 Scene from ATY’s production of The Reluctant Dragon |
Once upon a time, in the enchanted land of Austin, theatre companies believed that all they needed to do to ensure their success and long life was produce plays about which they were passionate. It didn’t matter if the plays were revisionist Shakespeare or
unabridged O’Neill or dense socio-political dramas they’d written themselves,
it didn’t matter where they did it, or when or with how little money — if they
did it with enough spirit, then Austinites would flock to see their productions
and they would prosper. This belief inspired many a ragtag group of theatre
disciples to band together and, in the footsteps of St. Mickey and St. Judy,
“put on a show.”
Unfortunately, this belief was, like the belief in a fairy godmother who will
descend in your hour of greatest heartbreak and grant you what you most desire,
groundless. One poor shoestring company after another summoned the capital to
mount a show and staged it with all the ardor of a drive-in on a springtime
Saturday night, and, for whatever reasons — no publicity, a short run at a
busy time of year, the show just wasn’t as good as its producers believed —
audiences didn’t come. And the company might mount another show, or two or
three, or however many they could afford before they exhausted their
pocketbooks and themselves, but for whatever other reasons the audiences still
wouldn’t come, and the company would collapse. If there’s a broken heart for
every light on Broadway, there must be a busted theatre company for every
granite brick on Congress.
In that earlier time, Austin Theatre for Youth (ATY) might have been one of
those busted companies. This organization was founded on one of those
idealistic show people kind of dreams, that of a professional children’s
theatre company for Austin. And among the three friends who shared this dream
and believed in it enough to try to realize it was a belief that if it were
presented to the people of this city with style and conviction, Austinites
would support it with their presence and their contributions. When ATY debuted
this spring, Austinites did, but not in the numbers that ATY’s founders had
hoped, not enough to allow them to realize their ambitious plan to stage four
plays in five months. It was the sort of blow that put an end to many an
organization 10 or 15 years ago.
But Austin Theatre for Youth is an Austin theatre company of the Nineties. It
recognizes that faith in one’s audience is all well and good, but that it takes
more than faith for an arts organization to survive. ATY was able to weather
the storms of its first year and hang on to begin a second. This week, it opens
the first production of its new season, The Christmas Schooner. The
story of this company has some things to tell us about the ways in which Austin
theatre has evolved in the past decade and how an increasing number of
shoestring stage companies are going about the business of survival.
For Rick Schiller, ATY’s
Executive/Artistic Director, starting a theatre company in Austin was almost a
necessity. Schiller had been trained as s director and had spent a year at the
Children’s Theatre of Louisville, but following his time there, he found the
market for directors to be tighter than expected. “I came to Austin because I
couldn’t find an artistic director’s job elsewhere,” he admits. “I found out
that there’s a small group of professional theatres for children, and most of
them are managed and directed by people who started them because they couldn’t
find jobs either.” If working in his chosen field meant founding a company,
Schiller was willing, but where?
Austin was the answer, though it came more out of personal considerations
than professional: A woman with whom Schiller was involved lived here. Still,
on arriving in Austin, Schiller found it an ideal place to start a children’s
theatre. “It’s the right size, it’s an educated community, it’s also a family
community, with people who care about their young people.” He began to meet
people around town and through a friend was introduced to Rod Caspers, a
director of long standing in the community who also had a deep interest in
theatre for youth, one that had been nurtured at the University of Texas
Department of Theatre by legendary educator Ruth Denney. According to Schiller,
he and Caspers discovered that they share “a really important concern for the
imaginations of young people and see the value in what a live theatre
experience can do for them.”
At the time, Caspers was involved with Second Youth, a local company that
produces plays for young audiences. The group was in the midst of discussions
regarding its direction, and Caspers invited Schiller to meet with the company
as a consultant. He did and through the experience began to develop a sense of
Austin’s theatrical landscape. He and Caspers continued to share their visions
for a children’s theatre company. Along the way, they found another kindred
spirit in costume designer Pamela Wolf Fletcher.
“Pam got involved and we began to talk about what we wanted to create and how
we were going to do it,” Schiller recalls. “And one thing that we knew was that
we wanted to plan very carefully. Our intention was always to set down roots,
and we were always envisioning where we were going. It just wasn’t a bunch of
people wanting to get together to put on a play. Our intention from the
beginning was to be — modestly — a major player among the arts organizations
in town.”
The three knew that to realize such a dream, they needed support — and not
just support from other theatre artists in mounting productions, but support
from the community. Foremost, they needed the support of an audience, Austin
families who were interested in their kind of stage work. And they needed
serious support in funding. An essential part of the dream shared by Schiller,
Caspers, and Fletcher was a theatre of professional quality. That’s a slippery
term, with almost as many meanings as there are artists, but for this trio it
meant paid artists on every level of production; design work by the premier
designers in town; and a level of execution rivaling that in the top children’s
theatres in the country. Realizing this meant production budgets of
$25,000-$30,000 per show, and that meant they needed support from a broad range
of contributors and a board of directors that would be willing — make that
eager — to raise that kind of money.
 ATY founders Pamela Wolf Fletcher, Rick Schiller, and Rod Caspers |
support. “In April of ’95,” Schiller says, “we had a kick-off
orientation/feedback session at Pam’s house. We invited members of the
community to come and hear what we were talking about, get some input from them
— good, bad, or indifferent — and incorporate it into our planning.” The
response from that session was so positive that from it the trio was able to
begin forming a board of directors.
Working from a list of 200 corporate leaders, politicians, and university
personnel, the founders started shaping their core support group. “Once we
brought on one person who seemed committed, we would say, `Okay, who do you
know?'” says Schiller. “We identified certain characteristics of our board
members, certain abilities that they could bring to the board. Not that we
said, `We need accounting services, so let’s bring an accountant on the board,’
but we wanted entrepreneurs, educators. We knew our board’s primary
responsibility was to help us give a tangible shape to our dream.” By August 1,
the team had secured enough committed individuals to hold its first meeting.
The dream was on its way.
As the ATY board was taking shape, so were other aspects of the organization.
The company secured an office with rehearsal space, hired an administrative
manager, Claudia Bell Olson, and found a performing space. Schiller, Caspers,
and Fletcher wanted a location that was accessible to different geographic
sections of the community, that was near a bus line, that was affiliated with
an educational institution, that was large enough for them to grow into. After
a city-wide search by Caspers and Schiller, the company settled on the 300-seat
theatre in McCallum High School, near Koenig and North Lamar. Not only did the
venue offer a central location and a solid connection to part of their
audience, McCallum’s designation as a fine arts academy meant ATY could involve
student artists in the organization’s projects.
The company was also setting its first season, and again the process reflected
the thoughtful approach of the founders. “We very carefully chose the kind of
plays that we were doing,” says Schiller. “From the beginning, we had a
specific mission as to who were going to serve and how we were going to serve
them and what value we placed on the theatre experience that they were going to
have.” Central to the mission was the idea of serving young people of different
ages with different kinds of plays. The three founders divided their audience
into three segments: three- to seven-year-olds; eight- to 12-year-olds; and 13-
to 18-year-olds. For ATY’s debut, they wanted to offer at least one production
for each segment. They painstakingly pored over material being staged in
children’s theatres around the country: old favorites, new works, fairy tales,
musicals, adaptations of classic books and popular series. By late summer, they
had selected four titles — The Reluctant Dragon, Mary Hall Surface’s
adaptation of Kenneth Grahame’s story; Nightingale, by Rita Grauer and
John Urquhart, from the Hans Christian Andersen tale; Jon Klein’s The Hardy
Boys in The Mystery of the Haunted House, adapted from the Franklin Dixon
series; and Lynda Barry’s The Good Times Are Killin’ Me — however, the
timing prevented ATY from starting production at the top of the theatre season.
Still eager to capitalize on the momentum behind ATY, the company members made
a fateful decision: to produce all four first season shows between January and
May.
“We thought, `We don’t want to wait a whole year, so we’ll start mid-season,'”
recalls Schiller. It was very ambitious to try to do four shows in five
months. None of the shows we did was simple. We built costumes for every show,
designed every show. I don’t think we were trying to prove anything in doing
that many shows in such a small amount of time. We were trying to show our
commitment to our audience, so everyone would have a chance to see at least one
show.”
But that desire to be all things to their audience right out of the gate
almost scuttled the company before it had a chance to complete its first
season. The founders and their new board had made projections about
contributions and attendance that would provide the income for the full four
shows, but as the season progressed it became clear that their projections were
too high. “Our attendance was okay for a beginning operation,” notes Schiller.
“It wasn’t 100%, which is where I wanted it to be. It was about 35%. A hundred
people would be full in a lot of other venues, but the board doesn’t always
understand that. `You sure got a lot of empty seats,’ they’d say. And I’d say,
`Well, you gotta start someplace.’ I said to Connie Macmillan, a friend of
ours, `Oh, god, we’re only playing to an average of one-third houses.’ And she
said, `You should feel pretty good about that, especially opening your first
show right after the holidays.'”
Attendance for ATY’s first three shows was respectable on several levels, just
not on the level they needed to support four full productions. The company
successfully mounted three shows, but then, although they had cast The Hardy
Boys in the Mystery of the Haunted House and had the final designs ready,
ATY opted to postpone the last one. This cast a dark cloud over the shining
realization of the founders’ dream, so carefully conceived and worked out in so
many ways. Still, there was a silver lining. Unlike the companies of old who
might have expended all their resources to get one last show on stage, this
company was retreating so it could live to produce another day.
On reflection, Schiller sees ATY’s first year as a mix of the good and the
not-so-good. “We’re pleased with what our first season brought us. Some
credibility, for one thing. I think we followed through, more or less, on the
artistic part of what we promised our audiences. We’re pleased artistically
with what we did. It was important to us to provide a full visual experience
for the child, and it was important for us to spend the money to do the kind of
physical production we felt was required.
“We learned a lot. We learned that no one wants to bring their kids to a play
at 10 o’clock on a Saturday morning. That’s when we had houses of 40 people. So
we’re not having 10am performances anymore. We found out that we did well when
we did a 7:30pm performance. That’s why Christmas Schooner is going to
play for a couple of evenings. The kids feel it’s more important to be going
out on mom and dad’s time than on their time, which is in the afternoon.
“There was a little bit of confusion as to age appropriateness. It’s very
important to me that a four-year-old see a play that’s appropriate and not see
something that’s totally over his head. Conversely, we had some people come to
see Nightingale who were 11, 10, nine years old, and it was too
juvenile, and they were bored. You can’t tell parents that they can’t bring
their kids of a certain age — it’s really their decision — but the worst
thing is for a kid to come to the theatre and have a dull experience. They’ll
think, `Oh, this is a place to be bored.’
“I don’t think our funding was where I expected it to be, and maybe that was
my na�vet�, that all we had to do was send out a nice brochure with
wonderful words about the value of art, and corporations would just take out
their checkbooks. `Oh, how much do you want?’ What you realize is that there’s
a process that you have to go through, with applications and procedures and
committees. And even if you have friends in high places, that helps, but
there’s still a time span you can expect. We ran into some corporations that
said, `Our by-laws don’t allow us to give to an organization that’s been in
existence less than 12 months. So let us know if you survive.’ They didn’t say
that, but [that was the idea.]”
Now, Austin Theatre for Youth can tell them that it has survived. And
it’s producing again, which, in this arts-unfriendly era, is significant in and
of itself. Adjustments are being made for the company’s sophomore year that
build on the lessons of the first season and will help ensure ATY’s continued
survival. “Our production budgets have increased, but everything else has
decreased by 15%,” reports Schiller. “We moved out of our office space and into
my dining room. The office was costing us $1,100 a month, and the board felt,
`Let’s look for donated space.’ It’s a bit more difficult, but that’s a
temporary measure.” The company has scaled back the size of its season, from
six plays to two: the current production of The Christmas Schooner and a
spring production of the postponed Hardy Boys show. “We picked these two
shows,” says Schiller, “because we thought they would be the two that we could
build the strongest audience for.” ATY is also revising its attendance
projections. Notes Schiller, “We’re only budgeting for half-houses this year.
And maybe I’m na�ve again to think that we can do better than half-houses,
but you have to be as conservative and as realistic with your income as you
can.”
Perhaps most important, the company is developing a structure that will ensure
its viability on the long term. Schiller says that the board is instituting “a
formal business plan structure. We have an adviser from a corporation in town
who sees business plans all the time and is assisting us in working up a
business plan for Austin Theatre for Youth, a three-year business plan with a
bit of background about where we are and about the field in general and about
the Austin community. We’re talking about three major areas: finance,
operations, and programs. We want a document that the board and staff can look
at and measure themselves against every six months, every year.”
In addition, the organization is working with five MBA students at St.
Edward’s University to develop a profile of ATY’s target audience. “We wanted
them to give us a profile of the family in Austin, Texas in the 1990s. What do
they like? What do they do? What’s our competition? And I’m getting a sense
from the comments that it’s indirect competition: computer games and soccer
practices and music and ballet lessons and videos. We also wanted demographic
info, so we have a specific idea of how we can fit into the lives of our target
audience. Then we can re-position ourselves or newly position ourselves to take
advantage of that knowledge.
“I’ll tell you,” says Schiller with a bit of a laugh and a sigh, “Starting an
organization is tough, but keeping it going is even tougher.”
Austin Theatre for Youth is not living happily ever after. There is no
“happily ever after” in the American theatre. Every season, every day, is a
struggle and so it will ever be. But the struggle can be managed, in such a way
that a theatre company — even one in Austin, Texas — can survive for years
and years, providing creative work that adds something valuable to the
community. What it requires is planning, a sense of the long-term, realistic
expectations, and management of resources. In its first season, Austin Theatre
for Youth has demonstrated that it understands this — and around town, so have
a number of other fairly new companies: Frontera@Hyde Park Theatre, The Public
Domain, Salvage Vanguard Theater, Austin Musical Theatre. They are ambitious,
but it’s a fair bet they will be around for many seasons. You don’t have to
take it on faith.
The Christmas Schooner runs December 6-22 at McCallum Fine Arts Academy Theatre.
This article appears in December 6 • 1996 and December 6 • 1996 (Cover).