What It Takes to Build a Theater Town

For a brief spell, back in the days when the Baltimore Business Journal had an arts-and-leisure page, I was the theater critic. In 1993 the BBJ killed that page, arts and leisure being viewed, I guess, as unbusinesslike. Having lost my own business reason to keep my eye on the Baltimore theater scene, I turned my attention to other matters the next 17 years. Then, in 2010, through my journalist wife’s good offices, I was offered the chance to take up reviewing again, now for the Baltimore “page” of Broadway-World.com. My resulting rediscovery of Baltimore theater at that point was like Rip Van Winkle’s awakening: the place was the same but almost everything in it had changed.

As it happened, the moment I clocked out was close to the moment Vince Lancisi clocked in. Coming out of Catholic University in Washington with a master’s degree in directing, Lancisi in 1990 envisioned bringing a repertory professional theater company to a town that didn’t have one. Baltimore, he judged, filled the bill.

As he tells the story, when he looked at Baltimore he saw one top-notch regional theater, Center Stage, plus a thriving community theater scene, and very little else that was locally produced. There were, then as now, two large houses, at that time the Morris Mechanic Theatre and the Lyric Opera House, where national touring companies of Broadway shows could alight for a week or two, but of course those shows were anything but local. And, though Lancisi does not mention it, there was one house, the Theatre Project, where avant garde productions—local, national, and international—staged brief runs. Even adding that detail, however, Lancisi was right that this state of affairs left a need the new company he had in mind could help supply. All he had to do was convince Baltimore audiences that the need existed, and that the dozen or so community theaters, whatever their virtues, were no substitute for what a small professional company could offer. Lancisi dubbed his company Everyman, partly as a reference to the medieval morality play, partly to proclaim the troupe’s aspiration to universality.

When Lancisi and I compared notes, we agreed that in the interim between the early 90s and 2014, while I was playing Rip Van Winkle and he was building Everyman, Baltimore became a theater town.

Definitions first: what does one mean by the phrase “a theater town”? Clearly, there’s no easy synonym, no bright line demarcating theater towns from others, much less a magic formula for making one emerge. Nonetheless, it’s very easy to take Baltimore as a test case, and look at what’s been added over the last two decades. Without some of these additions, the label wouldn’t have fit. The additions are what make the difference, and they are worth considering.

Surely the single most striking difference between 1990 and now is that where there was once only one company staging original professional productions in its own house, there are now four, spanning an impressive spectrum.

First and foremost is the same pillar that sustained Baltimore at the beginning, Center Stage, now in its 52^nd season, a typical age for a product of the regional theater movement. I have been around to witness most of Center Stage’s trajectory. At the beginning, Center Stage bore some resemblances to Everyman today: a focus on mainstream, non-musical dramas and comedies, with a good helping of classics. And there was at Center Stage, if not a regular company, a solid core of actors who regularly appeared there, some of whom stayed principally in the region for most of their careers. A couple escaped into the larger world and became national names, like Terry O’Quinn and Christine Baranski. But audiences could look to see many of the same faces from production to production, and watch pronouncedly local talent grow and become more assured.

That local flavor to Center Stage was just ending around the time Lancisi’s company arrived, with the appointment of Irene Lewis as...