Episode 6: Kate Galvin and Cardinal Stage

Lacey: [00:00:00] Kate, it's so nice to see you here today. Here we are on the zoom. We're making While The Applause Is Paused Conversations With Regional Theater Makers of which you are one, and I want to hear all about Cardinal Stage. Let's just start with the overview and your mission and your community that you serve.

Kate: [00:00:19] Sure. So Cardinal Stage is a small regional theater in Bloomington, Indiana, which is about an hour south of Indianapolis and it's where Indiana University is. So that's the reason for being in a lot of ways for Bloomington. It's a college town, it's a big 10 college town. So it's a city of about a hundred thousand people.

I would say half of them are students. So when the students aren't here, it really is a small town.

For economic reasons, it's good when the students are here, but for health reasons, it is better when they are not. So I know I breathed a sigh of relief when they all left town over Thanksgiving. I completely understand why the university brought them back.

And I think for the good of the business community here in Bloomington, it was probably best to have them back because they're the ones who are, spending money at restaurants and bars and things like that. Whether or not that's the best choice for your health. I don't know, but like our restaurants and bars need that money.

Cardinal Stage has been around since 2006, it was founded by a gentleman named Randy White, and I have been here since 2017. I was the first kind of new artistic director who got hired when Randy and his family decided to move to Chicago.

So I've been here for three years. Our mission is to produce high-quality professional theater that engages audiences and strengthens the cultural, educational and economic vibrancy of South central Indiana. We are the big tent theater company for our region. There's a couple other small professional theaters.

 But Cardinal has the largest budget and serves the largest audience we normally have in a non pandemic year. We have a budget of about a million dollars and, Oh gosh, I don't know how many people we serve each season.

Probably something in the ballpark of 20 to 30,000 people, I would guess I should probably know that.

Lacey: [00:02:24] That's amazing in a town of a hundred thousand.

Kate: [00:02:26] Yeah. So we really do have ticket buyers that come from, as far as an hour away, out we do a big musical every year at the holidays in the a 500 seat theater and, we'll hit 10 or 12,000 for that show alone in terms of attendance.

And that's the kind of centerpiece of our season that really draws the biggest audience and supports the rest of our work throughout the year, Cardinal has always done a really, I would say, wide mix of programming since its inception. We will do, one or two contemporary shows each year, either plays or musicals, but we mostly have built our audience and our reputation on classic work, classic plays or adaptations of literature, the big holiday family musical.

Which would be something like, we did Newsies last year something that the whole family can come to and have a great night out. And then our TYA programming is the other thing that we've really built a reputation on. So we serve a very broad audience and that is a challenge at times.

And I think, especially during this period where we have to be producing in a untraditional way, A lot of our tickets, single ticket buyers, especially, they aren't diehard and theater goers. They're people who come to the theater to have a good night out. They want something that's going to go down the easy.

So trying to serve that component of our audience during this time is really challenging. And I don't know that we're succeeding at reaching those people.

Lacey: [00:03:59] What is the percentage of patrons that are subscribers, if you do have a subscription package and then how has that fared or how has you mentioned that? There's a difference with your single ticket buyers? How has that fared in the pandemic? And then more generally, what was happening in March when we shut down what was happening at your theater, how did you make the decisions that you made 

and, what's been happening for you since.

Kate: [00:04:23] so I can answer the subscription question first and then I can get into that stuff just while it's in the front of my brain. So we normally have about 800 subscribers when we did the budget for this season, we knew it was going to be a moving target. And we talked to our board and committed to take it six months at a time.

 We did a budget for the entire fiscal year where we imagined we would be doing alternative programming for six months. And then we get back on stage in the spring and finish out the season with three real productions, not real productions, but in person productions. We shifted to a membership model for this season rather than a traditional subscription, because we weren't sure what we were going to be able to deliver.

So I argued that we should shift gears. We should do a membership that would not make any promises, but basically tell patrons that, Hey, you can buy a membership for a hundred dollars and whatever we do this year, You can come see it. You can come see it as many times as you like, 

Lacey: [00:05:34] Who doesn't want to see something they like again, and we so rarely get to, with ticket prices. 

Kate: [00:05:39] So I think people were a little confused about that at first, they're used to having a subscription and going on a certain day at a certain time . But we were very conservative in our estimates for what we thought the subscription level would be this year.

And we budgeted for half the number of subscribers. So we budgeted for, I think about 400  members. And we are currently at 300 ish and I don't think we're going to make it to 400, because I think a lot of people who chose to get memberships chose to do it because they wanted to support us 

many of them, I would say probably aren't even engaging in our virtual programming, but it doesn't matter to them. They bought the membership to support us. They're keeping an eye on things. They had hoped that we would be back to in-person producing in the spring. We're not going to be doing that. So we did the budget for the whole fiscal year back in June and then re-evaluated in October and made the decision to continue with virtual programming for the rest of the season. So we've now had to do a reforecast. So subscriptions have definitely been affected. I'm hoping that when we get back to producing in person, there'll be a big bounce back from that.

But we'll see, there may be people who we've lost.

Lacey: [00:06:56] I think that's just part of such a broader question because why have you lost them? Did you lose them because that year away made them decide to put that, budget money in their household elsewhere, or are they afraid 

Kate: [00:07:07] It's really hard to know and it's going to be, I don't think we're going to really fully understand kind of audience behavior until we get back to producing in person and can do some real surveys.  I think a lot of theaters have been doing extensive surveys of their audience during this time we have actually not, we have just been talking to people as, our loyal patrons as much as possible directly, rather than doing big surveys, because nobody knows they actually, nobody knows what the future holds. It's yeah, that could be valuable information. But I think the bottom line is given the age demographic of many of our most loyal patrons.

Like they're not going to come back until there's a vaccine. We need to be aware of that and think about okay, what is next season? Look like  if we are able to get back to in-person presenting and how can we take advantage of some of the advances that we've made in terms of streaming and the way the licensing companies and the actors union are approaching that, and maybe do a little bit of a hybrid model for awhile where we have both in-person and streaming

Lacey: [00:08:11] Yes, you are not the first person to say that. And it sounds from my perspective, very smart. 

Kate: [00:08:16] I hope that the union and the licensing companies will continue to support that as we transition back into in-person performances, because I think it will help with sales that if some of our older patrons who might be understandably afraid to come back to the theater, 

 so as far as what was happening at Cardinal Stage, when all of this went down, 

So we were in rehearsal for a show called Ada And The Engine. It's a really lovely Lauren Gunderson play about Ada Lovelace. And it's actually a show I've been wanting to do for a number of years. I'd pitched it around in Philadelphia before I moved out here.

So it's been on my list for a while and I was finally getting to direct it with a wonderful company of actors and a really cool design. And we were about to load in our set and go into tech. And I was directing the show and made the call on Friday the 13th easy date to remember that we were going to cancel the production and it was a Friday.

So I worked at so that everyone was, given two weeks pay in lieu of two weeks notice. And we took the day off on Saturday to get our lives together and our out of town actors to pack their bags. And then on Sunday, the 15th, we regrouped and did a reading at music stands for the staff and the design team and a couple of board members in the rehearsal hall just to show them all the good work that we'd been doing over the past two weeks and to give the cast and the team a little sense of closure so that we weren't just ending things like with a phone call that we could be together and have some closure on the project. I fully intend to produce that play. That'll be like the first thing we do when we come back, um, because we have the setup sitting in storage, like it's basically done. So we canceled that and we canceled the show that was going to follow it, which is a TYA show canceled both of those things right away, and then held off for a couple of weeks before canceling our final production of the season, which was going to be a co-pro of Hedwig and the Angry Inch with 11th Hour Theater Company.

Lacey: [00:10:23] Oh, our friends in Philadelphia.

Kate: [00:10:26] So it was going to start in Philly and then come out here. And as I was talking to Mike O'Brien, who runs 11th Hour, where I used to work, it was just looking worse and worse and less chance of there being able to be a production in Philadelphia.

And it was not looking good here either. So we decided to put the kibosh on that. The other big thing we had to cancel was our gala. And that's really the weird thing about the economics of regional theater, right? So like shows, cost us money. And so canceling shows as hard as it was as heartbreaking as it was financially was not as detrimental as canceling the gala.

We had to do a huge pivot on that and make sure that we still were able to like, pull in as much  contributed income as possible on that event. This is an event that normally nets us something in the  70 to $80,000 range. So it's a huge chunk of change. It's always crucial at the end of our season to get us through with cashflow and things like that.

This was at the very beginning of the pandemic, so we didn't do anything fancy.  I see, people now doing much fancier things with their online galas, but we kept it really simple. And we asked people who had already bought tables to just convert their tickets to donations.

And 99% of the people who had bought tickets did that. So that was a huge help. We probably retained about $20,000 just from tickets. People opted to donate rather than either get refunded or credit. Most everyone donated that, that money back. So that was great. And then we already had a silent auction online poised to go.

So we tried to beef that up a little bit and we extended the length of time that we kept the silent auction online. And then we also did a big raffle, which was, again, something that was planned for the live event, but we extended the length of time.    As part of, the gala, we did a series of videos called  our quarantine cabaret, where artists were posting little videos everyday from artists who were singing their hearts out from home.

 So we turned it into a month long drive rather than a single day event.

Yeah. And that was really helpful. And on the last day we did like live stream. Where we drew the raffle and we announced what we are going to be doing in the coming months.

 It was like just a cute little 15 minute, hello from the Cardinal staff and a way to put a cap on the month long campaign.

Lacey: [00:13:05] Can I ask how you fared compared to the traditional gala that you would normally

Kate: [00:13:10] Yeah, I think we brought in something around $40,000. So about half  but our expenses were also way lower

because we didn't do a, 200 person event at a catering hall. 

Lacey: [00:13:22] Zoom is free or almost free.

Kate: [00:13:24] Yeah, it did what we needed it to do in our pivot. It was also a good indicator for us that the community had our backs and that has continued to be true.

We just did a virtual version of a fall fundraiser, which we do every year, which is a luncheon event. It's always just a short one hour event where we serve people lunch and give them a state of the union address about where things are with the organization and a little preview of our holiday show, and we just, we raised $10,000 on a little, half hour virtual version of that a couple of weeks ago.

So we've been very fortunate in that our contributed support has maintained a good trajectory so far. We'll see how that goes as the pandemic wears on. We're a little concerned about  donation fatigue.

Lacey: [00:14:13] Yeah, absolutely. When patrons can't come and see the theater in the way that they're used to at a certain point. You wonder whether that will drop off.

Kate: [00:14:23] Yeah, it's definitely a big concern.

Lacey: [00:14:25] Have you been able to do a holiday season this year, given that you normally do such a big production?

Kate: [00:14:31] we have done. We have done something, So to give you an idea of what we have been doing over the summer and the fall, my big focus was on creating theatrical experiences that would get people away from their computers, especially while the weather is nice. I wanted to take advantage of theatrical experiences that people could have outside or on their own safely that didn't involve sitting in front of your computer.  

Lacey: [00:14:55] Like we're doing right 

Kate: [00:14:56] Exactly. So in the spring, like basically clear almost right after our quote unquote gala at the end of April in May, we launched a script reading book club. We call Cardinal Play Dates and people read different scripts each month. And then we do  a meeting on zoom and but they're primarily engaging with the art.

In their homes by reading the script and it's free. And we just ask that people buy the script so that the playwrights can get something because their shows aren't getting produced right now. And that's been really fun because we were able to have, for example, Lauren Gunderson or James Ijames, or, major designers and directors zoom in to our meetings who normally wouldn't be able to join us for in-person meetings. So that's been really fun and we're going to keep that up throughout the season. I think it's been a really nice way for me to get to know some of our most invested and artistically hungry patrons. So that's been really nice, actually. Some other things we did a big family dance party event in July called the Social Dis Dance Party.

And that happened outside at a city park. And I commissioned a local choreographer to create like a flash mob style dance that people can learn at home with a video tutorial. And then they came to the dance party and we like practice a little bit and then they performed. some. 

Yeah, we did some little dance games and stuff.

It was a really fun event and like something good for families to do. Unfortunately, the day of the event happened to be one of the hottest days of the summer. So it was like a thousand degrees. So our turnout wasn't quite as good as we wanted it to be.  A hundred people signed up to attend.

And only about half of them actually came and I don't blame them. Cause it was disgusting outside. So I'm hoping we can do that again in the spring on a day that's maybe not a hundred degrees.

Lacey: [00:16:49] That seems like a thing that could last post pandemic. It's just

Kate: [00:16:53] Yeah, it was just really fun.

and cost us almost nothing. It's like a park permit and a choreographer fee, like it was easy and fun to produce. The flagship part of our fall programming was a site specific radio play series. Which I was really proud of.

It turned out really well. It was a lot of fun to put together. So the way that it works is  suggested donation ticket model. We wanted to make the barrier to entry as low as possible so people would try it. So they make a donation of their choice and then they get access to a webpage that has a map that shows them a route they're going to walk around town. And then it's got a series of tracks and each track corresponds with the location on the map. And it's a scene from the play. So you walk around. Yeah. A designated route and you listened to each track as you go.  

We did an original piece. It was a four episode storyline that we had two local playwrights. And so they each did two episodes, but they collaborated on the characters and the storyline and where the show was going. And they were already friends  and they work really well together and really quickly together as Emily Goodson and Josie Kendrick.

And it was really great to work with them. I had already worked with Emily on some other stuff, but it was my first time working with Josie and she mainly writes like young adults novels. And so she had some really great ideas on how to put this story together in a series. We'll see. She might actually turn it into like young adult novel, which would be amazing. I gave them a few parameters, but mostly left them to their own devices. We had some restrictions on like cast size and I said, I wanted at least one episode to take place on campus. Cause IU has a really one of the most beautiful campuses in the country. And especially in the fall when the leaves are turning, it's just gorgeous.

So I said, I wanted one, at least one episode to take place on campus and at least one episode to take place downtown. And then I let them. Go at it. And they came up with this really cool story. That was the central figures are three women who are buried at this creepy stuff, cemetery on campus.

And they had lived in Bloomington back in the mid 18 hundreds. They had all been civil war or not. I'm sorry. Daughters of the American Revolution kind of like Patriots and wound up relocating to Bloomington before it was really a thing. The other parameter I gave them was that I really wanted to imbue the show with a sense of magic. And so that people would see things that they walked by every day, whether it's a building or a piece of public art, these things that people take for granted as they move through their community, to imbue them with new meaning and magic, and that worked out beautifully, I think with this series, because it had a bit of a witchy element to it. So there was an, a supernatural kind of vibe throughout it, it reassigned a lot of meaning to two different sites in the community. And that was. I think it was just really cool and hyper-local in a way that I really wanted it to be because one of the things that I think theater does really well, and part of our mission is to  really engage people and create a sense of community.

And that's something that I felt was an important pillar of how we were thinking about 

Lacey: [00:20:16] It makes so much sense too in the pandemic. It dovetails  unfortunately we're talking about dovetailing with a pandemic, but here we are. So to me, that's what you did. Not only by making something so community oriented and local, because Hey, we're all. We're all at home. Now, this is where we are.

We're in our communities. We're relying on each other and in different ways than we did before. And also that sense of finding magic in something ordinary. That's also what we need to do right now to stay sane. We're not going to exotic places anymore. And so that just seems brilliantly aligned with 

Kate: [00:20:54] and also something people can do safely. It's like, all you need is your cell phone and some headphones. You can do it on your own time. You can do it with your partner or whatever, but you don't have to, you can do it by yourself. You could also do it from home. We created visual companions with photos of all the locations so that people who had mobility issues or were just afraid to go out because of health conditions or something were able to enjoy it at home. So that's been, yeah. So we're going to do another one of those in the spring. It's in early stages now, but so the fall series was all original work. And I think that was a little bit of a hurdle for some patrons that like, not only was it a format, they weren't used to, but it was also content that they had no idea what it was going to be. So we're adapting a little bit to see if we might get better results in terms of engagement. We did have, a couple of hundred patrons partake. So that was great. Very rewarding for all the work that we did.

But I think we can do a little bit better with the spring series in terms of numbers. I felt like the fall series was very artistically successful, and I feel like we can build on that. So the spring series is going to be two stories, which will each be two episodes, and both of them will be rips on Sherlock Holmes.

They'll both be like Sherlock Holmes and Bloomington stories okay. It's like a recognizable figure. What the genre is going to be. You know what the tenants of the plot might be. You understand what it is and we're adapting it to a new format that you might not be familiar with.

The other thing we're going to do with this spring series  to like add value is we're going to have a couple of scheduled events. Where people will be able to buy tickets to go do the show at a specific time. And it'll maybe be a group of 10 people it's all outside. So it's safe and people will be wearing masks.

And there'll be led by a guide. So rather than get a map, they're just going to get the tracks and there's going to be a, some sort of interactive element where maybe they have to solve puzzles, an escape room situation where they maybe have to like solve a puzzle at the end of each scene to figure out what their next location is.

And then they'll go, or they'll be getting text messages as they walk through the thing. So we're trying, we're still figuring out what the sort of interactive element of that is. But I think that the kind of mystery plot is going to set us up well to do something pretty cool. With the, like the extra special sauce version, if you want to partake in that.

But the goal is that you'll be able to do it either way that you can just do it by yourself, or you could buy tickets to go do it with the extra layer of 

Lacey: [00:23:36] Yeah, I think interactive is the new invention of the pandemic from what I've been picking up from various theaters. And I'm curious to hear your opinion on. The more kind of straightforward virtual programming that a lot of people are doing is that how you're doing Ordinary Days, which is, your next production that's coming up right after the new year.

And in general, how do you feel about it? How do you think your patrons feel about it? Is there a format within that VR, virtual programming universe that you prefer. Like personally, or is there one that's even if you don't prefer it personally, is it just more commercially 

Kate: [00:24:15] Yeah, I don't think we know yet. So yes, we're doing Adam Gwon's musical Ordinary Days. It'll be running in like mid February. We'll have it running on demand for about two weeks and we are doing it all remotely. So we have four actors in three different time zones and a sound designer. And yet another time zone.

It's going to be great. So that's terrifying to me  the logistical coordination of it, but given the understandably strict health protocols that Actor's Equity has put in place for any in-person anything, we needed to make a decision back in October about what we were going to do for the next, January to June.

And I didn't see any way where we could guarantee we could get these four actors in a room together safely period. Before I even was thinking about Ordinary Days, I was thinking like, okay, I don't think we can shoot a live production in a theater venue. I don't think that we can accomplish that safely.

We don't have rigorous enough testing options here to get people tested every other day or whatever, which is all again, completely understandable. And hopefully when we have, readily available at home testing, like we will be able to do that. So I knew I, if we were going to do a show, which we were hearing from, especially our older patrons that they thought what we were doing was a little confusing with the fall programming and it wasn't for them and they really, they just wanted a show.

 Because those are our most loyal patrons, we want to make sure that we're serving them. So then I went into the mode of thinking about what. Pieces would work that a were available for streaming and B would be compatible with remote production. And one of them, one of the shows I considered was The Last Five Years.

And then I had this moment where I was like, Oh my God, whatever the results of the election are, I can't sell a show called The Last Five Years. No one wants to see that show.

 Then I saw the Ordinary Days had released streaming rights and I was like, Oh, this is great. It's such a wonderful piece. It's so uplifting and moving. It's beautiful. And I think it's really going to work well in this format.

Lacey: [00:26:30] And it's about another sort of national tragedy in a way. 

Kate: [00:26:33] Yeah. 

Lacey: [00:26:34] Yeah. Right now, I'm sorry to any patron of Cardinal stage. Maybe we'll edit that out. Maybe that was a little bit of a, get too much of a giveaway. 

Kate: [00:26:43] Yeah. And I've known Adam for a long time. I was introduced to this piece when it was on its way to the NAMT festival in 2008. And 11th Hour did a beautiful production in 2011, but I have never directed it. So I'm excited to take a crack at it. All of our actors are going to be self taping their material from home.

It's going to be a technological nightmare and logistical headache, but we're moving in the right direction. I think. So if we do enough planning, I think it's gonna go as well as possible.

Lacey: [00:27:13] So are you providing them with sets? I'm using air quotes here, costumes.  Are you providing them with those things to dress their personal environment and then are you're prerecording it and then editing it 

Kate: [00:27:26] Yeah, everything's going to be prerecorded. They're going to do their vocals first and then take their videos to their vocals so we can have best possible quality for everything. Yes. There'll be some scenes that take place in the character's homes where we'll just be using the actors homes or someone in their pods home, and we've shipped out green screens to everybody.

So that for scenes that take place. In very specific locations or scenes where the actors need to look like they're in the same location. We'll just be dropping still images into the background. I want to keep that as like clean and simple as possible so that the focus is really on the actor's performance.

 That definitely is keeping me up at night a little bit right now, I know how to direct a play in person I've learned how to direct a prerecorded radio show. I am now going to try to direct what's essentially a movie, but all of the actors and designers are in separate locations.

So it's the kind of double whammy of learning how to tell a story in a new medium, and then also learning how to overcome the technological hurdle of coordinating all of these pieces when we're not in the same space at the same time.

Lacey: [00:28:44] Huge challenge and kind of creating a new form of theater as we

Kate: [00:28:48] Yeah. Yeah. Like what other people have been doing? I've been trying to watch a little bit more. I generally have not been watching a lot of virtual productions because I personally like I go to the theater to have a live experience. I'm like my patrons, I go to the theater to have a live experience.

I think I'm a little more adventurous than most of them that like something like the radio play series, I'd be all over that. I'm really into Immersive theater as a patron. It's not something that I have yet cracked as a director. And I think that part of the reason why I love immersive theater as a patron, I like don't know how to do.

And so it's as a patron, it's really magical. And it's a very different experience from when I go see a play in a proscenium theater. And I'm like, I know how to do that. 

However, when I go have a more experiential theatrical adventure, I'm like, woo, awesome. This is cool. So like I can really enjoy the ride in a way. That's very different. 

Something that was really helpful to me was so I've been a part of the National Alliance of Musical Theater for many years, and they did their festival all online this year. And so they had eight different musicals . Creating 15 minute presentations to showcase their work. And each group took a slightly different approach. So over the course of two days of the festival, I was able to see eight different approaches to how to present musical theater on screen. So that was really helpful.

And. Some were more successful than others, but the ones that were great, I was like Oh yes, this can work. Great. 11th Hour also been doing a series of virtual cabarets and I watched one early on that Alex Piper and Mike Joe did.

They're a married couple who are both wonderful performers.  And they put together a really successful virtual cabaret because they treated each song with a different approach. Some of them, they made as a music video, some of them were park and barks from home where we're seeing the microphone and seeing the ukulele or guitar or piano or whatever it is.

But they just took a different approach with every number and it kept it engaging for a full hour.  And so that's helped me think about Ordinary Days  I think we're going to take a much more of a music video approach than a zoom theater approach because the zoom theater that I've seen so far has not been successful in my opinion. Philadelphia Theater Company has been highly praised for their production of The Wolves. Which was much more in the zoom theater model. And I find The Wolves to be a pretty challenging tease as an audience member.

There's a lot of overlapping dialogue and it's just hard to keep the girls straight for a very long time. And I think that the format for that didn't help overcome some of the existing challenges of the script, but  man, it was a technological feat. They had all of these actors with it just made me think, Oh my God, I'm so glad I chose a show that is four characters and has a lot of solo numbers.

 Made me feel better about my choice of programming because I just was sitting there like my face was melting. Just thinking about the technological. Like juggling had to happen in order to make The Wolves possible. And they did it, but I was like, I don't know if I have the bandwidth to do that.

Lacey: [00:32:07] What you said about mixing it up in terms of the cabarets that you watched through 11th Hour that's another thing that I think everyone's learning from each other. And when I was talking with Chad Rabinowitz a week ago, He had a similar realization in the plays that they've been writing.

For, I think he's calling it entertainment in a

box, 

which is yeah. Which is like so cool.

Um, It's

really cool. But , as he was choosing what the script would be. That idea went into his thinking as well, which is that, it's a different medium it's a screen and people just tune out after a certain amount of time , you need to keep switching it up more like a music video. 

Kate: [00:32:46] Yeah. One of the benefits of the pandemic is that I'm able to watch all these shows that especially my friends back at home in Philadelphia are doing, it's like wonderful. I get to see their work, even though I'm here in Bloomington. 

Lacey: [00:32:59] You've talked a bit about your coming season and at this point, none of it is your usual people gathering in a theater and you're sitting and watching a show.

What are your plans for that happening? Obviously none of us has a crystal ball, but how do you plan for something that's such a moving

Kate: [00:33:14] Yeah, it's really challenging. And we have a couple of additional challenges right now  So cardinal Stage does not own and control our own venue. We rent and have always rented.  One of the big challenges for us right now is that the venue where we produce most of our shows, it closed in May and the community college that had owned and operated that venue for 10 years, turned over the building back to the city.

Lacey: [00:33:40] And was that because of the pandemic or was already going to

Kate: [00:33:44] I think it was something that was going to happen eventually that was accelerated by the pandemic  The pandemic kind of gave them an out. We have put in a proposal to the city to take over management of that venue and get a long long-term lease at a nominal fee every year.

It's a historic building. It's been an art center for the past 20 years, but has never been financially successful. And so the city now has a committee that's evaluating the future of that building. 

They just put together the committee just had their first meeting.

Lacey: [00:34:20] I'm counting on my fingers. That is many months. 

Kate: [00:34:23] So we've put in a proposal to take over management of that building.  We won't know until maybe April  what direction the city is going to go with that building. It's hopefully going to continue to be an art center, whether or not we're involved on a management front, but there is definitely a possibility that.

The committee will say, Hey, we gave it a go and no one's been able to make this work yet. So it needs to be put to some other use. I don't think that's going to happen. I think that the community would be up in arms if the city made that decision, but all options are on the table is what the mayor has told us.

So that's a big question mark. If that gets turned into condos or something, Then we're facing an existential crisis for real. So hopefully we won't have to deal with that. Yeah. There's a world in which we can continue to rent it just as regular renters and that's fine. We can definitely continue to survive with that.

If we've become the managers of the building, that's going to be a whole new category. We'll have to figure out how to do that. We also have, I have some ideas about renovations to the buildings that would help the building generate more revenue. And so if we indeed take over that building, we need to think about how we phase those renovations in order to get the building open as quickly as possible. 

  Another factor is we are in some discussions right now, very early discussions about a potential merger with a couple of other arts organizations in town.

We have just gotten to the stage where our boards are really getting involved. And we've hired a facilitator to help manage those negotiations that may or may not happen. I think it's very possible that it will. I also think it's very possible that it won't. So right now my managing director and I really have just a lot of different.

paths that our organization might take in the next year. And we're in a bit of a wait and see pattern. We're ready to roll with the punches. The good thing for us is that we are a small organization and we're able to be nimble. We also sold our administrative and shop building back in May, which was something that had been in the works prior to the pandemic hitting. And we were able to go through with the sale  last spring when we didn't know what was going on.

And so right now we don't have a mortgage and we're like squatting with some other arts groups in town. And so we're in a very nimble position right now. Which is I think just the best possible place to be in this really uncertain moment in the theater industry.

Yeah, we've brought our overhead like way, way down right now.

So  selling our building is probably going to be the thing that  gets us through this year. Not only because we've been able to bring our revenue down, but we also have some cash to lean on and not have to take expensive loans or anything like that just to meet payroll. And we've also benefited from, some of the public programs from, PPP loans and, grants made through the Indiana Arts Commission.

 And our local city has also provided some low interest loans to businesses in the community. So we've been very fortunate to be well positioned, to take advantage of those 

Lacey: [00:37:40] Okay. So talking about payroll, how has that changed in the pandemic?  In terms of artists and creatives that, continue to be able to support or not, and also your staff.

Kate: [00:37:49] Yeah. So Cardinal has a pretty small staff to begin with. this time last season had. Three full-time employees and like four very part-time like part-time, but almost full-time employees or people with varying degrees of part-time. So staff of seven core staff of seven and then hourly employees, independent contractors, all sorts of things.

We also have. Graduate assistants from the university who are like fulfilling requirements, but also getting paid. We've got work study students. So it's a real  mashup of who is working for the organization   so we are now down to myself and my managing director Gabe Glodin are our board committed  to keeping us full-time at our regular salaries.

Because they were like, if you guys aren't here, then there won't be a theater to come back to.  Which was amazing and such a gift. As I know, so many of my friends are out of work right now. And then we had two people, one who is normally full-time one who is going to be full-time this year, who we cut to part-time for this. season. And we've been trying to up their hours as much as possible as the season goes on. And we see how things are shaking out.  And then another person who's part-time who really only works a handful of hours.

 All of our carpenters who are hourly workers, box office, people who are hourly workers, our TD, who is on a seasonal contract. Like none of those people have employment at Cardinal Stage, right now we are trying to provide as many opportunities for artists as possible.

And, through our kind of pandemic programming and providing compensation, even if it's just, a hundred dollar honorarium for doing this. Little thing every time we do that, like not asking anyone to do anything for free. We are in a community where you cannot be a working actor.

Like you have to have a day job. So some of our local artists at least are all people who have day jobs to begin with or they're full-time students at the university.  A lot of times that's a pain in the butt because their availability is questionable for projects when we're in production.

But in this instance, it means that there isn't, there wasn't a big sort of drop out  of employment for most of the artists who work for us, at least the local folks.  We've just been trying to even if it's a little something to like every time we ask an artist to do something that we pay them,

Lacey: [00:40:04] Yeah, that's the gesture. Of course the money is important, but the gesture is just as important, working for free  demeans people.  So  we have one other big topic to cover, which is talking about the other major development in 2020 and black lives matter.

And the need for white theater to practice. Anti-racism have you had discussions at Cardinal Stage or in a NAMT situation or a larger community of theater makers about anti-racism or other systemic problems in our industry that need to be addressed like accessibility or inclusivity or representation.

And I'm curious. How the pause may have changed or informed that conversation. 

Kate: [00:40:44] Yes, we have definitely had and continue to have conversations about what we can do at our own organization to improve participation and representation onstage, offstage, in our staff, and our board. That's something that we have been working towards very intentionally, I think, especially because of the pandemic, haven't had any sort of like publicly tangible results to show yet, but it's a conversation that we've been having for a long time and  has increased in urgency.

We were very fortunate. One of our donors. Who feels very strongly about this issue a year or so ago? Pledged a very generous sum of $10,000 a year for three years, to support getting more artists of color on stage to allow us to take bigger risks with our programming and support more artists of color on creative teams.

She knew that. Money is an obstacle for us because we are in a predominantly white community. Bloomington is I think 85 or 90% white.  People who are theater artists at a professional level who are artists of color.

There's really not that many, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be doing work. And I can speak only speak for myself personally, that I have been looking at the demographics as a sort of huge hurdle and one that without more money, I didn't see a way to overcome. And so our donor. Was able to help us with that.

So we could  have more resources to do recruitment, and also have more resources to bring in professional artists of color to our organization. So that's something that was had the groundwork laid last season before any of this huge upheaval happened over the summer, but certainly all of these discussions in the public sphere in our industry have triggered discussions internally in our organization.

We have a DEI committee that's been meeting regularly. We're evaluating our hiring practices. We're evaluating our board recruitment strategies.

Oh, diversity, equity and inclusion. Yeah. Sorry. I know there's so many acronyms and everybody uses something different. So . We've done some things changed the language around our casting policy to be explicitly clear that we are actively seeking people of all races, ethnicities, orientations, and abilities.

We're changing the language around how were posting job notices on what kind of language we're using in those job notices? We are also working to build more inroads in our community so that we can find more board members of color, create more partnerships with local organizations that are, primarily BIPOC owned businesses or organizations, so that we can create a supportive atmosphere when we have more staff members or artists of color working at our organizations so that they're not walking into an organization that is still all white people, other than them, one of the things that I'm excited about that may come out of the merger,  if that happens, is that we'll have some new job opportunities and we can be very intentional about our recruitment process and actually work to diversify our staff because we will have new positions.

 That's been the big thing during this pandemic is there's all this action we would like to take, but we're like hunkered down in our little COVID hole, trying to like make theater. So it's been great to have the bandwidth, to have these conversations and do some planning about great when we are in a position to be hiring again, here's how we're going to move forward in a way that is better and more inclusive.

We're also, we, this whole staff is doing anti-racist training. We've hired a consultant who we're going to be working with in. February to do a like theater specific training session with our staff and board. And I went the other day, I  did a workshop through Art Equity, which was really wonderful, which was specifically geared towards anti-racist recruitment strategies, which I found to be hugely helpful.

So we're really trying to keep an ear to the ground as to best practices so that we can be better.

Lacey: [00:44:58] Yeah,  and I like to say after asking this question, as we are two white people sitting here having this conversation that I hope our listeners will give us feedback, let us know if anything that we've said has inadvertently caused pain and to let us know how we can be better allies.

Last question. Personal question. Not super personal.

Uh, let let's, Oh my gosh. Tell me about your personal life.

Kate: [00:45:27] We can't drink yet. Right? 

 It's, it is, it's hard, right? It's hard, but I, I've already mentioned I'm so thankful to have a full-time job right now that I haven't had my income disrupted, and I have a team of people who I'm working with. Who I love working with and who I feel like we're in it together.

So I'm very grateful for my work family. I've been in Indiana for three years now and  I direct several shows a year at our theater. Not all of them. Thank goodness, but I do a couple. And that means that my schedule is pretty rough most of the year because I'm working in the office during the day and then rehearsing at night.

Because as I mentioned earlier, our actors are, there are people in the community who have day jobs and who are full-time students.  So that means really long days for me for much of the year when we're in production. And so I haven't been able to take advantage of all of the kind of wonderful things about Bloomington as much as I would've liked in past years.

And this year, the thing that has really brought me a lot of joy is getting out into nature.  I'm so lucky that there's just like dozens of parks, within, half an hour or an hour drive of where I live. And so I've really been able to get out and hike.

And get some time away from my screen. And I always make sure that I am like not listening to podcasts or anything while I'm hiking. I'm just like living in the moment and not filling my brain with other things and letting my brain. Go where it's going to go as I traipse around nature. So that's something that I hope I can hold on to some degree when I get back to the grindstone of the the insane treadmill of running a theater company 

in a small town. 

Lacey: [00:47:20] Yeah,  you wear many hats, but now you have a new hat, which is nature, lover and hiker 

 You've given us so much information about how things are working at your theater and probably at a lot of other, small theaters throughout the country. 

Kate: [00:47:36] And yeah. If anyone hears any ideas, they want to steal feel free. I've stolen many, a good idea.

Lacey: [00:47:41] We're only as good as the people we steal from, or as there is a great book. I think it's by Austin Kleon Steal Like An Artist.  It's a great book. And it's exactly what you're talking about. 

 Thank you again.

Kate: [00:47:52] All right. Thanks for having me.