American nonprofit theater is in crisis.
Audiences have not fully returned from the pandemic, costs have risen, philanthropy is stretched, and theaters around the country have cut programming, laid off staff, reduced seasons or closed altogether. Atlanta has not been immune. Atlanta Lyric Theatre closed in 2023 after more than four decades, and Georgia Ensemble Theatre closed after 32 years.
But Atlanta has something worth fighting for: an extraordinary theater ecosystem. Arts Capital Atlanta identifies roughly 210 nonprofit arts organizations across our 11-county region, including dozens of nonprofit theaters.
These organizations make different kinds of art, serve different communities and preserve different histories and traditions. Atlanta needs that diversity. The question isn’t which model should replace the others. It is whether this moment of crisis can also become a moment of experimentation.
We need to invest more in the arts organizations we already have. Arts Capital Atlanta is doing important work toward that goal, recently raising more than $1 million in unrestricted funding for metro Atlanta arts nonprofits. But philanthropy and public investment alone will not answer every question facing nonprofit theater. We also need to explore new ways for theaters to generate revenue while creating value for their communities.
Is the nonprofit theater movement over?
This summer, Oskar Eustis, longtime artistic director of New York’s Public Theater, sparked a national debate when he declared that the American nonprofit theater movement was over.
Whether or not one agrees, it raises a useful question: What comes next?
Brett Egan, president of the DeVos Institute of Arts and Nonprofit Management, and I are co-hosting a national conversation bringing theater leaders together to wrestle with that question. Across the country, theaters are already experimenting with different answers.
One possibility is Theater for Public Good: theater organizations putting their artistic abilities to work on the issues facing their communities.
At Out of Hand Theater, we call our particular practice Civic Theater. But we are hardly alone. The point isn’t for theaters to become more like Out of Hand. It is to expand our imagination of what a nonprofit theater can do.
Instead of asking only, “How can we get our community to support our art?” we can also ask, “How can our art support our community?”
What that can look like in Atlanta
At Out of Hand, we begin by asking community partners what they are trying to accomplish and how theater might help.
With the Georgia Justice Project, we created a play about mass incarceration and brought it into Atlanta living rooms—a collaboration Doug Ammar and I previously wrote about here in SaportaReport. We have worked with the ACLU of Georgia on classroom censorship and with AIDS Healthcare Foundation on HIV/AIDS and stigma.
Our collaborators have included Asian Americans Advancing Justice, United Way of Greater Atlanta, Partners for HOME, Families First, Leadership Atlanta, the City of Brookhaven, the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, the CDC Foundation, Habitat for Humanity and Coca-Cola, among many others. We worked with Mayor Andre Dickens on theater addressing homelessness. Next, we’re collaborating with Mayor Dickens, United Way, the Atlanta Regional Commission and Atlanta Way 2.0 on economic mobility and Atlanta’s affordability crisis.
These organizations don’t need to become arts presenters. They have their own missions and expertise. Theater is another tool for advancing those missions.
Information can help people know something. A story can help them care about it. And a well-designed gathering can give them an opportunity to do something about it.
A different business model
This way of working has also changed Out of Hand’s economics.
In 2018, we stopped treating community-focused work as an outreach program attached to our “real” artistic work. We made it the work.
That year, Out of Hand had $296,000 in revenue. Our most recent audited annual revenue was $1.9 million. Ticket sales account for only about 5 percent of our revenue, and more than 90 percent of the people we serve pay nothing to participate. Instead, organizations contract with us to create civic theater programs that advance goals they already have.
Harvard Business School studied this approach in its 2024 case study, Out of Hand Theater: Monetizing Creativity, describing it as a “services model.” Peer-reviewed research has also examined how our work aligns with the Arts-Based Community Engagement model, connecting artistic partnerships around community issues with earned revenue, public access and community support.
This isn’t a prescription for every theater, nor is earned revenue a substitute for philanthropy or public funding. It is one model worth adding to the conversation.
What could Atlanta’s artists help us accomplish?
That’s the question I hope Atlanta’s community leaders will consider.
If you run a nonprofit trying to change public understanding of homelessness, economic mobility or public health, what might artists contribute? If you’re a government agency that needs residents to understand an issue and participate in solving it, could theater help? If you’re trying to bring Atlantans together across differences, what might happen if you began not with a PowerPoint or panel discussion, but with a story, a meal and a conversation?
If your organization needs Atlantans to know more, care more or do more about an issue, Out of Hand wants to work with you.
But the larger invitation is bigger than any one theater. Atlanta’s arts organizations collectively possess an extraordinary reservoir of storytelling, creativity, cultural knowledge, trust and relationships. What other public problems could those assets help address?
The crisis facing nonprofit theater is real. Atlanta should invest more—not less—in the artists and organizations that make this city culturally vibrant. At the same time, crisis can invite reinvention.
Atlanta’s theaters are filled with people who know how to make us feel, imagine, gather and see the world through someone else’s eyes.
Those are artistic skills. They are also civic assets.
So as the American theater field debates what comes after the traditional nonprofit theater movement, perhaps Atlanta can ask a slightly different question:
What could happen if we stopped thinking only about how Atlanta can save its theaters—and started asking how Atlanta’s theaters can help Atlanta?
