Are you hoping for a bailout at the theater? Better Head in London

The last person you expect to see emerging as a theater savior is Boris Johnson.

Well, maybe not the last.

On Monday, Johnson, the British Prime Minister, announced a bailout to keep the arts alive in his country following the coronavirus pandemic. The package of grants and loans was a far better plan than anyone expected, said Nicholas Hytner, former director of the National Theater at the New York Times. It was also much larger than anyone dared to hope for: a surprising 1.57 billion pounds, or about 2 billion dollars.

This bonus is not reserved for the theater only; it will also help museums, concert halls, independent cinemas and, because it is Britain, palaces. But it’s still a lifeline for an art form that has suffered more than most and will likely take longer to recover if it does; even such a large sum will not prevent all theaters from sinking or rehiring dismissed staff from those who survive. Arts Minister Oliver Dowden said he hoped the plan would be at least preserve the crown jewels of culture.

But the problem of funding the arts in America concerns something more important than its president; a laissez-faire approach to culture is part of our philosophy. Start by rewinding a bit to note that Britain has a National Theater and also a ministry of culture; Full title of Dowdens is Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sports. There is no such theater or cabinet position here.

Federal funding for the arts in America has never been more generous, as in Europe. The budget of the National Endowment Fund for the Arts for the financial year 2020approved before the pandemic was only $ 162 million. Total expenditure of the Arts Council of England in 2018-2019 was almost five times higher in a country with one-fifth of the population.

The situation is hardly better in New York, the arts capital of the Americas and more theaters than any other city in the world. Last week’s city council budget reduced cultural spending to $ 189 million from $ 212 million, an improvement from the much more draconian proposal of the mayors.

Nonprofit theaters that are already reeling from a lack of ticket revenue will still feel more than a pinch. Despite loans to arts organizations under the federal paycheck protection program, which represent less than 1% of the gift, according to an analysis many will surely be ousted.

Yet the theater industry seems frozen in doubt about how to do this. No commercial or institutional leader has taken the lead or organized a national response. It is because these leaders have long ceased to turn to politicians for a position that the British sometimes envied. According to them, budgetary self-sufficiency protected the American theater from the vagaries of public funding.

We now see the disaster that was always hidden in this formula. When revenue earned and the philanthropic reservoir and bridges to government relief burn on both sides, where can theaters turn?

Hubris is the dramatic failure that led the theater to this pass. His commercial arm brought in billions of dollars in good years, but never made common cause with his nonprofit brothers. The two have trumpeted their civic worth mainly in terms of jobs, tax revenue and related business activities, which are all important and all are now decimated.

Through it all, institutions that might have expected to promote a broader view of the importance of theater, the American Theater Wing, the Broadway League, the League of Off Broadway Theaters and Producers, even the unions appeared largely accommodating and uncoordinated.

For months I have been waiting for industry groups to come together to take meaningful action, as they have done in Britain and as black theater artists have shown that it is possible to do here too . Instead, the coronavirus has made the theater managers speechless and useless. Even small accommodation at the moment seems to exceed their capacity. Ticket refund plans and the possible resumption of the shows was mistreated and mistreated.

Or take the cinema in streaming. The promising format, which at least keeps the work of dramatists and actors in front of the audience when in-person representation is impossible, should be widely adopted as an interim measure. Instead, the parties’ inability to create new viable contracts means that most productions can only be shown briefly and under strict limits, that’s why so many people find themselves as benefits for The Actors’ Fund. Wouldn’t it be easier to pay the actors directly?

But the biggest failure of American theaters is the one that makes it helpless in an existential crisis like this. By allowing itself to be presented as another industry, a role that it does not even play very well, it has denied its true identity under public law.

Will someone make that argument now? Imagine for a moment that Jeffrey Seller, Scott Rudin and Thomas Schumacher, commercial producers who are well versed in dispute concessions, assembled a delegation from the dream team which also included Lin-Manuel Miranda; Mary McColl, CEO of Equitys; Charlotte St. Martin, President of the Broadway Leagues; Oskar Eustis, artistic director of public theaters, and Todd Haimes, managing director of the Roundabout Theater Companys. Bring in regional theater leaders like Joseph Haj at Guthrie in Minneapolis and Maria Manuela Goyanes at Woolly Mammoth in Washington. Let Jeff Daniels and Audra McDonald join them to represent the buttonholes. Ask Stephen Adly Guirgis to write the script.

If they could not get help, they could at least demonstrate, as the British did with surprising success, that the theater is also the jewel in the crown of our democracy and not just the beating heart of an ATM (dying).