Wisconsin Public Television University Place Entrepreneurship in Society  Jennifer Uphoff-Gray Entrepreneurial Thinking and the Arts  March 14, 2012 UP697    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]