Fall Back: Portland Center Stage
After taking the theater company 'down to the studs,' Artistic Director Marissa Wolf rebuilds
Marissa Wolf enters her seventh season as Artistic Director of Portland Center Stage this fall, a job that involves nonstop shifting between the right and left parts of her brain.
On one hand, Wolf says it’s her job to “lift the vision and the mission of the theater and to really live inside its values—while connecting to the community.” Inside the theater, she works with artistic teams and acts as a producer on the season’s shows and supports the different directors.
Wolf is also the one digging into the finances and earned revenue part of running a major theater. And though PCS will hire a new managing director to focus on those parts, it’s Wolf crunching numbers these days.
At its magical best, live theater takes us on a flight. But take-off depends on selling tickets and being able to keep the lights on. “Your product is the work you put on stage,” Wolf said, matter-of-factly.
No shock, it’s a challenging time for the arts.
“Many nonprofits have struggled post-pandemic, but now it’s ‘what does stability look like,’” Wolf said. “We had a certain way of operating before, and then we had to really take it down to the studs during the pandemic. But we’ve done a mighty lift and made massive cuts.”
The theater’s finances came to a head in late spring, said Wolf, and Portland Center Stage had to go public with its problems.
“I didn’t want to, but it felt that urgent,” she said. “We had to let our community know.”
The good news is that PCS reached its August benchmark partly thanks to a gift from the State of Oregon that will help build back its audience. Wolf credits the efforts of the staff and board, too.
Everything excites Wolf about the upcoming 2025-2026 season. Here are a few highlights. Full season here.
The season kicks off with “Primary Trust,” a play that Wolf describes as Mister Rogers meets “Our Town.”
“It’s about how we learn to leave childhood trauma behind, and it has a lot of tenderness in it. It’s that warm hug people need right now,” she said.
For the holidays, PCS stages a new production of “Little Women.” Portlanders, Wolf said, love a good literary adaptation, and this one satisfies our need for something smart, moving and romantic.
Winter brings a high farce called “The Play That Goes Wrong,” a co-production with Seattle Rep.
“It will be gray and raining by then,” Wolf said. “Who knows what kind of political moment we will be in?”
The murder mystery whodunnit promises a break from world events with two hours of comedy built around a complex series of set and prop pieces that have to function as they break. Pity the stage manager for this show.
For the season’s grand finale, Storm Large returns with “Storm Large Makes it Home.” Large’s 2009 one-woman show, “Crazy Enough,” was one of the all-time biggest hits at PCS. “She’s so brilliant, she’s an incredible storyteller,” Wolf said. “You’ll feel like you’re at a rock show” while also analyzing this city’s favorite topic: itself.
“She’s very interested in questions around what home is, especially now that she has lived so many places. But Portland is the connection inside these powerful, muscular stories.”
Large’s performance is available to Portland Center Stage’s season ticket holders first, but if 2009 is any indication an extended run and other connection points could open up more opportunities.
I'll make it simple. This is just another fluff piece which many struggling theater companies like to float in order to deflect any real examination of their appallingly bad business and financial management practices. PCS is not at all explaining just how poorly they made expensive artistic decisions in order to maintain the artifice of status. On the rare occasions when they made their financial records public on line, anyone with some degree of accounting knowledge and analysis of financial statements could see that they've over spent and under sold productions for years. Like most regional companies, they make no effort to operate profitably, do nothing to reduce operating or production expenses or innovate to gain more sales - except to rely on hope and charity to balance budgets year after year.
I predicted their financial crises to local theater friends more than a year ago. Anyone paying any attention to their artificially keeping financially solvent the previous two years by leasing theater space to the now bankrupt ART company would have known the moment ART's term lease expired (or funds ran dry as they did) PCS was the next to come begging for public and private bailout.
And to be fair, what do you expect from a company managed by theater artists trained in acting and directing, but not educated in profitably managing a business? Anyone with a memory will recall that PCS carried tremendous debt that nearly shuttered them following Oregon Shakespeare Company's failure to make this Portland experiment profitable. (It was a financial failure.) The company was bailed out by the developers of the Brewery Blocks and with help of rich patrons and much well-managed fundraising. Of course, two years back, when theater professionals with no business training or experience decided they knew better how to manage as a board of directors, those well-placed patrons were coldly dumped from their directorial tasks and the funding fell off. (Come on, that wasn't the real reason - they took over so they could push expensive diversity training onto the company against the board's resistance to same.) Anyone who were to take a close look would see that PCS is managed by the artistic inmates of the asylum - few to none having serious for-profit business, finance or sales/marketing management training and experience. (ART is another of these locally precarious institutions. They managed to blow through millions in real estate sales income in no time.)
And, as for Marissa, as an artistic director (does anyone reading this article even know what the duties of the AD are?) has her degree in drama with graduate studies in stage directing. Naturally, that makes her an outstanding candidate to manage the business, financial and sales needs of a theater company that was near bankruptcy 3 months ago and currently operating on handouts. (Except she doesn't do that really - she has a: 1) a director of finance, 2) a general manager, 3) an accounting manager and 4) a staff accountant. to manage the business side of the company. That plus a staff of five on business development. And collectively they must be doing a swell job - to be bankrupt 3 months ago.
Yep, fluff is as fluff is wont to get. Too many uneducated reporters carry the lies forward to a completely uninformed public. But, see, that's the appalling standard we maintain - for the arts are exempt from critical scrutiny. Just don't act so damned surprised when the arts suffers from financial problems again and again and again and again..... Just get your checkbook ready and bail them out again.....ad naseum.