to get
it exactly right. But because we kept the mission
sort of tight and not overly-- tight may be the wrong word,
but we tried to be specific about our big goals but not
about lots of little goals underneath because we wanted to
be able to get out and listen to the community and see what
people needed, but by focusing on being an artistic home,
improving the cultural options in our community, contributing
to the economy in our community we thought, well we all agreed
on that fairly quickly. We wrote our mission statement
at that very first table meeting, and it hasn't changed
since then, but it has been the guiding principle in everything
we've done and every decision we've made since then.
So you revisit it pretty regularly as a team.
We do. We were doing a lot of strategic
planning over this past year. We finally have enough capacity
to start to talk about what our capacity might be.
And so we always go back to that big mission, and then we think
of our bylaws as sort of our constitution.
If we're going to continue the federal government idea, the
bylaws are the constitution telling us how we're going to
operate, and what we've been starting to focus on the last
six months or so is refining our values a little bit more.
I'm calling it our Bill of Rights and sort of laying out
these are the things we believe that overly tie our hands in
long-term planning in a way that doesn't allow us to be
responsive to the community but that lays down some sort of
fundamental principles of why we do what we do and how we're
going to serve our community. >> Hi, I'm Matt.
Hi. >> Thank you for being here.
My pleasure. >> So I'm very interested in all
matters abroad, and I know you did a film festival
in South Korea, the Chuncheon International Film Festival.
I was hoping you could talk a little bit about that
experience, what you liked, disliked, what work you had in
it. >> Sure.
Cultural juxtapositions. >> Sure.
Were you understood. >> Sure.
Actually, it was a theater festival.
This was in the mid-'90s. I was a few years out of
college, and the government in South Korea had built this huge
new performing arts complex in Chuncheon.
And they wanted to celebrate that by having an international
theater festival, and they sought out representatives from
different countries all over the world to bring theater
representing their communities or their countries.
I had directed a production that was invited to be the US
representative at that festival. And it was wild.
We were there for a week. I felt like I almost never left
the convention center because I was just seeing everybody's
show. We were very conspicuous as the
Americans there, so a lot of the other companies would do their
show and see a few others and then go out and sightsee, but we
all felt like somehow we were the big dogs, being the American
company, and our absence would be missed if we weren't there.
So we saw everything. And it was great.
I was really wild to see. Most of the pieces were not in
English. It was a great experience for
me, just as an artist, to get to see Japanese theater,
Russian theater, German theater, African theater.
It was pretty cool. It was pretty cool.
Hi, Jennifer. I'm Darian.
Thanks for being here. So my question is that, being a
non-profit, what are some ways that you get donors, funding,
and do you guys do any creative strategies for getting those
donors? Do you do fundraising events?
And, also, since there are some other non-profits within the
community, do you find that you're ending up sharing some of
those donors across those boundaries?
Great question about where our funding comes from.
We get our resources from a variety of different sources.
Obviously, the biggest one is ticket sales, and we're about
40% of our revenues come from ticket sales which is actually
pretty good in this industry. It's a number we're really proud
of in season three to be hitting 40%.
We get some money from grants from local granting
organizations, and as we get to be an older company we actually
become more eligible for other sources of grant money which is
great because our budgets are going to keep going up.
We do have special events. We have one sort of signature
event that we started in our first season that's been really
well received, and so we're continuing that and having that
be our big bang event every fall which we call Feast Forward, and
it's a sort of unique kind of event that people have gotten
very excited about. And then, yeah, it comes to
individual donors. We do a lot of the traditional
things. We have a place when people
subscribe and fill out their season ticket order form,
there's a place where they can say, oh, I want to contribute on
top of that, and a really healthy number of folks do that.
We send letters to single ticket buyers after they come and see
one of our shows asking if they would be interested in a
contribution. And then we try to do just a lot
of donor cultivation events and have a lot of opportunities for
people who are potentially able to contribute very significantly
on an individual level, and we'll have opportunities for
them to come and watch a rehearsal or come and do a
backstage tour with me or someone else from the company
afterward and trying to kind of come up with fun and interesting
ways for people to get to know us and get to know what we do.
And as far as competing, yes and no.
I think that Madison's a small enough community that the number
of people who are philanthropically involved in
the arts isn't enormous. And I would guess that most of
them do give to a variety of different institutions.
I don't think of it so much as competing.
Our philosophy all along has been that rising tide lifts all
boats. It seems to be true.
We've been doing very well in terms of individual donations,
and it doesn't appear to me that the other arts organizations in
town are losing an equivalent amount of money.
And we've actually been really strategizing ways that we can
help collaborate in fundraising. For example, we're really proud,
we were just named a resident company at Overture Center about
two weeks ago which is a very big landmark for us.
And we've been working with Overture to say, hey, maybe
there are ways we could do a joint fundraiser because your
health is good for us and our health is good for you, and we
should talk to our donors about the fact that it's great to
support both Overture and Forward, that we're not
competing for dollars, we're collaborating for dollars.
So hopefully that answers your question.
I'm going to ask a question about the advisory committee
that you mentioned. We've had different folks come
in, other entrepreneurs, and they've talked about their board
of advisers and people who've advised them.
Can you describe, not necessarily a name unless you
choose to, but what kinds of points of intelligence or value,
what backgrounds that your board is made up of because I'm going
to guess it's not necessarily just a board of artists.
Maybe not? >> Well, the advisory company is
a board of artists. So we have our board of
directors, and that's coming from all different aspects.
We have people from the university.
We have people from the local hospital.
We've got folks from local non-profits, from the
government, law firms, banks. We've got a really nice diverse
board of directors from all aspects of the industries here
in Madison which is great. They're united by their passion
for theater and for what we're trying to do in the community.
Our advisory company is all artists, although different
fields. We've got a director.
We've got a dramaturge. We've got a couple of designers.
We've got some actors, a playwright.
So we really do have this nice mix of people who look at
scripts in different ways. Since their primary function is
to advise me, and whoever is in my position down the road,
artistically both in script selection and in other ways.
Is this play going to resonate with Madison?
Do we think it's a good play? Hey, here's a director whose
work I just saw, we should consider bringing them in to
direct something. Or here's this actor I saw in a
little shop production in Milwaukee, you should really
take a look at them. And so we wanted that to be all
artists who are advising me on the art.
But from very different perspectives.
And some of them really like classical theater and some of
them are really into avant-garde.
We try to have a really broad range of tastes.
I'm going to bring the mic back down.
I see we have a student who has a question, but while I'm
walking, can you describe again, Jen, in the earliest days,
because you and I talked about it just before we got started,
how many staff there were and how well they were paid.
Sure. Well, our first meeting,
everybody pitched in a couple of bucks so that we could open a
post office box because we figured you have to do that
before you can start the process of registering for your
501(c)(3) non-profit status. So we all kicked in a couple
dollars, and we had $56. And we went and opened a bank
account with $56. Our budget for next season is
over half a million dollars in three years.
So that's been a little dizzying, and sometimes we all
still hyperventilate a little when we look at the budget
because those are very big numbers for us to be looking at.
In the first year, we paid all of the artists and technicians
that worked on our shows. We're a professional theater
company, that's what it means, I think, to be professionals.
We pay all of our artists, and we work with the unions that the
artists belong to. But our entire staff was
volunteer the first year, and it was just three of us, myself as
sort of managing director/general manger kind of
person, and a marketing director.
And we all just kind of pitched in and, with a lot of support
from our board and our advisory company, just did what had to be
done that first year for free because it was all we could do
to raise the $100,000 we needed to pay for that first season.
The second year we had a staff still of three but everyone was
getting a part-time salary, and if you worked full-time
equivalence, we were sharing 1.0 salary
between the three of us. This current year we're at
1.8, with a staff of four plus two volunteer
sort of intern staff members. And in our fourth year, which
will start July 1st, we're going to go to 3.2 and
seven part-time staff members, which we're all giddy
about that, just having a little more help to keep things going
and to become more sustainable because the first three years is
not actually sustainable in the long run.
All of us saw it as an investment.
We're kind of creating our dream jobs at our dream company, but
we can't all continue to work time-and-a-half for quarter-time
or third-time pay. And so we're getting closer to
actually paying people for the work that they're doing, and
that's very helpful. >> So my second question kind of
piggybacks off of Jeanan's previous question about the
staff. So you have the staff, board of
directors, and an advisory committee.
Yeah. >> Can you talk a little bit
more about what your staff does and what their role is?
Sure. Sure.
So our current staff of, like I said, we have four, plus
two volunteer staff members. So there's myself and I'm the
artistic director. And, really, if you're looking
at other job descriptions, I'm kind of the producing artistic
director. So I have the leadership of the
company. I oversee all the different
pieces, marketing, development, all the artistic decision
making, and sort of the management of the staff.
And because I'm a director, that's my personal background, I
direct two of the three main stage shows that we do each
season, artistically, and, again, all the other artistic
hiring. We have a communications
director. She's in charge of our marketing
and also our development, so the grant writing and coming up with
the strategies along with the board for raising our funds.
We have a general manger who oversees the production
elements. She hires the production staff,
makes sure that we come in on or, ideally, under budget with
all of our shows. She does the bookkeeping and
works with me on creating the budget and those sorts of
things. And then we have a director of
audience development, and she is focused right now mostly on
audience services, processing subscription orders, dealing
with audience members who may need assistance in some way, but
doing some focus, and next year when we have a little more staff
she's going to be able to focus more on developing new audiences
and bringing in new people to the theater and creating more
complementary programing to enhance our audience's
experience. And then our two volunteers, I
have an artistic associate who's helped me with arranging
auditions and reading scripts and that sort of thing, and then
we've had a volunteer house manager who helps with the front
of house things at the theater. >> Hi.
My name is Amelia, and I was just wondering, it sounds like
you're very involved with the business side of it, how do you
not lose that artistic inspiration part of the company?
That is an excellent question.
Well, check in with me in a few years.
Right now it's still pretty fresh.
I'm an artist. That's what my background is so
for me, personally, it's not hard to keep that at the
forefront because that's why I'm doing this is to be able to
create theater that engages and challenges and entertains
audiences in our community. It's been a wonderful learning
curve. I've always had a very organized
and practical bent which has been very helpful in running the
company, but I've certainly learned a lot of new things that
I have not had to dabble in before.
But as a company as a whole, having the advisory company
there makes sure that we don't lose sight, and that's the whole
purpose of it is to make sure. You don't want to have just the
artists because you can get in a whole mess of financial trouble
if you're not respectful of reality in that way, but we
wanted to have that advisory company with a very distinct and
mandated in the bylaws voice in everything that we do to make
sure that we don't just start to go, oh, well, this will sell a
lot of tickets, we should just do that, but to really keep it
balanced. But we're only three years in.
So far it's working very well and hopefully it will continue.
You mentioned it's three years in and you've kind of also
talked with us about your budget and the increases associated,
obviously a lot more investors, be them individual ticket
members or companies, how unusual is the success of
Forward Theater Company in the scheme of other groups like
this, not even necessarily here in Madison but around the
country? >> I can't speak to that really
specifically because one thing that I'm sure you all understand
about a start-up is you have almost no capacity to look
outside of what you're doing to compare it with others.
But all of our sense, both from our own experience and from the
responses that we get from the communities, is that this is
incredibly unusual that we would have started three years ago.
We're at 1800-plus subscribers already, and we sold 4100
tickets for the first show of our season and over 3,000 for
the second. To me, that speaks, I think,
most strongly to how suited what we're doing and how we're doing
it is to this specific community.
Doing this three-legged structure, working so much to
build partnerships, thinking so strongly about making our
choices of what we do in our programming to suit Madison, I
think the response to what we're doing has been incredible.
Like I said, the fact that half to two-thirds of the audience
stays for talk backs after every performance.
That's crazy. That doesn't happen anywhere.
But I think that the selections we've made and the way we've
gone about things has been particularly well suited to this
community because everybody who created the company makes their
home here and wanted to create something lasting for Madison.
So I think it's pretty unusual. >> You mentioned, Jen,
collaborative efforts that Forward is involved in, and you
described a specific group in Milwaukee that you were kind of
sharing talent and intelligence and all other things with, and
it's such an important theme because so many non-profits are
really being pushed to work with other non-profits now so that
they can produce at least as much but maybe together and more
cost effectively. Are there other collaborative
relationships beyond other artistic non-profits that you
would potentially consider? >> Yeah, we're pretty wide open
in terms of things that we would consider, and I do think that
one thing that's happening now that we're in year three is we
are able to finally get a little bit more selective about which
collaborations we say yes to. The first year was definitely if
someone asks us to come speak somewhere or if someone asks us
to perform some place, say yes because it was all about just
getting out into the community and having people go, oh, I've
actually heard of Forward Theater.
And so now we can be a little bit more choosey to make sure
we're doing things we have the capacity to do well and that
help bring us exposure to other audiences.
What we've been doing a lot of is partnering with other
non-profits in ways that either enhance their mission or ours.
For example, our first year we put together a program for the
AIDS Network's annual gala, and it was their 25th anniversary
and we created a piece about AIDS in American theater, sort
of a retrospective of scenes from plays and musicals dealing
with AIDS. We've done pieces
with A Fund for Women. We have worked with other arts
groups. The play "A Thousand Words" that
we premiered in January/February was about art and was about
Walker Evans, the depression era photographer and it was about
quilters and different kinds of artists.
And so we reached out to different arts groups and helped
put together a curated exhibit of work that was inspired by the
play that was in the gallery at Overture Center.
So we're constantly looking for new ways that we can reach
people who might not normally come into the theater and bring
them in. We're going to be doing some
very politically themed shows in the fall leading up to the
presidential election. I think that gives us a great
opportunity to reach out to some new groups on partnerships
there. Yeah, we're trying to keep a
pretty open mind with that. >> So another question I have,
not really on the business side of it, but as a director, what
are some of the experiences you learned along the way to getting
to be a director that you hold close to serving all the
responsibilities you have as a director?
What does that entail with the communications side of it but
also the creative side of it and making sure that you see over
everything. >> Sure.
Well, the thing that sort of comes to mind first, as I
mentioned when I started, I wasn't planning on a career in
the theater when I started college, but by the time I
graduated I had a degree in theater and moved to New York
City and started directing and was very fortunate to have a
couple of jobs as the associate director on some Broadway shows.
And after a couple of years I thought maybe I should go get my
MFA and go to graduate school for directing.
And I interviewed at a number of colleges, and I remember I was
working on this musical, "The Life," on Broadway at the
same time I was doing my interviews for grad school, and
I had the head of one of the programs talked with me and said
when our students graduate they're trying to get the gig
that you have. If you want to teach, you should
come and get your MFA, but if you want to be working
professionally as a director, that's a lot of time and money
that you're going to spend on that.
There are better ways to spend your time and money to get
yourself out in front of the people who could hire you.
So that resonated with me, and I made the decision at that point
to take a small amount of the money that I would have spent on
tuition going to grad school and I produced myself a showcase at
a small off-Broadway theater that would allow me to bring all
of the people who'd gotten to know my work as an assistant
director, as an associate director, and let them see
something I'd created myself. And I figured now I can bring in
agents and producers and other people, artistic directors with
the power to hire me and show them my work.
And so that experience of actually producing that show in
addition to directing it and creating the budgets, hiring the
actors, dealing with the actors union restrictions, was very
formative for me for sure in terms of laying the groundwork
for what we're doing now with Forward.
I'm going to ask one final question, Jen, and partially
because we have a statewide audience with our university
channel audience that's joining us today, and I suspect that the
story of Forward Theater Company will inspire some folks to
think, well, why don't we do that.
I hope so. >> Wouldn't that be great?
What recommendations would you have for those that are inspired
by this talk to get started? >> Well, I think a couple of
things that we did that have served us very well, and every
community is different and every arts group is different, but we
started from a place of knowing that there was a hole that was
not being filled in the arts community.
There was no locally produced professional theater here.
In another community it could be that there is no company to do
musicals or there's no company to do new work.
But we knew that what we could do nobody else here was doing,
and so that makes it a lot easier coming in to fill a gap
versus coming in to compete against already established
groups. That was very helpful for us.
I would love to see companies coming up all over the country
that are very focused on serving their communities.
I think of theater as a community service.
There's no question that we're all artists.
We're trying to serve our artistic inspirations, but I
think the performing arts, the presence of the audience is the
most important part of what we do.
And it can be easy for artists to kind of get inside their own
heads and say I'm doing this for my own artistic fulfillment, and
I think our focus at Forward is very much on what can we do
that's going to really serve our audience.
And it doesn't mean dumbing it down at all.
You read off the list that shows what we've done so far.
They've been really challenging, but we were focusing on what we
thought would engage and be inspiring to our community and
then taking it from there. And I think coming up with the
structure that we did to sort of force us to always be in
collaboration with the community and in communication, those are
the things that we started with, and I would imagine that those
would transfer to any community. >> Excellent.
I know the students join me in thanking you, Jen Uphoff Gray.
My pleasure. Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]