When the Ford Foundation convened the nation's nonprofit theaters back in 1961, all 23 of them showed up. Now, says Ben Cameron,
there are more than 1,900 nonprofit theaters in the United States. Last
Thursday, I heard the lively program director for the arts at the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation address a bunch of exhausted theater critics at the Museum of Contemporary Art
in Los Angeles. Cameron kept our attention by tap dancing (literally)
and delivering straight talk on what theater must do to keep doing good
in our communities.

In the '60s, Cameron explains, nonprofit
theater exploded because a group of journalists and philanthropists
sold the idea that no city could be "world class" without a
professional theater — and that taxpayers and wealthy donors should
support regional theaters in cities like Minneapolis, Cleveland, and
Milwaukee. With dollars pouring in, nonprofit theaters sprung up
everywhere. Lately, however, they've hit on hard times with rising
costs and falling revenues.

Before making his own case for (or
against) the theater, Cameron shared a little about himself as a boy
growing up in North Carolina. To this day, he protests, a Southern
accent is used to signal ignorance and evil intentions. And that's
nothing like the impression of the South he grew up with, where his
strongest memories are of his grandfather delivering babies in the
countryside and being paid with chickens, tobacco, and a slew of babies
named after him.

As a Southerner, he felt left out of our national culture until someone introduced him to the work of William Faulkner when he was a senior in college.

"Finally," he told the crowd, "here was someone not speaking for the South or at the South but of the South."

"It
is not a leap," he continued, his passion contagious, "for me to
understand an African-American child who has never seen his story told
on stage."

He discounted the movie Guess Who's Coming to Dinner as a tale meant to make "white people comfortable" and Philadelphia as another meant to make "straight people comfortable." Cameron pointed out that those stories would never have the power that Lorraine Hansberry, August Wilson, or Tony Kushner do in speaking from their own communities.

The
challenge facing nonprofit theater today is not only to represent the
racial and cultural diversity of our nation, but to capture the vast
differences in telling and hearing stories across the digital
generational divide.

Cameron cited studies that show that
people over 40 and under 20 have fundamentally different ways of
understanding media, with the oldsters drawing on "linear narrative" and the youngsters drawing on "image associative" intelligence.

Although Cameron served for eight years as executive director of the Theater Communications Group
— the national service organization for theater in the United States —
he doesn't assume that theater is worth saving. Instead he suggests
that the current decline in audiences and revenue might reflect a
decline in the value of theater for most Americans.

You see, before the TCG gig, Cameron worked for the national giving program at Target
Stores, doling out $51 million in grants for all kinds of good causes.
That's where he learned that people pay for what they value — and that
you'd better know how to let your customers know exactly what you're
selling. You know, like the Target motto says: Expect More, Pay Less.

The
"world class city" argument is not enough to justify a nonprofit
theater anymore. Now, Cameron argues, if any individual theater is
worth supporting, it has to answer three questions:

1. What does theater (in general) offer my community?
2. What does this theater in particular offer my community?
3. What would happen to my community if this theater were no longer here?

Come
up with compelling answers for those questions, nonprofit thespians,
and chances are your theater will thrive, even in this time of hardship.