As small theaters across the country have learned, creativity on the stage will only take them so far. Creativity in the business office can be just as important.

Live Bait Theatrical Company has a firm grasp of this concept. For 10 years, the theater on the North Side of Chicago has been soliciting doodles from celebrities across the country, then auctioning them off as a way to help keep their productions of new work by area playwrights ... well, in production. It's worked out very well so far, says Sharon Evans, the theater's artistic director; this single fund-raiser, combined with ticket sales and grant money, helps keep Live Bait afloat.

"When you do the kind of fundraiser we do, it's enough to last the whole year," she says of the doodles-for-drama, which this year included whimsical drawings by a wide range of celebrities associated with performance, including writer Kurt Vonnegut, comic writer and commentator Al Franken, actor Jon Voight and public radio maven Nina Totenberg. "I truly think we invented the auction doodle concept, but now it's done all over. It makes it harder for us to attract participants; there's more competition for them."

Fund raising is playing a bigger role than ever in small theaters. For one thing, grants represent just temporary funding. They may be used to fund a particular production, but cannot be relied upon for multiyear funding; theaters must re-apply for them each year, and there is no guarantee they will be forthcoming.

Due to access to grant-making organizations, corporate donors and patrons, theaters in Chicago may have an easier time surviving than those in downstate Illinois. But the world's changing economy, social needs and politics regarding arts funding have meant that even the Windy City's estimated 130 professional nonprofit theaters can't raise their curtains without some degree of struggle.

According to the New York City- based Theatre Communications Group, nonprofit theaters earn an average of just 62 percent of their budgets, largely through ticket and concession sales, and advertising in their programs. The rest comes from a hodge- podge of grants, gifts, sponsorships and the fruits of fund raising.

While theaters in Chicago, and other large cities, might have easier access to a larger pool of potential sponsors and large audiences, they also must compete with more theater groups. Downstate, there simply are not as many theaters within each city.

Unlike for-profit theaters, those that are nonprofit can seek state and federal grants as well as tax-deductible donations.

Leonard Anderson, executive director of The Little Theatre On The Square in tiny Sullivan, is gearing up for an "adopt a seat" campaign to raise money. Patrons will be asked to donate the cost of replacing a seat in the theater — a fairly common approach to raising funds for capital improvements at theaters. But he's also on the lookout for

26 / December 1998 Illinois Issues

creative state sources to keep the 41year-old theater, which has been a nonprofit since 1981, alive and well.

Besides receiving a sizable grant from the Illinois Arts Council, the Little Theatre, sitting 30 miles east of Decatur, has successfully billed itself as a tourist attraction, thereby snagging money from the state's tourism bureau. It lures an estimated 42,000 people annually to a town of 4,500 residents. Many of those visitors come to see the national celebrities the Little Theater puts on its stage.

"Our audience comes from an 80-mile distance, often driving from places an hour-and-a-half away," Anderson says. "They come from Terre Haute, St. Louis, Chicago. We draw a lot of people here to Sullivan who otherwise probably wouldn't be coming to town."

Yet as much as theaters look for sources of state and federal dollars, it is crucial for them to cultivate community donors on both an individual and corporate level, says Bruce Halverson, head of the theater department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "In this day and age, that's the reality. You don't look for big money from the National Endowment for the Arts; you look to the people around you." The university's Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, for example, looks largely to residents and businesses in Champaign and Urbana for support.

For many reasons, putting together a theater's budget is far more difficult today than 20 years ago, Halverson says. Theaters are forced to try all kinds of things, even auctioning off props or small roles on stage or in a chorus to high bidders in an effort to raise money.

For starters, although Illinois Arts Council grants to some groups have risen, Evans says, NEA grants have dropped correspondingly.

And when they do receive grants, some theaters have become more cautious in how they use them. "Because of politics, the grants themselves are a lot more restrictive," Halverson says. Evans points out that one risk for Live Bait in using public grants for general operating expenses — rather than a particular performance, for example — is that the theater rents out its space to others. If one of the groups renting its quarters were to put on a show that was considered obscene, future funding for Live Bait could be jeopardized. Some conservative might say, 'The NEA funded that,' even though the performance would really be about three steps away from that funding," she says.

But perhaps an even more alarming difficulty for small theaters, Halverson says, lies in the changing business landscape of communities everywhere, as well as the increasingly challenging social issues those communities face. "There has been an increase in demand for social works funding," he says. "Corporations and individuals who may have given money to the arts are hard pressed to help solve social problems. Kids can't read; they're dropping out of school;

there are all kinds of problems. So potential donors start to look at the arts as a fringe instead of as an important part of the quality of life of a city"

At the same time, business support has been singled out by experts in funding for the arts as key to survival. Philip Kotler, a professor at Northwestern University and co-author of Standing Room Only:

Strategies/or Marketing the Performing Arts, points out in his book that it is crucial for theaters and other arts organizations to target companies that stand to gain from reciprocal support from theatrical programs.

Alvin H. Reiss, a noted arts writer and lecturer who writes an arts column for Fund Raising Management magazine, has pointed to the need for theaters to recognize a company's specific marketing needs, then shape one of their programs to meet those very needs.

Theaters that will succeed, he writes, may have to develop sophisticated business support proposals that pinpoint such benefits as program listings, media ads and on-site signage that showcase the sponsors. Offering this type of high-profile involvement for businesses may help arts organizations compete against factors that otherwise lead to declining support, such as shrinking corporate budgets and growing philanthropic needs.

Yet even these efforts cannot guarantee ongoing support for local theaters. The "continuing conglomeration of America," Halverson says, threatens to wreak havoc on theaters' budgets, as longtime or would-be arts supporters in a community are gobbled up in the global marketplace.

"When local firms are bought by firms from out of town, the incentive to maintain a town's quality of life is taken away," he says. "This movement basically strips down a business to its profits. A company may have corporate funds available for the arts, but those are generally geographically far away — bestowed by an office in the company's headquarters — and don't match a local business' level of support, or desire to support."

Halverson points to examples he saw in Rochester, N.Y, where he lived before coming to the University of Illinois two years ago. Xerox, Kodak and Gannett all once were headquartered in Rochester, and gave generously to local theater groups. Chicago, as the head- quarters of such global giants as United Airlines, Sara Lee and Baxter pharmaceuticals, may have been thought immune to such concerns. But globalization has taken its toll even on this booming metropolis; the London-based BP oil giant is taking over Chicago- based Amoco, for example, while Ameritech is becoming part of SBC, formerly Southwestern Bell, based in Phoenix.

Once companies move from an area, their support for local organizations drops significantly. "Often, local managers don't have the authority to make donations," Halverson says. "They have to go to get approval from someone who has no direct role in the community.

"Busey Bank is a locally owned bank that's been very supportive of Krannert. It's in their best interest to do so, to help maintain the quality of life here," he says. "But if they got bought out by BankAmerica, it could be a very different situation."

Which takes theater groups back to the challenge of combing their collective creativity for the next stroke of fund-raising genius. They may prefer performing before a crowd, but doing so will take some backstage theatrics first. 

Jennifer Halperin, an editorial writer for the Columbus Dispatch in Ohio, is also a former Statehouse bureau chief for Illinois Issues.

Illinois Issues December 1998 / 27