Brian Kurtas is the Walnut’s Associate Artistic Director. He oversees the casting of productions and works with artists of various natures to bring the best show forward. He has been involved with the Walnut Street Theatre since 2007, first as a performer and part of the theater’s professional apprenticeship program.
The Walnut Street Theatre is America’s oldest theater, operating for over 200 years at its national historic landmark location. The theater saw a myriad of the greatest American stars of the 19th and 20th centuries: Audrey and Katharine Hepburn, the Marx Brothers, Sidney Poitier, and Jane and Henry Fonda are a few celebrity names that graced the legacy theater’s stage.
In 1982, the theater became a non-profit organization running under the Walnut Street Theatre Company. The theater’s education programs enrich and collaborate with the artistic minds of Philadelphia students who often receive little to no arts education.
What is the importance of allowing children access to drama programs?
It’s certainly studied and there is reliable research on the benefits that music, theater, arts and culture have on a child’s development. Not just from a math and reading point of view, but from a social, you know, an SEL point of view. Confidence, social skills, interaction, problem solving, a lot of those things are byproducts of a healthy arts and culture involvement.
Tell me about the Walnut Street Theatre’s Education Programs?
It’s one of the largest, if not the largest in our state. When we talk about the impact on students, it’s well over 100,000 students that the Walnut Street Theater is able to reach. And we do it through a variety of programs. Primarily, our touring outreach program is wildly popular.
There are so many Title I schools that have not just limited but no access to the arts at all. And we get support from very generous organizations like PECO, for example, who will fund an entire production on bullying, or on nutrition, or a special production that highlights Black History Month and it will go into all of the elementary schools in the Philadelphia School District at no cost.
Many schools outside of the Philadelphia School District also will pay to book that in. So that’s a really important way that we’re able to not just expect audiences to come to us, but we bring theater to audiences, and we bring educational theater to audiences. We also have residencies where we’ll go into schools and provide teaching artists because there may be a school that doesn’t even have an arts teacher, and we can go in and lead improv, train the teachers so that when we leave, they can have a self-sustaining, running theater program or music program.
So there’s new programs, there’s old programs, constantly rotating so that we can always continue to serve our community best, which is really what makes a true nonprofit organization shine.
What role do you think theatre plays in the personal development of students, particularly students of Philadelphia?
I think for young people who have limited to no access to arts and culture, it’s our obligation to provide them with an experience that might help them grow into being a well-rounded human being. And so, as a nonprofit administrator, we look at the person as a whole, and if there’s a need that’s not being fulfilled in their home life or in their school life, maybe there’s an opportunity where we can reach that child.
And that’s not to pass a judgment or a comment on anybody’s home or school life, but it’s us always looking for opportunities to not just entertain our community, but to help them grow and be the best humans that they can be.
That’s where I feel like the obligation of a nonprofit comes in, where when people think about the Walnut Street Theater, they think of our high-quality entertainment. But we’re so much more than what you see on stage. Our involvement in the community, our involvement in the bettering of young people’s lives is just as important to us as the quality of our main stage productions.
What are the challenges of keeping a theater running in a post-COVID world?
We have obstacles and barriers that never existed in the past. I think creating theater was already hard before COVID and now it’s just even harder. And I’m not just talking about the cost of materials and labor, I’m talking about our competition. 15, 20, 30 years ago, there was no Netflix, there was no Hulu, and so we weren’t all competing for the same audience.
The options for entertainment are so varied these days that even separate from an audience perspective, we all compete for the same funding now too. It’s not like foundations are continuing to grow. I think foundations and philanthropic gifts and contributed income is shrinking.
So, where there used to be endless opportunities for grants and endless opportunities for government support, many organizations, many government agencies are changing their giving priorities. And we have to fight just as hard, if not harder, for arts and culture support in this country than we did in the past.
In a post-COVID world, what is a greater priority – creating some art that’s unique and bizarre and from an unrepresented voice that has a very limited scope and a very limited appeal to an audience or picking a show that will probably just help you keep your doors open? We’re all forced now to take a really hard look at our priorities and say, how are we going to both survive and sustain theater at the same time?
And it’s very challenging because I think all the rules and regulations of how we used to do this and how we used to measure success 15, 20 years ago are just out the window now. Everyone has to kind of evolve and reinvent themselves and figure out what’s a priority right now in this very moment.
What are your long-term goals for the future of the theater?
Sustainability. Right now, I want to make sure that theater at a large scale and theater in an individualized scale – like the Walnut – will still be here in 20 years.
That’s really important to me now. And I don’t think I realized how important it was until all of us had our livelihoods threatened. And I suddenly had to say, how am I going to make sure that this will continue to exist. You know, the oldest, one of the oldest professions in the world, storytelling will continue.
So, sustainability is very important to me right now. Especially as a leader, you know, it becomes different when there’s people’s livelihood at stake. And if you look at the Philadelphia landscape from a theater point of view, 50 years ago, there was not a community as large as it is today.
Most of the theaters in Philadelphia, the Dramatist Guild, etc., were bringing artists in from New York. And now when you look at the Philadelphia landscape today, there’s hundreds of equity working actors who can call Philadelphia their home, and they can earn a living here. If we are not able to continue to provide jobs for them, that’s going to go away.
And I think all the major markets are threatened with this: Chicago, Los Angeles. The sustainability to our market is really important. Because if this theater goes away, imagine the impact it’s going to have on the restaurants and the shopping. And I think we’re all woven into this fabric of the city’s economic engine, that it’s really important for theater to remain a sustainable thing to do.
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