Spanning 18 theatre companies in 6 cities across the country, this work will ultimately, as always, come back to the Bay Area, providing our companies and individual artists with a new set of tools, developed over the next 18 months, to measure and understand the intellectual, spiritual, emotional, and social impact of your work on the people who watch it.
The real challenge to the American theatre, and all the arts, is not a financial emergency but a crisis of relevance. As a field, we have become very good at measuring "things financial;" any theatre knows how to count heads in the house and dollars in the box office till. Studies are regularly conducted by major funders and service organizations to assess the aggregate financial well-being of the sector. Advocacy groups commission research to extrapolate the mega-economic impact of the arts on communities and the nation as a whole.