Stewart Skelton over at the Big Cheap List Serve offered this interesting question to the group:

“Hm, what if we all stopped doing theatre for a few months? Would anyone besides our landlords and our colleagues notice? Maybe the printers. What other businesses would be impacted by theatre folk stopping what they do? How would the Los Angeles economy be impacted if we stopped pouring every spare dime into our work? What if we all just picked up and left this sprawling whore of a town?”

Stewart is obviously pissed and reacting to all the bad news going on around town, closing of Pasadena Playhouse, potential shuttering of the Cultural Affairs Department, LAUSD cutting the Arts from Public Education, but it’s actually quite a provocative statement. Because the bottom line is, well, the bottom line. Money. If theatre has no real effect on the economy then the people who write the checks aren’t going to really give a shit are they?

Now, we, the smart, savvy and sophisticated unwashed masses of the world realize that this is hogwash – the Arts are absolutely ESSENTIAL to everything that makes us human. Without it we would have no conscience, no mirror to reflect who we are and what we do and how we should be living our lives. Religion provides some of this for us – but it just ain’t as entertaining!  Here’s the metaphor I use for the Arts.  It is our Cultural Conscience.  And what do we call someone with no conscience?  That’s right – a Sociopath.  So a culture without a conscience would be…?

Yup.

Besides that, it would just be plain BORING without the Arts.

But back to Stewart’s original query: have any of you established theatre company folks ever done a study on how your company affects the surrounding neighborhood’s economy? The coffee shops, the printers, the restaurants, the liquor stores, the florists – do we actually have an economic impact? We all know it certainly impacts our OWN economy – basically by giving the Laws of Gravity a helping hand with our bank accounts – but what about our local communities?

And if the answer is “No, not really” then isn’t that something we should be looking at? How do we weave what we do into the fabric of our neighborhoods? How do we make ourselves essential rather than just peripheral, or even worse, expendable.

Because that’s certainly how we’re looking to City Hall these days.