Seattle Rep, town’s preeminent regional theater firm, is eliminating 17 workers positions over the course of the subsequent a number of months, together with nearly all of its inventive, arts engagement and Public Works departments.
Based on Managing Director Jeffrey Herrmann, the corporate can even mix, add or fill a number of further positions within the coming months, leading to a web lack of 13 full-time jobs — a discount in numbers from 108 to 95, or 12% of the workers.
“The entire business has been actually struggling popping out of the pandemic, and we’re actually not proof against any of those forces on the Rep,” Herrmann stated. “Bills are sky excessive, our subscribers usually are not absolutely again but, and that is triggered a giant hole between income and expense that has actually pushed lots of organizations to the brink.”
Subscriptions to the Rep are nonetheless hovering slightly below half of pre-pandemic numbers, Herrmann reported, with 2023-24 subscription income touchdown about $200,000 in need of objective. (Single-ticket gross sales for the season are proper on monitor up to now.)
Including to the monetary challenges, the Rep’s annual fund, its general-purpose fundraising marketing campaign, is projected to land about $600,000 in need of its objective, Hermann stated, largely because of the finish of presidency COVID reduction grant applications. That leaves the Rep with a mixed fundraising and subscription income shortfall of $800,000 for the fiscal yr, which ends June 30. However by managing bills, and with a pending draw from its reserve, the Rep is at present projecting an working deficit of $335,000 this season, Herrmann stated, which retains the group close to its budgeted lack of $297,000 for the season.
The layoffs, Herrmann stated, aren’t a measure to shut any current-year fiscal hole, however fairly a method for lowering annual bills into the longer term.
The departments hardest hit by layoffs initially, Herrmann stated, are the event division, which oversees fundraising operations and is shedding three positions; and the beforehand five-person inventive workers, which handles duties like season planning, new play growth and casting. The whole lot of the inventive workers is being let go (or within the case of 1 vacant position, not stuffed), apart from Creative Director Dámaso Rodríguez, who joined the Rep in July 2023. A newly created position — inventive applications supervisor — will probably be employed within the coming months, and two directing/inventive applications apprentices (a part of the Rep’s academic Skilled Arts Coaching Program) will probably be employed during the upcoming season. As well as, inventive contractors will probably be employed on a challenge foundation.
The Rep can also be pausing most neighborhood and teaching programs, together with the elimination of its Public Works Program, which works with neighborhood teams year-round and presents an annual manufacturing on the Rep mainstage that includes neighborhood members alongside skilled actors. The Rep’s new-play growth program can even finish in its present kind, although creating new work will stay a precedence, Herrmann stated, and the Rep’s 2024-25 finances at present consists of funding to help three to 4 new-play workshops subsequent season.
Although “it seems like we have minimize all of this workers and so we’re slicing all of this neighborhood programming, in truth,” Herrmann stated, neighborhood engagement, youth training and humanities engagement are “not going away, we’re simply going to ship it in a different way.”
Herrmann stated most of the laid-off workers members could proceed to work with the Rep, however on a contractual or project-by-project foundation. This upcoming season, he stated, “actually represents type of a pause and a reset,” with a powerful deal with experimentation, making an attempt new issues and seeing what sticks and what’s sustainable.
The Rep’s fall 2024 manufacturing of Thornton Wilder’s “The Pores and skin of Our Tooth,” for instance, will function (in accordance with the Rep’s web site) “dozens of neighborhood visitor stars” and be a check balloon of types, to check out a brand new mannequin of constructing theater with neighborhood participation after eight years of Public Works.
The Rep is focusing its assets on “sustaining a sturdy, seven-play season,” Herrmann stated. “And that requires transferring some assets to that space to bolster that.”
Six of the subsequent season’s seven reveals are going to be produced in-house, he stated, versus the numerous coproductions, and displays of reveals created elsewhere, seen on the Rep in current seasons. And so, he stated, the Rep’s technical crews and retailers are going to be on seasonal contracts for anyplace from 45 to 50 weeks subsequent yr — “a giant change from prior years once we’ve employed them on a project-by-project foundation, and it may be simply 20 to 30 weeks of labor that they are getting.” The theater believes this transfer additionally creates potential income alternatives by supporting its potential to hire out its areas to different arts organizations and to draw extra touring productions.
The Rep has “a special type of runway than many organizations,” with an endowment to depend on and a reserve fund, Herrmann stated. So the corporate has continued to put money into placing full seasons on stage since reopening after the peak of the pandemic, within the hopes that technique would carry audiences again sooner. However after three years of that, he stated, it is clear that restoration goes to take so much longer.
“It is terrible,” he stated of the layoffs. “No person needs to do that. We have carried out our greatest to attempt to keep away from it, however at a sure level you’ve simply received to stare actuality within the face and say, ‘OK, now we have to make some changes now to keep away from lots of ache down the street.’”
