How a Small New York Theater Succeeded After the Pandemic
Since the COVID-19 pandemic ground performing arts to a halt in March 2020, bad news has kept coming for American theater. Following Broadway’s fall 2021 reopening, there have been just 16 weeks in which attendance met or exceeded 90% of pre-pandemic levels. At least 35 theater programs across the U.S. have closed since March 2020, including nine in New York City. In June 2023 alone, three regional companies announced closures.
But the pandemic has not spelled universal disaster. For some small companies, like the New York City-based nonprofit What Will the Neighbors Say? — also known as “the Neighbors” — it opened new doors. Rapid growth in the experimental company’s ticket sales and grant funding have enabled it to produce higher-budget productions and pay artists more.
Theatremakers Sam Hood Adrain and James Clements, plus two of their former classmates from the Experimental Theatre Wing at NYU, co-founded What Will the Neighbors Say? in 2016. It premieres original works that blend historical fiction with documentary theater, a genre incorporating primary source material into stories about real events and people.
In March, for example, the Neighbors and a group of students at CUNY Queens College produced “Traces”, a play based on archival research about four historical pandemics. It told fictional stories of immigrant families set in a Queens apartment across those crises.
Cameron Marcotte, a longtime Neighbors patron, said he appreciated how Clements and Hood Adrain ensured the identities of their student cast members factored into the plot. “That’s the strongest thing about the Neighbors’ work,” Marcotte said. “They create things that are intensely personal and intensely lived in.”
The average ticket sellout rate for the Neighbors’ New York shows has risen from around 75% pre-pandemic to around 90% post-pandemic when adjusted for theater size and length of run, Hood Adrain said. The company’s revenue has more than tripled in three years, from $14,308 in fiscal year 2019 to $44,165 in 2022. Its expenses grew at a slower rate over the same period, from $14,511 to $36,310.
That’s not enough to live on, so co-artistic directors Clements, 31, and Hood Adrain, 30, also act, teach college theater and work other arts-related jobs.
The duo pointed to several factors in the Neighbors’ success. First, the company does not maintain its own theater space, so it had almost no overhead during the pandemic. That allowed the founders to save up and focus on the future. “We didn’t lose any money,” Hood Adrain said. “We just banked it all for when the world reopened.”
During the early days of the pandemic, Clements, Hood Adrain and their colleagues worked with an arts-consulting firm to develop a five-year plan. They standardized a procedure for developing new plays: a two-week workshop culminating in a staged reading, then a weekend-long workshop production, then fundraising efforts for a main-stage production.
“We really took the leap from a gang of friends making work to a bona fide organization,” Hood Adrain said.
While waiting to return to the stage, the founders hosted virtual community-engagement events and expanded the company’s educational partnerships, including teaching contracts and guest lectures at the Wuhan Institute of Design and Sciences, Ohio State University and other colleges.
Starting in 2020, Neighbors also benefited from a national push to diversify theater and secure places for smaller companies. The movement encouraged funders to lower barriers to entry and prioritize companies’ mission, makeup and audience, said Adam Mummery, grants and data manager for the Alliance of Resident Theatres New York, which directs funding from the New York State Council on the Arts and other such organizations.
“A lot more funding for us has gone into funding the theater company as a whole, versus funding a project or production,” Mummery said.
Across its first four seasons, What Will the Neighbors Say? received $18,000 in grants, Hood Adrain said. Since 2020, funders have allocated the company $97,500, including a three-year commitment of at least $35,000 from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and two National Endowment for the Arts grants totaling $25,000.
Clements thinks one factor, above all, has allowed the Neighbors to foster an engaged audience base: its art. He said the company’s productions toe a rarely explored line between unorthodox and accessible, abstract and well-researched. While performing in the company’s first full-scale post-pandemic production, “Third Law,” last December, Clements realized the Neighbors had something special, he said. “Third Law” was an interactive theater game in which audience participation determined casting, design and plot.
“We wanted to do something you cannot get from Netflix or Hulu, something you must be in space with other bodies to do,” Clements said.
Clements said between educational partnerships and funded projects, he and Hood Adrain have secured Neighbors work through 2026.
“I feel completely optimistic,” Clements said. “We survived the pandemic, and we survived our sort of five-year hurdle of, ‘Is this going to happen? When is this going to happen?’ So I know that Sam and I are tough enough to kind of take any blows that come to the company because we’re committed to our mission, because we’re committed to our community, and because we love what we do.”
