🔒Long Wharf Theatre transforms business model in survival bid

Financial realities — not just artistic re-envisioning — triggered the Tony Award-winning Long Wharf Theatre’s announcement in March that it will leave the physical complex it has called home for the past 57 years for a nomadic existence within the community.

With years of six-digit deficits, declining endowment and audience numbers, and capital needs of its physical complex, Long Wharf’s leadership is changing the theater’s business and artistic structure.

“This is a step in that direction,” said Managing Director Kit Ingui of the move. “It’s acknowledging our income stream, and right-sizing the model to that reality. We have to break the practice of operating at a deficit that has been part of our life and that cannot continue.”

The theater’s endowment — currently at $11 million, down from a high of $17 million seven years ago — credit lines and philanthropic funds have kept things running despite years of red ink.

Following the close of the current season in June, the organization will take a year off to regroup, seek local input, deal with its physical inventory and plan for an itinerant existence in yet-to-be determined spaces throughout New Haven.

Long Wharf is not alone in its fiscal dilemma. Other Connecticut theaters and not-for-profit producing venues across the country live perilously close to an economic precipice, theater executives said.

“The business model [among America’s regional theaters] is not strong,” said Cynthia Ryder, managing director of Hartford Stage. “The year-to-year survival of Connecticut institutions should not be taken for granted.”

The big move

As any homeowner knows, moving costs plenty.

But Long Wharf has the resources to make the physical and other transitions over the next two years through more than $2 million it raised from a pre-pandemic “stabilization initiative.” It will also fundraise for additional dollars as it prepares for the 2022-23 year with a single production, play readings and community conversations. A full season of productions won’t happen until 2023-24.

Ingui said the new business model will lead to a smaller budget and staff as the theater goes from a roughly $5.5 million to $6.5 million organization to a nonprofit that spends approximately $3.5 million to $4.5 million annually.

“We also know that we will have to supplement what exists in those new spaces to produce theater that people have come to expect from Long Wharf,” she said of the nationally-recognized theater whose new and classic works have won Pulitzer Prizes, Tony Awards and have regularly transferred to Broadway and beyond.

Ingui also said the organization will continue its more flexible membership model generating monthly income rather than a fixed-play annual subscription template.

Pivot with Padrón

With the hiring of Jacob G. Padrón as artistic director three years ago, the already financially-troubled theater chose a dramatically different direction. Padrón’s aim was to find new growth, energy and inclusion in the communities within New Haven.

Over the decades, Long Wharf was criticized for its disconnect with the city, including by former Mayor John DeStefano who tried to woo the theater downtown during his tenure. Twenty years ago, the theater considered moving to a new downtown location largely funded by the state, but it never happened.

In the mid-2010s Long Wharf sought a satellite venue and collaborated with the Shubert Theatre and Albertus Magnus College to share a downtown space. That project also failed to materialize.

However, Padrón’s efforts to make a closer connection with the city stalled with the pandemic-induced shutdown in March 2000.

“The pandemic gave us this moment to reflect on the changes we were beginning to put into practice and figuring out what was working and what wasn’t,” said Ingui.

With its lease up for renewal in June at the Food Terminal, the theater’s leadership took the chance “to let go of some of what has been maybe holding us back from really leaning into the new vision of Long Wharf,” said Ingui.

Terminal relationship

The cost of Long Wharf’s lease made a compelling argument for change, though Ingui emphasizes it was not the sole reason for the move.

The annual lease was more than $200,000, “but with everything included, it costs more than $500,000 to operate the facility, and that’s just the low estimate,” she said.

Though she said Food Terminal leadership has been supportive and generous, “the facility is old and was maintained at the level that a warehouse facility needs to be maintained. But that’s not what we need to operate.”

If Long Wharf remained, she said fundraising would be necessary for capital needs for a complex it did not own and that was not easily accessible to a disenfranchised community it wanted to engage.

Fran Lettiero, president of the New Haven Food Terminal, declined to comment on the theater’s exit — or if another theater group could use the Long Wharf space in the future.

Lettiero did say: “The theater has been a valued and cherished tenant and we wish them only great success in the future as an important component of the New Haven cultural community.”

Talks continue between the two parties on the scheduling beyond June to deal with the removal of Long Wharf’s physical operation, including two well-equipped professional stages (the 400-seat C. Newton Schenck III Theatre and 199-seat Stage II). The space also includes new seats from the theater’s multimillion-dollar renovation several years ago; property from its administrative, box office and rehearsal spaces; and decades worth of props, costumes and other stored materials.

The theater is searching for storage options right now, including with partner organizations and other theaters, said Ingui.

Money that would have been spent to remain at the Food Terminal will be reallocated to renting spaces — and now only on weeks when they are needed.

Reactions mixed

City government’s response to Long Wharf’s planned transition has been positive.

“We’ve worked with Long Wharf Theatre on their strategic planning either on-site or to do something different,” said New Haven Economic Development Administrator Michael Piscitelli. “The strategy they put together — to be a little bit more nimble and mobile around our community to get in our community like they did at Clinton Avenue Park last year — is a great forward-thinking strategy.”

“I believe this is a risk worth taking, not just for the community but from a sustainability perspective,” said Adriane Jefferson, director of the city’s arts, cultural and tourism office. “With new audiences there’s potential for more funds to come in, but it will take a while to build up that base.”

Ingui acknowledged not all Long Wharf supporters are comfortable with the shift.

“We acknowledge there are folks right now who are questioning their relationship with the theater and there are other folks who are inspired by this new direction,” she said. “This is never about displacement. It’s always about broader and more radical inclusion.”

She said for many decades Long Wharf — like many other theaters — was sustained by a handful of wealthy donors.

“That’s not the world we’re in anymore and certainly not the world we want to live in,” she said. “We have utter respect and gratitude to those donors but we want to be able to survive beyond that — and our old model had not proven that we can as we currently produce, so yes, it’s been a long time coming.”

New Haven Biz Managing Editor Liese Klein contributed to this story.