Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:01:06] Lily, you’re the Chronicle’s theater critic. What’s the range of theater in the Bay Area?
Lily Janiak [00:01:13] Oh my gosh. I could see a show at Counterpulse that ends with two performers lying on the floor making flatulent noises and have that make total sense and be a thing of great beauty. I could see a touring musical about Neil Diamond. I could see as much summer outdoor Shakespeare as I want. I could see brand new world premieres. Truly, if I went out every single night of the week, I would not be able to see everything the Bay Area does.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:02:05] You mentioned before we started recording that when you moved to the Bay Area, one of the first places you watched a show at was the Aurora Theater in Berkeley, is that right?
Lily Janiak [00:02:16] I’ve been going to the Aurora since 2009, and the first show I remember there is this piece called Jack Goes Boating. And I don’t remember a ton about the show, but I do remember something that stayed true about the Aurora ever since then, which is that I got to see amazing actors up incredibly close. And so it’s the kind of experience where you have to like hold your breath and keep still a little bit because you feel their energy and that image has stayed with me and it’s been true of pretty much every show I’ve seen at the Aurora since.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:03:00] Yeah, tell me a little bit more about the history of the Aurora Theater Company for folks who maybe don’t know. How long has it been around?
Lily Janiak [00:03:08] It’s been around since ’93, so more than 30 years. And for the bulk of that time, it’s been in this space that’s steps from Berkeley BART. It is this extremely special venue. They call it a three-quarter thrust, but if you’re not a theater person, picture a lizard tongue, very, very long and thin, and just four rows of audience members surrounding that lizard tongue. There’s no bad seat in the house. No matter where you are, the action is a few feet away from you and your fellow audience member’s faces. So it is not like a hide in the dark kind of space.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:04:05] Is that pretty unique, you’d say, for a theater setup?
Lily Janiak [00:04:08] In the Bay Area? Yes. Especially of the intimate size. It’s just 150 seats. And for the consistent quality of actors you’ll see there. These are the top names in Bay Area theater.
Josh Costello [00:04:28] The Aurora Theater Company has been around for 33 years and I think it is the best theater in the Bay Area. I’ve always really respected the work here.
Lily Janiak [00:04:35] Josh Costello is the Artistic Director of the Aurora Theater.
Josh Costello [00:04:39] This is a place that a lot of Bay Area actors and directors and designers really think of as their home. The people on stage are part of the same community as the people in the audience. And so we’re telling stories that are personally meaningful to us because those same stories are personally meaningful to the people in the audiences as well.
Lily Janiak [00:04:59] Aurora is firmly a mid-size company. They have historically, not that any theater artist’s career has necessarily been linear, but they have been a ladder from, here I am making theater with my college buddies on $1,000, to something with more prominence and more reach. It is that mid-sized theater company and it’s not just the aurora that I, as an observer, am especially worried about.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:05:39] It sounds like Aurora is a pretty important piece of the Bay Area theater landscape, but now it announced it’s suspending production for the next calendar year. I mean, what happened?
Lily Janiak [00:05:51] Their specific situation is they have this budget deficit of $500,000 and their subscriber base, still five years after the pandemic, is half of what it was before.
Josh Costello [00:06:07] Every year we thought this is the year that the audience is going to start to come back and we can’t say that anymore, it’s just not happening for us or for anybody.
Lily Janiak [00:06:15] Their situation is not unique. I’ve covered the closures, suspensions, fundraising campaigns. I have a whole list of theaters here. CalShakes, Cutting Ball, Bay Area Children’s Theater, Piano Fight, Theater First. It feels like, in my worst moments as a lover of this art form, it just feels like they’re dropping like flies.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:06:44] I feel like I wanna chalk this up to COVID and the lack of in-person events, but why is this happening?
Lily Janiak [00:06:53] The causes are really complex. You know, I get emails from readers say about why they’ve stopped coming to not just Aurora, but any theater that they might have attended before the pandemic. And I hear so many different reasons. They tell me they’re still very COVID conscious. And then there are folks who complain about programming choices. So none of the shows in this lineup grabbed me. I hear that people are just out of the habit of going to shows.
Josh Costello [00:07:30] All the information in the world in our pockets all the time. And we have all these algorithms that are designed to hold our attention.
Lily Janiak [00:07:39] Josh has the perspective that one reason is that phones are ruining it.
Josh Costello [00:07:45] And the idea of putting the phone away for a couple of hours, right, and sitting in a theater surrounded by other people is, seems like a bigger ask than it used to.
Lily Janiak [00:07:57] Here in the Bay Area, we have the astronomical cost of living, which, on top of everything else, makes it so hard when you’re that theater leader, that theater artist, to decide to keep going.
Josh Costello [00:08:13] Everything has gotten more expensive. Materials for building the sets are more expensive, labor is more expensive…
Lily Janiak [00:08:20] So Josh talked about doing this emergency fundraising campaign. But you can’t have an emergency every single year, he said. That’s not a business plan.
Josh Costello [00:08:32] For us to continue producing plays the same way we have been doing, we would need our annual income to increase by half a million dollars a year. That is not that much money in the Bay Area in the grand scheme of things. There are people who could write us a million dollar check every year and that would solve all of our problems. You know, we don’t have those donors in our audience.
Lily Janiak [00:08:59] If you’re someone like Josh Costello at Aurora and his staff who I believe have been keeping that theater afloat with just four full-time people. And it’s like, if you’re working 100 hours a week and you have this operating deficit and you can’t see a financial future for yourself, I mean, how long do you keep going?
Josh Costello [00:09:26] You know, I mean, time at the clock is ticking. And that’s the reality, that’s where we’re at.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:09:58] What does this mean for Aurora, that it’s suspending its production for the next calendar year? Like, is this it for productions at Aurora Theater?
Lily Janiak [00:10:10] It could be it. They’re about to have Marga Gomez in The Search for the Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe in July. And that could well be the last in-person Aurora production ever in that space, that wonderful, wonderful space in downtown Berkeley. It’s possible that Aurora will come up with some other way to exist. And I know Josh has put forward a few different possibilities. Maybe they do a lot of co-productions with other theaters. Maybe they give up their space and move into a smaller space. But it would be so awful to lose them entirely.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:10:58] What do you think it would take to turn this around, not just for Aurora, but the broader landscape of theater in the Bay Area?
Lily Janiak [00:11:09] So we, in the nonprofit theater world, rely on a model that is really not working for anybody. It wasn’t working before the pandemic. The warning signs were there. Nonprofit theater relies on subscribers and grants to invest in a season before it opens. Ticket sales alone typically supply 50% of an organization’s budget. And there’s a lot of variance in there, but you’re never going to support a theater with ticket sales alone. And so getting someone to decide they want tickets to all six of your shows more than a year in advance, and making up the rest of the difference with increasingly dwindling government and foundation support. That just isn’t working anymore. It’s not penciling. And that’s why Josh thought it was irresponsible to continue to program another season.
Josh Costello [00:12:18] We didn’t want the chaos of canceling shows at the last minute, of taking employment away from actors, having to refund subscribers’ tickets. We wanted to really just close out with the same kind of professionalism and care that have always defined this organization.
Lily Janiak [00:12:33] We don’t have another idea of what to do instead as an industry. Nobody’s figured it out. You could look to commercial theater, but commercial theater is much more risk averse. You know, if all you cared about was ticket sales, I have a quote from Melissa Hillman in my story here. She works at the nonprofit Theater Bay Area. She said, all you would have are productions of Annie.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:13:02] Right, like that’s what we’re losing when we lose a theater like Aurora is that sort of, I think you mentioned earlier, a sort of jumping off point to something like a Tony Award. I mean, what would it mean if we lost Aurora Theater?
Lily Janiak [00:13:20] If we lost Aurora Theater, the worst case scenario, forgive me for, I don’t know, being such a doomsayer here, but Bay Area Theater would start to spiral. And we’re already seeing this. It’s not one single company closing that’s going to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. But artists will slowly start to not see the Bay Area as a place where they can make a career. And so we might end up with a metropolitan area, not where there’s no theater, but where there are maybe a couple big organizations and a few small ones, but not enough to sustain a whole vibrant scene. This is a hard truth to reckon with and I don’t think I’ve accepted it yet, but did we have more theater than the Bay Area could actually support before the pandemic, and now are we just being forced to, I hate this word, but right size? I hate asking that question, but as a journalist, I have to. It just kills me, man.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:14:40] I mean, I’ve been to a couple of theater shows at Piano Fight, you mentioned that earlier. And I’m thinking about the kind of stories that I’ve seen told there that I can’t imagine seeing anywhere else now that it’s gone. And if this, I guess, scenario plays out, it’s like, where will we see those unique stories?
