Long Wharf Theater, a regional nonprofit on New Haven’s waterfront, is ending a long, bumpy chapter there, hoping to expand access and reduce costs.New Haven’s Long Wharf Theater will move out of its longtime headquarters and embrace itinerancy as the company seeks a fresh start after a period of extraordinary upheaval.The leadership of the nonprofit theater is framing the move as an opportunity to reach new audiences and reimagine its operations, and the city is supporting the change, which it says will help the organization better serve the community.The move is the latest chapter in a time of extensive change at the theater, which in 2018 fired its executive director, Gordon Edelstein, a day after The New York Times reported sexual misconduct allegations against him. As the company remade itself, it faced a real estate quandary: whether to renew its expiring lease at the New Haven Food Terminal, just off Interstate 95, where it has been performing for 57 years.The theater, which has been among the nation’s leading regional nonprofits, also faces the same challenges as its peers: demonstrating to patrons, artists and donors that it can move forward following the lengthy pandemic shutdown, and that it is committed to shifting priorities in response to industrywide calls for more diversity, equity and inclusion.“Long Wharf Theater has an incredible legacy, and it’s had some complicated challenges,” said Jacob G. Padrón, the theater’s artistic director. “The next several years will be about discovery.”The theater’s leaders said they could have chosen to renew its lease when it expires in June, but that they opted not to, both because the theater was spending too much money on rent and upkeep, and because its location, once treasured for free parking and easy highway access that appealed to suburbanites, was inconvenient for some New Haven residents and difficult to access via public transit.The theater, which had thought of the industrial waterfront location as temporary when it opened there in 1965, has contemplated relocating before. In 2004, it announced plans to move to downtown New Haven, but in 2011, citing a worsening economy, it abandoned those plans, opting to renovate the Food Terminal location instead.Padrón said he views the decision to relocate to a variety of yet-to-be-determined spaces around New Haven as a way of rethinking “how a regional theater makes its art,” and a way to “expand our imagination of how a theater can show up for its community.”“It’s exciting to think about what’s the project, and what’s then the right container for that project,” he said.Jacob G. Padrón, the theater’s artistic director, said that “the next several years will be about discovery.”Gabriella Demczuk for The New York TimesThe theater’s leadership, including not only Padrón but also the managing director, Kit Ingui, and the board chairwoman, Nancy Alexander, all said that they believe the institution is financially stable, and that it would benefit from the flexibility of its next phase. They said that the new arrangement should not only reduce its costs but also expand its reach to audiences who, because of geography, transportation or economics, have not found their way to the waterfront district from which the theater takes its name.“There’s no sense that we’re hanging on by a thread or that we have to live on a shoestring,” Alexander said. “We have been blessed with some longtime givers who have created a strong endowment for us, and we are projecting budgets that will work.”Long Wharf plans to stage at least two more shows at its current location — a new play called “Dream Hou$e,” by Eliana Pipes, which the theater describes as being about “the cultural cost of progress in America,” and “Queen,” by Madhuri Shekar, about “brilliant women confronting inconvenient truths.” The theater is still talking with its landlord about whether it might continue producing in the building later this year, but by the fall of 2023 the leadership expects to present full productions at other locations in and around New Haven — possibly in rented theaters, and possibly in spaces not traditionally used for theater.“We believe you can produce theater anywhere,” Ingui said.Long Wharf, which in 1978 won the Tony Award for regional theater, survived the pandemic with significant support from the federal and state governments. Its staff is less than half the size it was — about 30, down from 65 before the pandemic; the annual budget, which had been about $6.5 million before the pandemic, is now a little over $5 million.The theater’s leaders said they have not yet decided whether they will remain itinerant long-term, or whether this will be a short-term phase. But they all said the crises faced by the theater were catalysts, not causes, for the move.“We’re going into this with excitement,” Alexander said. She said that the theater’s pandemic performances in city parks demonstrated that new locations could attract new audiences, and that by moving around New Haven, Long Wharf is seeking to become “a theater that is much more widely in our community, and, we hope, valued by our community.”“We really are being mindful that this is a period of exploration and experimentation, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we ultimately decided to have something like an anchor space and then continue producing in some other creative spaces as well, in some kind of hybrid model,” she said.Adriane Jefferson, New Haven’s director of cultural affairs, said Long Wharf was one of the most important nonprofits in the city, and that its move would strengthen both the organization and the city. She said she believed the shift would help Long Wharf become more anti-racist, in keeping with the city’s new cultural equity plan, which called attention to “inequities that prevent people from participating in arts and culture in every corner of our city.”“Long Wharf’s idea of being more mobile, moving throughout the city and coming to communities who are not making it down to where Long Wharf is now, is very responsive to our plan,” Jefferson said. “I would have concerns if they weren’t thinking along these lines.” More
