Smoke And Heat Becoming A Bigger Threat To Summer Theater Than Rain Storms

American Theatre posted a really comprehensive article about the challenges summer theaters are facing.

In the wake of social unrest resulting from things like Covid, George Floyd, and Black Lives Matter, many theaters have worked to provide better working conditions for staff. Some of the changes have included shorter work hours, better pay, and childcare.

However, as expenses have gone up and philanthropic support has declined, these changes are raising increasingly difficult questions for summer theaters. Not that theaters haven’t always had a multitude of challenges to address. Staying committed to fair pay and fair hours has meant doing fewer shows, scaling back on customer service, or in one case, back office staff stepping in to sell popcorn when concessions staff exceed their hours in a week. There are concerns about whether having shorter rehearsal hours will result in lower quality performances and disappoint audiences who may be paying more for tickets than in the past.

In response to this some theaters are re-packaging their offerings for audiences. For some destination theater festivals, this may result in better experiences for audiences who felt there was more going on than they were able to experience.

Covid has continued to create consequences for these theaters. Not only have many experienced professionals left the industry, but the pandemic interrupted the continuity of training for younger professionals.

Bahr agreed, adding that “the supply chain of welders or people doing lighting is gone,” and that in Utah, the issue is deepened by the festival’s reliance on local college students, who missed several years of in-person learning. As carpenters and other skilled workers explained to him, seniors used to teach the juniors and they’d teach the sophomores, and so on, but “it’s like they’ve got four years of freshmen now.”

Climate change has also increasingly posed a challenge for summer theaters. In addition to dodging snakes and bears passing through the natural environment in which the theaters operate, forest fires and heat are becoming a central concern.

Oregon Shakespeare Festival artistic director Tim Bond noted that forest fires caused numerous cancellations in 2023:

“We had 10 cancellations last season,” he said, which is a serious financial hit. “We now have a ‘smoke team’ that monitors the smoke and the direction of the wind. They’ll know when the smoke will arrive, so sometimes we cancel even when audiences are seeing blue skies because we’ve gotten good at knowing when it will roll in.”

Utah Shakespearean Festival leadership said that smoke caused the cancellation of nine shows in 2022 resulting in a loss of $500,000.

American Theater Players in Spring Green, WI has had to cancel for heat and poor air quality and is having to budget to accommodate for increased number of refunds:

Young said that 2021 marked the first time American Players Theatre had to cancel outdoor productions in their 1,075-seat Hill Theatre for extreme heat. (Last year they lost performances due to poor air quality.) She said that while many audiences prefer matinees because they don’t want to drive at night, they increasingly have trouble sitting through them in extreme heat—weather that is also unsafe for actors. To compensate, APT is shifting outdoor matinees to late August, when it’s cooler in Wisconsin.

“We plan into our budget that we’re going to refund a certain number of tickets for weather,” she said, “but that number is getting higher, and we have to look at what it will be like in 10 years. Are we going to need a large indoor space to accommodate that shift?”