Separate New Works to Boost Theatres, Specialist Argues

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October 7, 2026 Larry Bomback Leave a comment

New Work or Old Subscribers? It’s a False Choice

A nonprofit turnaround specialist makes an evidence-based case for spinning off mission-driven new work from theatres’ board-supported mainstage programming.

By Larry Bomback

Many nonprofit regional theatres are having some version of the same fight. On one side: artistic leadership hired, often with great fanfare, to champion new work, new voices, and audiences the institution has spent a decade saying it wants to reach. On the other: a board watching that same work lose five and six figures per production out of an operating budget that can’t absorb it.

Both sides are right, which is why the fight never ends. Staff hear every budget conversation as a referendum on whose stories matter. Boards hear every programming pitch as a request to bet the balance sheet on an audience nobody can prove exists. And the people caught in the middle—the leaders recruited specifically to make the change happen—absorb the damage season after season until they leave or are pushed out.

I believe the audience for new work is real. I’ve seen the data at enough organizations to be confident of that. What I’m not convinced of is that a legacy institution’s current audience—the subscriber file it actually has, not the one its strategic plan describes and wishes it had—is where that work can be tested fairly. And the boards, whatever else you want to say about them, are fiduciaries. When a strategy asks the existing revenue base to underwrite an unproven bet at full institutional scale, many will conclude the bet is too risky to make. That is the one job the law actually assigns them. The failure is structural: The institution offers its board no way to fund the ambition without violating the duty. Until someone builds a new structure, the argument just recycles, and everyone loses a little more each season.

But what if someone did build that structure? What if these two impulses and audiences could be uncoupled? The mission could be served, and the board could still do its fiduciary duty. If that sounds glib, let me show you what it might look like in practice.

A note on the case study that follows: I am not describing a single documented outcome, but a composite that draws on the experience of three organizations I’ve worked with: two regional theatres, one in New Jersey and one in Pennsylvania, and an opera company, also in Pennsylvania. Each agreed to let me use its experience on the condition that it not be named, and no single one of them did everything I describe. The audience data and the shape of the internal argument are drawn from all three. So you can read the fictional Riverbend Rep as a model grounded in real moves those three organizations made, not as a case that ran start to finish and produced the numbers in the tables. The figures are illustrative; the dynamics are not.

Letting the Data Lead

Riverbend Repertory Theatre is a LORT-scale regional theatre in a mid-sized American city, with a $14 million annual budget, a 620-seat mainstage, a 199-seat second stage, and a subscriber base that has declined from roughly 11,200 households in 2015 to 6,900 today. Like many of its peers, Riverbend spent the last decade expanding its commitment to new work (premieres, commissions, and developmental productions), a slate that correlated strongly with work created and performed by artists of color.

The programming drew critical praise, internal pride, and mounting friction. New productions on the mainstage consistently underperformed known titles at the box office, and the board grew uneasy about underwriting six-figure losses per production out of the operating budget. Artists and staff, meanwhile, interpreted every concern raised about the financial losses as evidence that the board did not value the choices made by the organization’s artistic leaders who were hired by that same governing body. The board expected a handful of local foundations who had been pushing for more diverse voices in theatre to step up and help underwrite these new works. What resulted instead was a game of chicken, in which the foundations refused to put up any money until the board made more visible commitments, including hitting certain diversity benchmarks among its board and senior staff (a move that would, of course, have required either letting people go simply by virtue of them not being diverse, or adding more bodies at additional cost to the institution to hit the target numbers).

Rather than litigate the question ideologically, Riverbend’s leadership did something unusual: They took 18 months of patron data seriously and let it complicate everyone’s assumptions.

The analysis covered three seasons (FY22 to FY24), 14 mainstage and second-stage productions, and about 96,000 unique ticketed households. Productions were coded as “known titles” (classics, established contemporary plays, familiar musicals) or “new work” (premieres and second productions).

Finding 1: Known titles won on volume, but not on new-audience acquisition, at least not significantly.

Known titles sold far more tickets overall. But as a share of buyers, the new-audience rate for new work (19.4 percent) trailed known titles (22.1 percent) by a margin that did not reach statistical significance. The new work was pulling in first-time attendees at essentially the same rate. The widespread internal belief that “new plays don’t bring anybody new in” was not supported by the data.

Finding 2: The two audiences were coming from different places, and this difference was unambiguous.

When the analytics team mapped new-to-file households by ZIP code, the picture split sharply, despite average prices paid being within a few dollars of each other.

The new work wasn’t failing to build audiences. It was building a different audience: younger, from less affluent neighborhoods, with no subscription history, and, predictably, thinner near-term revenue per household. The known titles were replenishing the traditional patron pipeline: older, wealthier, and demographically similar to the existing subscriber base.

The economics on the ground were real on both sides. New-work productions lost an average of $310,000 each against their direct costs. But they were also the only programming reaching the neighborhoods every strategic plan claimed to care about.

Decide What Is Actually Mission

Before I get to the structure, there is a step most organizations skip, and skipping it is why the fight never ends. We keep calling everything “mission.”

A recent piece in this magazine quoted Jill Rafson to the effect that a nonprofit should be losing money on new work if it is doing it right. As a values statement I agree with that: Programs that are core to the mission should be subsidized; that is what contributed revenue is for. But the statement only works if you have actually decided which programs are core, and at what scale the balance sheet can carry them. Roundabout Theatre Company, with its brand equity, its balance sheet, and its Midtown NYC address, can say it owes the ecosystem a certain amount of money lost on a good cause without getting any CFO hackles up, or its donors’. A 350-seat theater in a Philadelphia suburb, or a company in a New Jersey river town, cannot say the same sentence and mean the same thing. Same values, different balance sheet.

So the first thing I do with a client is put every program on a two-by-two graph: One axis is mission relevance, scored honestly, not by the department that runs the program. The other is financial contribution after direct costs. Four boxes fall out. High mission and self-funding is the core, and you protect it. Low mission and high contribution is the engine (the holiday show, the rental business, the familiar musical), and you keep it precisely because it pays for the core. Low mission and losing money is sludge, and it gets cut, however long it has been on the schedule. That leaves the fourth box: high mission, losing money, and unproven. This is where new work usually sits, and it is the only box the two-by-two cannot settle on its own.

Everything in the first three boxes has a clear answer. The fourth box does not, because the answer depends on a fact nobody in the room knows yet: whether the audience for this work can sustain it at some scale. Boards and artistic leaders argue about the fourth box as if it were a question of values. It is a question of evidence, and evidence is what the proposed structure below is designed to produce.

Further Reading

Plays Are Meant to Be Seen, Not Heard

_Originally reported by [American Theatre](https://www.americantheatre.org/2026/10/07/new-work-or-old-subscribers-its-a-false-choice/)._