Stage Plight

Puzzled, Bond asked the man what he meant. The man gestured around
him. On the lobby walls hung photographs of people in Syracuse’s
African-American community: students from Fowler High School, fathers
and their sons, and baseball players of the past. The theme on display
was the father-and-son relationship, a subject explored in Fences.

“All of this, it’s making me look at my community, and what theater
can be and what its purpose is, in a different way,” the man said,
visibly moved. That is Bond’s goal as artistic director, to encourage
dialogue between Syracuse Stage and the community at large. And during
the run of Fences, that goal was coming to life.

“I don’t see theater as a pastime to go and escape from life for two
hours. I see it as an escape inside of life,” Bond says. “It’s
absolutely dialogue. It’s about the dialogue between people, it’s the
dialogue around issues. And by reaching out into the community and by
having them participate in different ways, we are creating a synergy
around these plays.”

Bond has only been at Syracuse Stage for three years and in that time
there have been a number of large-scale changes, from programming to
administration. He just recently finished assembling a new management
team to help him meet this goal: marketing director Jeffrey Woodward,
who arrived in late 2008, and Ralph Zito, the chair of Syracuse
University’s drama department, who came here in July. SU Drama has a
close partnership with Syracuse Stage.

Previously, it was only the artistic director and the marketing
director that ran both Syracuse Stage and the drama department. The
process of assembling the new team has been a three-act undertaking.

Act I was Bond arriving in Syracuse and accepting the position as
artistic director of Syracuse Stage and SU Drama. “When I took the job,
the idea was to create a three-headed management team. So my job when I
was hired would be to find how to get those other two people here,” Bond
notes. “In my spare time.”

With Bond’s hiring came a change in programming. He is not satisfied
with just producing commercially viable, Broadway-imported plays.
Instead, he tries to vary the season with non-mainstream pieces that
challenge the audience while still being financially feasible. Such a
feat is an annual balancing act. 

“It changes each year because the mood changes and issues change. So
I’m trying to keep my finger on the pulse,” Bond says. “It’s about
getting to know the community and connecting with the audience and
guessing what’s in the cosmos right now. What are people thinking about?
What are the relevant issues in their lives?”

The most prominent change is the decision to present the remainder of
August Wilson’s “20th Century Cycle,” a series of 10 plays that span
the century and deal with the African-American experience in each
decade. Wilson was also African-American. “They are some of the best
plays written in the last 50 years and it’s one of the most monumental
cycles written of that kind,” Bond says. 

So far, the plays have been well received here. Fences, which Bond directed, was described by the Syracuse New Times as bringing “the passion and immediacy that cannot translate to the screen. You have to be there in person to get it.” 

Not that Bond was surprised. “I expected that it would do as well as
it did but we didn’t budget it that way,” Bond says, gleeful. Fences saw a full house on opening night and exceeded its projected gross.

Yet such a risky artistic goal does not always yield financial
success. Bond knows this. He describes himself and Woodward, who manages
Syracuse Stage’s finances, as “conservative in our financial
estimates.”

Ticket to Slide

Woodward was Act II. The 2008-2009 season was Woodward’s first at
Syracuse Stage, and Bond’s first full season. It was a difficult one.
That year, the organization experienced a 13 percent decline in ticket
sales and a 20 percent decrease in subscriptions. Bond and Woodward had
to act quickly. 

“We felt the crunch of the economic downturn the same as everyone
else in the country,” Bond remembers. “So as soon as we saw things going
south in the fall, Jeff and myself started looking at worst-case
scenarios and decided what we needed to do.”  

The result was three layoffs and the elimination of four unfilled
positions. One show was cut from the season. They were forced to
decrease the operating budget from $5.1 million to $4.6 million.
Woodward believes the cuts were necessary for survival. “We had to do
it. This is what any company has to do in hard times, to shrink,” he
says. “Some people were cranky about it, but we got there.” 

“There” was a balanced budget in the subsequent season and an
increase of 12 percent in ticket sales. The upturn was so strong that
one more show was reinstated for the 2010-2011 season. Woodward
attributes the upturn to new marketing methods, such as a revamped
website www.syracusestage.org, that now contains video clips of upcoming
productions, and a Facebook page. There has also been a continual
effort to involve and educate members of the community about the plays
being presented. 

An example of such community engagement occurred in 2009, during Regina Taylor’s musical Crowns.
To publicize the production, local photographer Brantley Carroll took
photos of local African-American women wearing their ornate Sunday
church hats, called “crowns” in the play. The play, with the exhibition,
brought in 400 guests on opening night in a theater which seats 499.  

“We can’t just announce our season and put out a fancy brochure and
suddenly have our seats filled with subscribers,” Woodward says. “I
think {the new marketing} is working, our single-ticket sales went up
last year. We’ve started to see some younger folks in the audience and
we’re starting to see more ethnic diversity in the audience.”

While there have been many new factors that have led to this upturn,
there is one aspect that has continually been integral to Syracuse
Stage’s financial and artistic stability: Syracuse University. 

The new head of the drama department in the College of Visual and
Performing Arts is Ralph Zito, Act III and final member of the
management team. Zito is new to Syracuse and SU, and has never seen a
Syracuse Stage production. At the time of the interview, he had just
moved into his new house. 

“I did not come with guns a-blazing and say, ‘I’m going to be doing
this and this and this,’” Zito notes. “Everyone is counting on my
newness as a strength. My job in the first years is to ask a lot of
questions and to question every assumption.”

He does know this: The relationship between Syracuse Stage and the
drama department is like “two rooms in the same house.” Syracuse Stage
occupies SU property, and doesn’t have to pay rent. They also receive an
annual stipend. Last year it was $2 million, making up 40 percent of
the operating budget.

“We wouldn’t really be where we are now without university
involvement,” Woodward notes. “The community alone is not large enough
to sustain an operation as large as Syracuse Stage.”

This partnership is also one that benefits the university. Syracuse
Stage produces and markets all the shows from SU Drama, and some staff
members of Syracuse Stage serves as professors in drama. Bond also
oversees the programming for the department’s productions. 

SU Drama students can become involved in Syracuse Stage’s
productions, either by playing small parts in the main stage shows or as
principal cast members in the annual collaboration between both
factions. This season’s co-production will be the Pulitzer Prize-winning
musical Rent.

Although Zito is new, he and Bond have a similar goal: to further
dialogue between the theater and the community. “I hope our students
will have a richer involvement in the community,” Zito says. “It’s not
just about putting on a show, it’s about ‘What’s the world out there and
what’s the dialogue about me and the world and how that will inform my
work in the future?’” 

Despite the financial hurdles of the past year, Bond has finished
assembling his team. And he hasn’t lost sight of his long-term goal for
Syracuse Stage: to make it a multi-function space that mixes the
educational with the professional, offering many different types of
plays that speak to the community.

“My vision has always been that this is Syracuse stages, and that
means the stages of development from a theater training program to the
professional stage,” Bond says. “With Ralph being here now, we have the
opportunity to live out that vision and see what else that vision can
mean.” 

Diep Tran is a graduate of UCLA with majors in English and art
history. She has studied at the University of Warwick in England. She
intends to report on theater and the visual arts.