Beck volunteer suggests ways to turn finances around

Save Beck Center.

I have volunteered backstage at several community theaters including Beck Center for the past 24 years going through many changes including artistic directors, stage managers and volunteers. Beck Center is now in serious financial straits and I, along with my cohorts who work backstage, could offer reasons for the decline in attendance, which is a shame because the caliber of show they produce is top-notch.

When I first started at Beck there was a regular subscriber base and there were volunteers that participated in a program selling subscriptions for the shows and they were very successful. This was partly due to the fact that they were excellent salespeople but mostly because the shows were the type of shows that appealed to most people from senior citizens down to small children. When they decided to try to appeal to a different group of people and started doing edgy, off-the-wall shows that contained language that shocked people, they lost the subscriber base. The people they lost were the type of people who would contribute annually and bequeath money to the theater. Their new audiences were not interested in supporting the theater itself. Now they are in crisis mode trying to save Beck.

It would be a big loss to the theater community to lose such a wonderful theater that has the ability to put on such high-quality productions with truly talented and wonderful actors. They need to go back and do a season of box office successes to bring some cash flow back into the theater plus they should lower the ticket price and make their money in volume rather than per ticket. Sell 400 tickets for $20 each, making $8,000 per performance instead of selling $100 tickets at $31 each, making only $3,100 per performance.

Until they are on a better footing they should limit the equity actors to one per show and when they are back in the black, bump it up. The non-equity talent in this area is phenomenal....