Something I've observed is that one of the best ways to get government funding is to already be successful.
If you always sell out your entire season and have corporate sponsors up the wazoo (in the program, in the building, on the seats, in the bar, in the toilet stalls, by the payphones, on the backs of the tickets, in the advertising, in the name of the company itself...), you seem to get much bigger grants than you do if you're a comparatively small company, even if the small company's financial picture is substantially better than the large one's. (At least, insofar as a small company which is juuuuuuust breaking even is in a much better financial position than a large company which depends upon annual multi-million dollar grants just to keep the lights on.)
On some level, I think there's a credible argument to be made here, insofar as government should be focusing its funding on those arts which their populations find most interesting, and it doesn't take a genius to realize that a company which routinely sells out 2000-seat houses is more popular than one which struggles to hit 60% in an 80-seat studio space.
But at the same time... eh.
- Artists in general, and playwrights in particular, do not always spring fully-formed from BFA programs and young companies. Smaller theatres which are less beholden to the immediate success of every single show that travels through them provide an important proving ground and a source of experience (and baseline employment) for the artists who eventually move onto bigger and "better" things.
- There's a lot of snobbery about the commercial sector ("They do commercial work. We do real theatre."), but I think it's absolutely undeniable that genuinely risky theatre (particularly dance theatre), while it can be artistically interesting and commercially viable, simply doesn't have a place in the commercial mainstream. Every now and then a quirky new show makes it big, yes, but even then this generally involves moving up through the ranks [Cleveland -> Off-Off-Off-Off-Off Broadway -> Toronto -> Off-Off-Broadway -> Chicago -> you get the picture] rather than debuting at the top.
- I think we eat our own lunch when we focus on a smaller number of already-successful companies at the expense of the rest. If we are to attract large numbers of new theatregoers--something we need to do for the sake of the entire industry--we need to focus on an audience who are not already theatregoers. I'm not sure what form this takes--educational theatre, identity-driven theatre, young theatre in general, whatever--but I'm pretty sure it doesn't take the form of a company which caters almost entirely to retirees. (Well. Retirees, and the corporate sponsors who want to sell things to retirees, I suppose.)
