Audio By Carbonatix
There is much to be said about the arts in Arizona, and a lot of it isn’t kind.
Too often, the productions and exhibitions that unfold before Arizonans’ eyes pander to a worn-out and pathetic sensibility. It’s the sensibility expressed recently by a community leader and member of the Phoenix 40, a man of wealth and education. As he was pondering the state’s downturned economy and the way the crunch is being felt by arts groups, this man suggested that the best solution is for arts organizations to slash their budgets to the bone.
And although the arts must undeniably make some financial adjustments these days, there was something unsettling about the man’s tone. It was that his voice held no regret.
He was asked, But how will that affect the quality of the arts here? “You know what? Most people don’t know the difference,” he said.
Thank God there’s been some sure relief from such attitudes and the kind of artistic drivel it produces. For many years, the people who do know the difference have flocked to the Arizona Theatre Company, which has also known the difference.
Audience members have flocked because, when too many art shows at the Phoenix Art Museum were about Oriental art or period dressing, ATC’s dramas were often topical and contemporary. They have flocked–to the tune of 110,000 filled seats this year–because, while Scottsdale’s Stagebrush Theatre is still content to people its “community” productions with stiff-faced amateurs, ATC’s Equity actors have long radiated across the footlights a version of hinterlands theatre as glossily expert as anything you’d see in Minneapolis or New York.
As the flocks have grown, so has the complacency. It would have seemed impossible, had anyone even considered it, that the fate of the state’s most renowned and big-budget theatre company–the only theatre company in the country to provide full seasons to two cities, much less to win a federal citation for doing so–could suddenly hang by a thread.
So when the news hit at the end of March, it seemed as incomprehensible as though it were written in a foreign language. “This season will be the Arizona Theatre Company’s last unless $972,000 is raised by June 30,” read the lead to the startling press release that streamed into media newsrooms. And the text that followed did little to clarify the blow.
Ticket sales in Phoenix had never soared because the lack of a permanent theatre kept ATC from establishing an “identifiable presence,” the statement said. (ATC is now slated to set up permanent residency in the new Herberger Theater Center, but during its last six seasons, the company while in Phoenix has shuffled its dramas between the performing arts theatre at Phoenix College and the Scottsdale Center for the Arts.)
The 1987 season had been a controversial one that left 700 season ticketholders disaffected and unwilling to renew, we were told, resulting in a revenue loss of $77,000.
Amended tax laws had caused a “significant decline in contributions,” we heard.
When queried by the state’s reporters, ATC’s officers added another factor to the list: In Arizona’s newly struggling economy, the arts group had not been able to raise its usual donations from amongst a list of corporate contributors that depended heavily on the hard-hit development industry.
They were good excuses all, but did they add up to a million dollars of debt? Why, that’s much more than the entire budgets of most state arts organizations, and more than a third of ATC’s $2.8 million budget for the 1988-89 season.
And why was this announcement so sudden? Wasn’t a need for a million bucks something that would have crept up over a long period of time?
As onlookers wondered whether they were hearing the whole story, another revelation reinforced the impression they were not: On April 7, eight days after the first news of the disaster, ATC’s managing director, Susan Goldberg, resigned. “It is clear to me that ATC as an organization has evolved in such a way that I am no longer able to lead it in the manner that I believe is appropriate and most effective,” read her carefully worded statement.
What in the world had happened at ATC?
In 1988, it ranked fifth in the nation among 103 resident theatre companies in terms of the total amount of money received from individuals, and tenth with respect to corporations. If ATC is doomed, and it’s largely the economy’s fault, can any of the Arizona arts be safe?
It may have been the wrong question. The question presumed the economy was the villain. But if you believe some insiders, the economy alone did not create the flailing battle that is ATC’s fight for its life. It was created at least in part, these observers say, by the infighting and struggle for turf waged between artistic director Gisselman and former managing director Goldberg, a struggle that distracted the company’s primary officers from the issue of ATC’s financial health until the problem had gotten out of hand.
And it was created by foolish decisions about money that kept the ATC expense budget growing at the same time that the ability of all arts organizations to collect money was shrinking.
Says one insider who asked not to be identified, the ATC story is “a very simple story of ambition, of arrogance and jealousy.”
Says another, feelingly, when asked who’s responsible for ATC’s hell–“It was everybody.”
THE TALE OF ATC’S NOSE DIVE probably began in 1979 with David Hawkanson, the managing director who for more than six years was Arizona’s theatre wunderkind. Imported to Tucson from San Francisco by ATC’s founding artistic director, Sandy Rosenthal, Hawkanson immediately tackled his mandate: to take command of the company’s business side and transform what was then an outstanding community theatre group into the state’s leading resident theatre. It was Hawkanson who insisted on Equity actors and wrestled the theatre to its fully professional status. In the process, he became the charismatic spokesman whose name and voice was associated statewide with ATC. Says Shelley Cohen, director of the Arizona Commission on the Arts, “He was probably the strongest manager in the state.” About a year into the transition, Hawkanson recruited Gisselman, then the director of Chanhassen theatres, a group of successful commercial theatres in Minneapolis. Gisselman became artistic director–and thus Hawkanson’s equal partner–and took charge of play selection and production. Gisselman was appealing, Hawkanson says today, because of his understanding and enthusiasm for a wide range of work–everything from the classics to experimental American theatre. In cities like Tucson and Phoenix, where the theatre offerings aren’t wide, ATC intended to try to be many things to many people, and Gisselman was capable of creating those many things. What he did not create, perhaps, was a looming profile. Although the productions he directed were always solid and sometimes inspired, and although it was Gisselman who elevated the company’s production values to the elegant level that characterizes its productions today, Hawkanson was the leader who basked in public attention. Hawkanson tries to downplay the reasons for which he was ATC’s “out- front” person in what should have been an equal partnership: “The winner in terms of presence always goes to whoever has been there longer.” But some onlookers say that Hawkanson was better recognized in the community because his vision for the theatre was clearer, and that through the years the kudos heaped on him may have rankled Gisselman. When Hawkanson left ATC in 1985 for the Hartford Stage Company, Gisselman became determined to make his mark, these observers says.
“Gary had decided it was going to be his theatre,” says an inside source, who asked not to be identified. And the resulting turf battle was sometimes ugly. “He likes to say the theatre is his family,” the source adds. “Well, this theatre is his big, dysfunctional family.”
Gisselman denies that he has ever had a proprietary feeling about the company. “I am much more interested in Arizona Theatre Company surviving than having my stamp on it,” he says. “Do we have a family feeling? We try to provide an environment where a lot of good theatre can happen.”
Whatever the reasons, it was observed by members of the arts community that Gisselman’s working relationships with the two succeeding managing directors were marred by his “inability to compromise.” Where Richard Bryant was concerned, the conflicts were short-lived: managing director Bryant quit after eleven months. He is remembered within the company as a divisive force, and it seemed likely that his successor, Susan Goldberg, would be a healer.
She came to ATC from her position as deputy director of the Tucson public library system, a position that found her in charge of the library’s personnel programs and responsible for its multimillion-dollar budget. She had also served for two years as the president of the National Public Library Association. And if this history seems a little bookish, she was a proven arts lover, having served on the Arizona Commission on the Arts.
She was regarded by those who’d worked with her as both a skilled team player and an articulate, responsible leader who–according to Rolly Kent, who worked for her at the library and later at ATC–amounted to the “ideal boss.” “She will not tell you what to do,” says Kent. “She enlists cooperation.”
And Gisselman wanted her. He wooed her, the board wooed her, and in the end she was won over.
And thus the stage was set for what has nearly been ATC’s last harrowing act.
Although Goldberg won’t comment at all on her relationship with Gisselman or anything else relating to her tenure at ATC, citing a legal agreement that prohibits comment, and although Gisselman comments only sparingly, some picture of ATC’s ugly decline can be pieced together from the accounts of behind-the-scenes sources. They say that, from the beginning, these two shared power uneasily. These sources observed that one of the first schisms to show up between Goldberg and Gisselman was the issue of theatre education. Education was a great priority for Goldberg–so much so that she nabbed a $220,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to implement an educational program with several library systems in Phoenix and Tucson. Gisselman was less enthused about education and the energy drain it represented for the company, sources say. And the disparity in priorities was never resolved, a behavior pattern that would become the norm and that is credited to Gisselman’s “inability to compromise.”
Gisselman, however, denies this perception on the part of others. “I think education is very valuable and I have a great commitment to it,” he says. He says that he and Goldberg were not divided on the issue. He also admits that, as budget cuts have become a way of life at ATC, education is an area that’s taken a hard hit.
If this clash existed, it was personal. According to the spokespersons at ATC, the first sign of professional trouble–financial trouble– occurred at the hands of that 1986-87 season.
It was intended as a celebration. In honor of ATC’s twentieth birthday, Gisselman conceived of a run of plays he dubbed “The American Dream Season.” The slate of chosen works was quite a departure from the usual ATC mix of European and American stage classics sparked up with a contemporary selection or two. This group of six plays had all been written since 1950 by American playwrights, and four of the plays were downright challenging.
When had Arizona audiences been confronted before, in a single season, by the likes of John Guare’s A House of Blue Leaves, a dark comedy about madness and losers; A Delicate Balance, an intellectual Pulitzer Prize-winner by Edward Albee; The Marriage of Bette and Boo, Christopher Durang’s grim comedy about a thirty-year marriage that should not have lasted thirty hours; and Glengarry Glen Ross, David Mamet’s send-up of land fraud, whose major dialogue device is profanity?
The answer, of course, is never. And too many audience members would add that it should not happen again. Gisselman says that never before had audience members taken to striding up after performances to complain about play selection, not to mention the calls and letters that began pouring into the office. (“The plays were bizarre, trite trash. Dialogue was demeaning. . . . Characters were mean-hearted, psychologically sick participants,” wrote one former subscriber who was refusing to renew.) And although there were also letters from delighted supporters who counted the “Dream” season as their favorite, ATC lost 700 subscribers in 1987-88.
Gisselman was stunned. “We thought it was going to be terrifically provocative and exciting, and it was,” he says. But he concedes that there is no denying he overdid it: Perhaps he chose too many plays that the audience could label “depressing.”
“I don’t blame it on unsophistication,” he says of the response. “I blame it more on that we are not in this country used to going to the theatre to discuss problems.”
ATC spokespersons lean heavily on the “dream” season and the loss of subscribers when discussing their big deficit. But insiders who ask not to be identified say the season itself may not have been the major problem. And they say that the loss of revenues, which was not devastating when compared to the total debt, was important primarily in that it created the first tensions between Goldberg and the board of directors.
They recall that the new and inexperienced marketing director, whose responsibility it is to sell tickets, simply failed to sell the 1987-88 season. And that director was (and is) Margo Gisselman, wife to Gary. She took over toward the end of 1986 upon the resignation of Gary Bacal. “Margo was not cutting the ice and the board started yammering about how bad the marketing was,” says one source who asked to remain anonymous. “They complained about awful, uninspired ads.” And they pressured Goldberg to fire Margo, according to this source.
Which Goldberg refused to do. The source says Goldberg felt that confronting Margo was the board’s responsibility, since they had hired her. And she believed that any censuring by her of Gisselman’s wife would strain her increasingly tension-filled relationship with the artistic director. She decided instead to bolster the marketing department with additional and more seasoned personnel.
As the ’87-88 season was ending, the damage was clear, whatever its source: When season and single ticket sales were combined, Margo Gisselman had raised the same revenue as was collected in ’86-87 (about $1,080,000)–but the company had nonetheless sustained a loss at her department’s hands. This was because, for the first time in its history, ATC had scheduled a seven-instead of six-play season, a move that boosted their budget from $2.46 million to $2.8 million. (The rationale for this expensive move, according to Gary Gisselman, was the need for more exposure and more opportunity to develop a larger audience before moving from 300-seat houses to the 800-seat Herberger, a change ATC expected would happen in 1988-89. The plan didn’t work: The extra play did not attract new supporters.)
When ticket sales fell short, the buck was passed to the board of directors. Each year at season’s end, it is the task of the board members to meet the budget by conjuring up donations from among their many contacts. Always before, in a customary last-minute scramble, they had managed. But this year they did not. Perhaps it was because of the downturned economy–a factor that has begun to affect many arts organizations in Arizona when it comes to corporate giving–but when the fund-raising campaign was over, ATC’s books showed a $650,000 shortfall.
There are a lot of reasons beyond the economy given for the board’s failure. George Rosenberg, a long-time board member and ATC’s interim chief executive officer since Goldberg’s departure, blames it partially on the board’s belief in a million-dollar grant that was expected during the summer of 1988 but that never materialized. And he says regretfully that it was wrong of the board to depend on a less-than-sure thing. “The board wasn’t mobilized as it should have been mobilized. We just didn’t respond quickly enough,” he says. “I have said this shortfall is board failure.” (Shirley Estes, the chairman of the board, does not mention any grant but she also willingly takes her lumps: “We knew that we had a shortfall in ticket sales, we knew that the economy was falling down. But nevertheless we said, `Well, we’ll raise it, we always have.’ It became so frightening when in June or July we knew that we weren’t going to.”)
Observers of the board have their own theories–theories that are both more and less blaming than the rationales of the members themselves. One arts organization insider believes the fund-raising failure was rooted in burnout that had resulted from the unpopular “dream” season. Having struggled mightily in 1987 to balance the budget, while feeling nearly overcome with criticism about play selection, “They had trouble getting motivated the next year,” says the source.
Others say the structure of the board was too cumbersome to be efficient, and somehow the urgency of the crisis was never fully communicated to all members. Not until last September did the Phoenix and Tucson members begin holding joint meetings; until then the two groups met separately and there was little follow-through among them, says chairman Estes.
Hawkanson, who has remained in close contact with ATC since his departure for the East, sees a more specific failure than merely disorganized board members: He believes that they have not been taken properly in hand since he left more than three years ago. “What was missed and has really hurt the theatre company a lot has been the board has not gotten the attention and cultivating that you need to keep a board alive,” he says. He refers, of course, to what he perceives as first Bryant’s and then Goldberg’s failure to “take ownership” of the board on the heels of his own dynamic leadership.
MDBO
MDNMSO THERE THEY WERE: another season older and deeply in debt. And as the cold facts dawned last summer, the schism between Goldberg and Gisselman eventually became a crevasse, according to former staffer Rolly Kent. This time the issue was openness with the public.
It seems that Kent, in his former position as press liaison, was recommending to Goldberg that ATC go public with its problem. “I felt we should dump this news story right now, while everybody was out of town and before the season started,” he remembers. But he says Gisselman and his ally, development director Barb Levy, were worried that a public confession of the debt would scare away potential donors, who might assume ATC had been careless with its money.
Eventually some board members supported Goldberg’s plea for openness and Kent drafted a press release which, he recalls, did not survive unscathed. At Levy’s insistence, he was forced to change the word “debt” in the press release to “negative financial position,” and he was not allowed to include the $650,000 figure. “Nobody called,” Kent says. “Nobody knew what the press release meant.” And thus it was that, when the big news came down last March, it seemed like such a surprise.
Gisselman denies that the source of divided opinion was over whether to go public with the debt. He downplays the disagreement and says that everyone wanted to go public. He explains that any tension had as its source whether to mobilize immediately and get a public fund-raising campaign together–ten months or so before ATC was finally forced to do so. Kent is impatient with this soft-pedaling. “It would be inaccurate to say that it was some sort of friendly disagreement,” he says. “It literally tore the management level into camps.”
And frayed tempers worsened as the nature of the crisis became more deeply felt. “The money and watching the theatre go down the tubes made everybody crazy,” says Kent.
Some onlookers believe that, because the financial health of an organization is the primary responsibility of its managing director, and because his relationship with Goldberg was increasingly a power struggle, Gisselman began to blame Goldberg for the company’s problems. Whether or not that is true, some insiders saw or heard about rude scenes or bullying that Goldberg endured at Gisselman’s hands. “She would be running a meeting and he would be talking to somebody else, making jokes,” says one source.
Says Hawkanson, “I am sure that the pressure created a lot of tension in that office. And when Gary decided that Susan was not the right person, I am sure there was a lot of abuse there.”
Gisselman himself admits that things got ugly. He says, “It was unpleasant. I don’t mean to be abusive, but I know that I can at times be rude. But I think there was rudeness expressed on all sides.”
The rudeness was so extreme that by last November, Kent, a poet who clearly has no patience for a bureaucracy, had had enough. He quit, and he has no regrets. “I told Susan, `I can’t be here anymore, these are awful people,'” he says.
But he thinks he understands why so many staffers have stuck it out throughout the period of Gisselman’s heavy-handedness. And he thinks it’s only partially because of their loyalty to the longstanding theatre company. “Where else are you going to work in theatre if you go against the Big Man?” he asks in reference to Gisselman. “It’s a fearful atmosphere.”
(In fairness to Gisselman, it should be pointed out that a number of co-workers and former co-workers expressed surprise at the thought of his abusing anyone. Said Nancy Thomas, the company’s former general manager now living in New York, Gisselman’s primary style of attack is nothing more serious than teasing. “I have worked for a lot worse than Gary,” she said when asked whether Gisselman suffers from an “artistic temperament.”)
Sources say that as the Gisselman camp strengthened its stand against Goldberg, it became impossible for her to carry out her job. Managing directors at other arts organizations recall, in fact, that toward the end of her two-year tenure, she was no longer showing up at Arizona Commission on the Arts meetings and that ATC was represented by someone else, often a board member. And although no one seems to know for sure, or else they aren’t saying, the assumption is that Goldberg was finally fired by the board that had courted her.
THE VACUUM OF OFFICIAL comment that surrounds Goldberg’s departure leaves you wondering about the obvious question: Is ATC’s all-consuming debt really her fault?
Without all the facts, it can never be sorted out completely, but there is one point upon which all observers, friend and foe to Goldberg, seem to agree: The real problem at ATC was not the economy. It was that ATC’s annual budget had grown beyond what the traffic would bear. And when the buck stops, it is the managing director’s responsibility to oversee the budget.
Goldberg’s critics say she was too new to the idiosyncrasies of theatre management to oversee it well. Her supporters say she was prevented from overseeing it well by the Gisselman camp and their need for control. They say that the 1987-88 budget, the one that created the downfall, was drawn up within two weeks of the time Goldberg came to ATC, and was the result of her reliance on Gisselman and Levy.
But every onlooker agrees that somehow the budget became a hungry monster, and that management has blamed its own shortsightedness on the economy.
Former marketing director Gary Bacal remembers his reaction when he first heard that the ’87-88 budget had been set at more than $2.8 million, up from $2.46 the year before. “I really believe that $2.4 million should have been a limit, and instead it became a floor,” he says. “I just didn’t understand it. There weren’t any more seats to sell and how much more money is there to raise out there?”
At the end of the season that had caused Bacal such pause, of course, there appeared that nasty $650,000 shortfall.
Hawkanson expands on Bacal’s idea. He says that, not only did management and the board miss the signs of Arizona’s changing economics and fail to trim their budget to accommodate it, they actually plowed ahead with plans for the expensive transitions into the Herberger theatre and Tucson’s Temple of Music and Art, which is slated to be the anchor to downtown Tucson’s new arts district and is scheduled to open next year. ATC has committed $342,000 to theatre equipment for the Temple, and it also planned to bankroll an expensive marketing campaign in order to establish a strong presence in the Herberger, Hawkanson says. And it was bearing these extraordinary expenses in addition to its regular operating budget. Hawkanson’s question is, Why?
“When everybody is cutting back and trying to hold the trenches, who is anybody to try to expand into new facilities?” he asks. “If the Arizona Theatre Company had stayed at the level it was at [before the budget hike] and was not trying to deal with all these transitions it was committed to, I don’t think this awful financial condition would have existed.”
He and others wonder, too, why serious budget cuts weren’t implemented during 1987-88 as soon as it became clear that ticket sales and the economy were down. Instead, ATC proceeded with its enlarged season. “It’s a noble position to take that you can’t change [anything about your season], but it ain’t reality,” he says. And he blames the lack of action on Goldberg’s inexperience: “If you are halfway through a season [and you’re in trouble], you make changes, and a seasoned theatre manager knows that.
“I think she would have worked out in that job very well if she’d had time to learn it during a normal situation. But she didn’t have time.”
WHEN DEVELOPMENT director Levy, acting as spokesperson, is asked why extensive budget cuts weren’t made during 1987-88, when the economic crunch began to make itself known, she says this: “It all boiled down to the belief of the board and the managing director, who wanted to provide subscribers with what we had promised them. How could we cut what we were giving them and then turn around and ask for contributions?” (Gisselman says that, in fact, cuts were made, to the tune of 3 to 5 percent, or $54,000 to $140,000.)
And when she is asked why, when struggling beneath the burden of a $650,000 shortfall, ATC didn’t cut back drastically this season, Levy behaves as though it did. She says that the original $2.84 million figure was revised to $2.71 in December, only three months before the statewide emergency press release was issued.
“One of the things that we hope people understand is that our budget is extremely lean and always has been,” she says. “We get people who come here to direct from other companies and they are just astounded at what we are able to produce on so little. It is very, very difficult to cut this budget.”
Maybe so, but leanness isn’t the issue. You have only to wander once through ATC’s ratty offices in downtown Tucson to know that the company isn’t extravagant. Nonetheless, the issue is that ATC is struggling for its life. And the figures Levy cites and the attitudes she espouses prove a downright staggering reluctance to respond to the financial crisis that threatens its existence.
Consider the fact that last year’s $2.8 million budget–the one that left the company more than broke–produced seven plays instead of six. That, officers say, is why the figure leapt so high.
Yet when ATC drew up this year’s budget and scheduled only the usual six plays, and saw the huge shortfall looming above them, they did not cut back from last year’s figure. And when, midway through the season, even they realized they must cut back, the cuts were modest.
Consider, too, that whatever Levy says about leanness, the cuts have been found. Levy says that the 1989-90 expense budget is projected at about $2.2 million, which is lower than it was in 1985.
Consider the measures that other arts organizations are taking to shore up against our weakened economy. The Phoenix Symphony, with the largest arts budget in the state, saw the need for budget cuts this season and went from $5.2 million to $4.85 million. In money terms, this set them back by two full seasons.
Ballet Arizona, which saw its contributions drop this year from $460,000 to $250,000, cut a full 20 percent out of this season’s $2.1 million budget. Next year will see more cutbacks.
Neither of these major organizations is threatening to close unless it gets a million dollars–although it has been less than three years since the symphony was faced with having to raise $1.5 million in six weeks. And perhaps it is pertinent that during its most critical days, the survival of the symphony lay in part in finding new management.
UNLESS YOU’RE TALKING TO Goldberg’s most ardent supporters, it’s difficult to find anyone who wants ATC to close, whether it’s mismanaged or not. Even in the midst of the nightmare, ATC’s fans remember that much of its history has been the fulfillment of a dream–the dream of consistent, professional theatre for Arizona. And art world sages understand that the loss would be more profound than the loss of ATC’s particular productions.
“I think when any arts organization ceases to exist it is a painful struggle to revive and start anew,” says Shelley Cohen of the Arizona Commission on the Arts. “You see a void, you see board members tired and bruised, you see a sense of failure. And it’s hard to get motivated again.”
Hawkanson says that even motivation isn’t as serious a problem as finding money for the arts in the Eighties. The Seventies were the time when the federal government put money into arts growth and expansion, he says; the Eighties have been about cutbacks and consolidation at the federal level, and the Nineties will be more of the same. “I have heard some people say, `If it goes down the tubes we’ll build another one,'” he says. “And that’s not gonna happen! It is too damned expensive to start organizations from scratch these days.”
Meanwhile, over at the Arizona Theatre Company, they’ve collected MDRV $415,825 and they’re still anxiously counting the days–and the dollars.
They were good excuses all, but did they add up to a million dollars of debt? . . . What in the world happened at ATC?
“It would have been inaccurate to say that it was some sort of friendly disagreement. It literally tore the management level into camps.”
“If you are halfway through a season [and you are in trouble], you make changes.”
“When everybody is cutting back and trying to hold the trenches, who is anybody to try to expand into new facilities?”
You have only to wander once through ATC’s ratty offices in downtown Tucson to know that the company isn’t extravagant.
“I have heard some people say, `If it goes down the tubes we’ll build another one.’ And that’s not gonna happen.”
