People, Not Stuff

By Adam Greenfield, Artistic Director

“Playwrights Horizons exists to put as much new theater in front of as many audiences as possible, all the time. To this end, our aim is to turn today’s constraints into an asset, stretching each dollar as far as we can; creating new ways to produce; rediscovering what’s essential about the experience of live theater.” – Artistic Director Adam Greenfield

April Matthis, cast member of The Dinosaurs, and Adam Greenfield chatting at the first rehearsal.

It might not seem so from the audience’s vantage point, but the premiere of Jacob Perkins’ new play, The Dinosaurs, employs a brand new production approach for Playwrights Horizons: a bit of an experiment, but not entirely a risky one, as our staff has been working on this behind the scenes for a few years. Internally we call the approach “Unplugged,” and its motto: “People, Not Stuff.”

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man [sic] walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching, and this is all that is needed for an act of theater to be engaged.
– Peter Brook

Everyone I speak to seems to know that non-profit off-Broadway is facing challenging times, but most seem not to know what that means or why, so in a nutshell: federal stimulus packages and relief programs kept us open in those dark years of lockdown. We budgeted carefully, saving as many acorns as we could, so this funding provided a safety net as we re-opened in 2021 and 2022. Those programs were finite, though, and by the time they dissolved the entire economy had fundamentally changed: from 2020 to 2025, the dollar’s growing inflation rate produced a cumulative price increase of about 25%, skyrocketing the costs of making theater exactly as audience attendance patterns went haywire and many foundations shifted their priorities away from the arts. …Essentially, a six-play season (which had been the norm for Playwrights Horizons for decades) and the organizational structure behind it cost about 25% more while the income we could formerly rely on had decreased.

By 2023, this problem hit the op-ed columns. In July of that year, the Times ran an essay by Isaac Butler titled, “American Theater Is Imploding Before Our Eyes,” an impassioned appeal for a federal funding intervention. A few weeks later, the Washington Post ran a kind of rebuttal by Monica Byrne titled, “Why theater (in its current form) does not deserve to be saved,” in which she argues that, instead, the country should do away with non-profit theaters entirely and funnel arts funding toward artists directly, “reshaping [theaters] into direct granting agencies and public resources somewhat like libraries, offering artists and companies production slots on a lottery basis.”

The opposition of these two perspectives reflects how fractured, and deeply felt, the artistic community’s response is. Both, though, seem to characterize our non-profit theater institutions as immovable, calcified, like clumsy giants stumbling toward a cliff, unable to change direction. The truth is institutions can change, and in the face of the problems ahead, we’re going to have to reconsider how we produce theater in order to solve it.

There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.
– Jane Jacobs

The shape of an off-Broadway theater’s season, as produced before the lockdown – a subscription season of six plays, all produced on the same essential budget template, within the same scope, receiving the same degree of resources – is no longer sustainable. It was barely sustainable even before the pandemic. But theater as an art form is a leviathan greater than any one sea can contain, and it has behaved in different ways through many eras. In the long continuum of theater – decades, centuries, millennia – this moment is a cry for us both to revisit our past, and to innovate.

Playwrights Horizons exists to put as much new theater in front of as many audiences as possible, all the time. To this end, our aim is to turn today’s constraints into an asset, stretching each dollar as far as we can; creating new ways to produce; rediscovering what’s essential about the experience of live theater. Before all of the packaging, there was a text, a stage, an actor, an audience. In the past several seasons, we’ve expanded the range of experiences we offer, placing intimate works like Nothing Can Take You From the Hand of God deliberately alongside high-octane works like Practice, or (a couple years back) offering three solo pieces in rotating rep. In creating new variations, we’re able to do more with less.

Theater is a humble materialist enterprise which seeks to produce riches of the imagination, not the other way around.
– Charles Ludlam

A theater is not a building, it’s the people who fill it. “Unplugged” de-emphasizes physical production costs, instead prioritizing pay for the humans at the center of the work. Writers, directors, designers, design assistants, actors, and stage managers are compensated consistently with traditional productions on Playwrights’ mainstage, aka The Judy (and not reduced by a restricted production budget). People, Not Stuff.

In fall 2023, our Production, Artistic, and Management teams began to meet regularly, scrutinizing more standard Playwrights production budgets to find the wiggle room; and then to translate this into defined parameters for artists. In fall 2024, our Literary Department invited playwrights to submit work that would thrive in this program.

In The Dinosaurs, Jacob Perkins’ sweet, existentially sad, elliptical paean to loneliness and recovery, the women we meet, these “Saturday Survivors,” are our focus. Their stories – the language, performance, and writing that deliver them – are foregrounded, and the physical production as designed by a masterful creative team delicately upholds this priority. It’s remarkable how easy it was, it turns out, for an institution to find new ways of working.

In its long life, theater has faced more sinister challenges than it does today. This moment can remember us to ourselves. It’s a call to revisit what we value most about theater and forge the next chapter.