Mosque4Mosque is not a monolithic representation of the Arab American Muslim experience, and perhaps that’s exactly the point. 

Written by Omer Abbas Salem and directed by Sophiyaa Nayar, this charming production challenges all preconceived notions of a play about an Arab American Muslim family. 

In this sitcom-esque dramedy, Ibrahim (played by Salem) and his family navigate their lives in Chicago prior to and after Trump’s inauguration. Ibrahim is a queer Syrian American millennial working through his first relationship ever, with his white boyfriend James (Jordan Dell Harris). Having helped raise his 18-year-old sister Lena (Gloria Imseih Petrelli) after his father died from cancer, Ibrahim is accustomed to taking care of his family first, even if that means living a hushed life. His mother Sara—“Sa like sorry, Ra like ramen”—(Rula Gardenier) on the other hand, has other plans; she is determined to find him the perfect Muslim man to marry. 

Mosque4Mosque Through 12/17: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Wed 12/14, 7:30 PM, no shows Thu-Fri 11/24-11/25; Den Theatre, 1331 N. Milwaukee, aboutfacetheatre.com, pay what you can ($5-$35 suggested)

Salem, who is also Syrian American, first wrote Mosque4Mosque in 2019 through Jackalope Theatre’s Playwrights Lab. In July 2020, the play was workshopped and performed virtually through the Criminal Queerness Festival and Dixon Place, directed by Sharifa Elkady. Steppenwolf Theatre Company then selected the play, under the direction of community advocate Arti Ishak, for its SCOUT New Play Development Initiative, a groundbreaking accomplishment for MENA artists like Salem and Ishak. But a seat at the table is not enough. “They have made it very clear to us they are ill-equipped to predict what our needs may be because they’ve never worked with a group of Arab actors and they don’t have any Arab actors in their ensemble,” Salem said in an interview with the Reader. 

Now produced at About Face Theatre and supported by Silk Road Rising, Mosque4Mosque deconstructs stereotypical and harmful media portrayals of MENA communities and Muslims. The Den’s Bookspan Theatre becomes Ibrahim’s family kitchen—the heart of an Arab home. The subtle details can be easy to miss but are indispensable. In front of the shoe rack, a pair of cream balgha—traditional heelless slippers from the Maghreb region—sit next to a pair of hot-pink fluffy sandals. Vibrant oriental rugs cover the wooden floors and complement the Arabian vermilion armchair.  A hookah and a massive jar of pickled green olives rest on their white refrigerator, which is decorated with family photos and receipts. Some props almost feel ironic, like the ceramic camel by the kitchen sink. (Steven Abbott designed the set, with props by Lonnae Hickman.)

But it is Salem’s witty writing style that shines throughout this production. Through his use of comedic relief, Salem drives sensitive topics forward in a way that allows the audience to lean into the conversation. We first meet Ibrahim in a church. Ibrahim’s holy confession is amusing, but it is a monumental scene because it instantly forms a reverent connection between religions and dissects the contrasts between Catholic and Muslim guilt. 

In his depiction of an Arab American family, Salem avoids creating unrealistic portrayals by poking fun at the family’s eccentricities. Gardenier’s heartwarming performance as Sara is an enjoyable representation of the hospitable, lovable, and sometimes quirky nature of Arab, Muslim, and immigrant mothers. She immediately wins our hearts, and we recognize her controlling behavior as a form of love. Sara’s naiveté is hyperbolized to reflect her desire to be a part of Ibrahim’s life. Who else would google “famous Muslim gay men” to better understand her son?

In just two hours (including an intermission), Salem even manages to weave in subplots to highlight the multifaceted complexities of these characters. Lena, for example, is a walking paradox. We first see Lena coming home late, fumbling to put her hijab back on, which she occasionally wears, mainly for her mother. As she struggles to tell her mother that she quit the Scholastic Bowl to join the cheerleading team, she reflects the internal pressures children of immigrants experience to please their parents.

In between two cultures, young Arab Americans often struggle with the fear of disappointing their parents and their aspiration to live shamelessly. This message really resonates when Ibrahim says, “There’s a little bit of a lie in every truth I tell her,” referring to his mother. Still, this is a play about identity and belonging, highlighting universal struggles that everyone can relate to. 

Even with all the hardships, Salem never forgets what makes these families so special. It’s the chaotic family dinners. It’s the unbreakable sibling bond between Lena and Ibrahim. It’s Sara’s willingness to create a dating profile for her son on a queer Muslim “rearranged arranged marriage” website. This play also addresses the immigration issues caused by Trump’s Muslim ban, but it skims the surface. In the end, Sara returns home after her trip to Damascus but is stopped by immigration. While this story line felt rushed, its call to action couldn’t be clearer. In an era where Arabs and Muslims are either invisible or perceived as problems, Mosque4Mosque demands for us to be seen as whole. At the same time, it sends a message to MENA and Muslim communities that they are seen.

Read More

Taylor Hanna taught herself to cook on the job. “I don’t have formal training,” says the 17-year veteran of nine restaurant kitchen lines, and one half of the pickling power duo Vargo Brother Ferments. “Chefs would give me tasks to do and I wouldn’t know what they were talking about. I’d go into the walk-in and google on my phone, ‘What is soubise?’ And you’d just have to be quick on the fly with it. It’s a luxury if your chefs and managers are willing to teach you. Oftentimes, there’s no time in the shift to go, ‘Hey, can you spend 15 minutes with me to teach me how to sharpen my knife?’”

Jennifer Kim learned the fundamentals in culinary school, and sharpened them in kitchens such as Blackbird and Avec, but when it came time to open her first solo brick-and-mortar Passerotto, she was flying blind with respect to financial operations. (She sought help from industry friends.)

During the pandemic both Hanna and Kim emerged as ardent participants and organizers in the semiunderground microbusiness economy that flourished in its first 18 months. They didn’t just rely on skills learned on the fly to further their own ends, but shared them with the loose collaborative community that grew up within this alternative economy. Through pop-ups, workshops, and a barnstorming cross-country tour in the summer of ’21, Alt Economy—the open-source mutual aid platform Kimstarted—provided hospitality workers with educational resources to survive and thrive outside the established restaurant industry.

“You could kind of fly under the radar with certain things,” says Kim. “We were working at homes, working without licensing. There was flexibility with creativity on how you got to operate your microbusiness.”

But ask any number of cooks, bartenders, and servers who supported themselves within this decentralized labor movement how it’s going now, and the thrilling autonomy that came along with it has lost some of its shine. The reopening of brick-and-mortars drained blood from the microbusiness model, while a shift in algorithms withered the robust Instagram engagement many of these businesses depended on to get their food in front of eyeballs. Burnout and/or the need to make rent sent many workers back to brick-and-mortars—or out of the industry altogether.

“The pop-up scene was on fire,” says Hanna. “It was very trendy and cool. But you can’t rely on something to be cool to sustain you. It has to be deeper than that.”

“A lot of people are trying to figure out, ‘How do I keep this a viable business?’” says Kim, who’s currently teaching a fine dining course at her alma mater, Kendall College. “’How do I work within these rigid systems again? How do you compete with these giant businesses?’”

That’s why the pair, building from an informal fish butchery class Kim led in her home last winter, are launching a series of free industry worker skill-share classes, entirely funded by the community. “It was just, ‘Bring over some fish, and we’ll learn how to break it down from whole into filets,’” says Kim.“Participants felt empowered to continue building butchering skills. A few felt more confident to order whole fish versus filets, which has a financial impact on their food cost.”

Kim also posted a series of free financial worksheets that give “workers and biz owners a road map on how costs, cash flow, and profits work within whatever ecosystem they are currently participating.” In the meantime, she and Hanna began imagining how to go bigger: “Is there something that we can build out that people can come and share information, share skills, share resources in an environment that’s driven by the community and taught by the community?”

Earlier this month they put out a call for resources to support a series of three classes, the first beginning December 12 and featuring hands-on sessions on pickling, canning, curing, and fermentation (taught by Hanna and partner Sebastian Vargo); knife sharpening (Kevin Silverman of Northside Cutlery); whole fish butchery (Hatchery instructor Matt Miller); and fish curing and fermentation (Kim). They’re working on adding a pastry class. This first set of classes will be held at Impact Kitchen at the Hatchery, a space they’re renting out through donations. Others have offered drinks, snacks, or their own bar and kitchen spaces for future classes, but Kim and Hanna haven’t yet hit their goals to finance the next two sessions yet.

They’re still looking for support for December’s microbusiness courses on financial acumen and cash flow; business plan development, graphics, and design; and food photography. In early 2023 the plan is a series of introductory courses for BIPOC and undocumented workers interested in food photography and styling; bartending; coffee and barista work; and wine 101.

“We heard a lot from industry workers who are interested in entering the specific positions within hospitality that are typically gatekept from BIPOC or undocumented workers,” says Kim. “A lot of those positions, you need prior experience. We can at least jump-start the process of, ‘Here are the basics of behind the bar; all the tools that you’ll see; the language that they use.’”

Networking is a natural outgrowth of these classes, both for potential job leads and brainstorming on larger systemic issues within the industry. “It gives us a chance to almost have a town hall,” says Hanna. “We’re all gathered. Let’s start talking about the realities of what’s happening. For people who do want to keep doing this, what are the changes that we need to make? It’s a part of a conversation that needs to be had collectively.”

Donations of money, food, time, space, or equipment to support future classes can be made via Venmo @itsforpickles or Zelle at [email protected]. Kim and Hanna pledge to publish transparent financials on how all dollars are allocated.

Read More

When Elder emerged in Massachusetts in the mid-2000s, they worshiped at the altar of stoner-doom heavyweights such as Sleep and Eyehategod. But in the years since, they’ve emerged from behind the weed to establish a voice of their own. By their fifth LP, 2020’s Omens, most of the band had relocated to Berlin, and as a group they’d shed much of their early sludge and grime in favor of heady strains of prog, psych, postrock, and more. Unfortunately, it came out just as the music industry shut down. Elder’s new album, Innate Passage, arose from that period when the very definition of time felt like it’d come unmoored—days and weeks blurred together, and it became a morbid half-joke to wonder how many months long March 2020 could possibly be. Though a global pandemic is by definition a collective experience, prolonged isolation rendered each person’s experience of it intensely personal. Innate Passage loosely explores the notion of life and time as an individual journey—not just the paths we take, but the lenses we use to filter reality. Heard in that light, it feels appropriate that the record’s five long-form tracks sometimes feel simultaneously kaleidoscopic, fantastical, and yearning; “Coalescence” pairs motorik chug with celestial melody and delves into forlorn atmospheres, then jets off to space with intergalactic synths. Innate Passage is a milestone from musicians who’ve proved themselves unafraid of reinvention. There may be more rocky waters ahead, but Elder’s silky, exploratory rock doesn’t get mired in turbulence—and it’s inspiring to hear them sail on through it.

Elder’s Innate Passage is available through Bandcamp.

Read More

Mosque4Mosque is not a monolithic representation of the Arab American Muslim experience, and perhaps that’s exactly the point. 

Written by Omer Abbas Salem and directed by Sophiyaa Nayar, this charming production challenges all preconceived notions of a play about an Arab American Muslim family. 

In this sitcom-esque dramedy, Ibrahim (played by Salem) and his family navigate their lives in Chicago prior to and after Trump’s inauguration. Ibrahim is a queer Syrian American millennial working through his first relationship ever, with his white boyfriend James (Jordan Dell Harris). Having helped raise his 18-year-old sister Lena (Gloria Imseih Petrelli) after his father died from cancer, Ibrahim is accustomed to taking care of his family first, even if that means living a hushed life. His mother Sara—“Sa like sorry, Ra like ramen”—(Rula Gardenier) on the other hand, has other plans; she is determined to find him the perfect Muslim man to marry. 

Mosque4Mosque Through 12/17: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM; also Wed 12/14, 7:30 PM, no shows Thu-Fri 11/24-11/25; Den Theatre, 1331 N. Milwaukee, aboutfacetheatre.com, pay what you can ($5-$35 suggested)

Salem, who is also Syrian American, first wrote Mosque4Mosque in 2019 through Jackalope Theatre’s Playwrights Lab. In July 2020, the play was workshopped and performed virtually through the Criminal Queerness Festival and Dixon Place, directed by Sharifa Elkady. Steppenwolf Theatre Company then selected the play, under the direction of community advocate Arti Ishak, for its SCOUT New Play Development Initiative, a groundbreaking accomplishment for MENA artists like Salem and Ishak. But a seat at the table is not enough. “They have made it very clear to us they are ill-equipped to predict what our needs may be because they’ve never worked with a group of Arab actors and they don’t have any Arab actors in their ensemble,” Salem said in an interview with the Reader. 

Now produced at About Face Theatre and supported by Silk Road Rising, Mosque4Mosque deconstructs stereotypical and harmful media portrayals of MENA communities and Muslims. The Den’s Bookspan Theatre becomes Ibrahim’s family kitchen—the heart of an Arab home. The subtle details can be easy to miss but are indispensable. In front of the shoe rack, a pair of cream balgha—traditional heelless slippers from the Maghreb region—sit next to a pair of hot-pink fluffy sandals. Vibrant oriental rugs cover the wooden floors and complement the Arabian vermilion armchair.  A hookah and a massive jar of pickled green olives rest on their white refrigerator, which is decorated with family photos and receipts. Some props almost feel ironic, like the ceramic camel by the kitchen sink. (Steven Abbott designed the set, with props by Lonnae Hickman.)

But it is Salem’s witty writing style that shines throughout this production. Through his use of comedic relief, Salem drives sensitive topics forward in a way that allows the audience to lean into the conversation. We first meet Ibrahim in a church. Ibrahim’s holy confession is amusing, but it is a monumental scene because it instantly forms a reverent connection between religions and dissects the contrasts between Catholic and Muslim guilt. 

In his depiction of an Arab American family, Salem avoids creating unrealistic portrayals by poking fun at the family’s eccentricities. Gardenier’s heartwarming performance as Sara is an enjoyable representation of the hospitable, lovable, and sometimes quirky nature of Arab, Muslim, and immigrant mothers. She immediately wins our hearts, and we recognize her controlling behavior as a form of love. Sara’s naiveté is hyperbolized to reflect her desire to be a part of Ibrahim’s life. Who else would google “famous Muslim gay men” to better understand her son?

In just two hours (including an intermission), Salem even manages to weave in subplots to highlight the multifaceted complexities of these characters. Lena, for example, is a walking paradox. We first see Lena coming home late, fumbling to put her hijab back on, which she occasionally wears, mainly for her mother. As she struggles to tell her mother that she quit the Scholastic Bowl to join the cheerleading team, she reflects the internal pressures children of immigrants experience to please their parents.

In between two cultures, young Arab Americans often struggle with the fear of disappointing their parents and their aspiration to live shamelessly. This message really resonates when Ibrahim says, “There’s a little bit of a lie in every truth I tell her,” referring to his mother. Still, this is a play about identity and belonging, highlighting universal struggles that everyone can relate to. 

Even with all the hardships, Salem never forgets what makes these families so special. It’s the chaotic family dinners. It’s the unbreakable sibling bond between Lena and Ibrahim. It’s Sara’s willingness to create a dating profile for her son on a queer Muslim “rearranged arranged marriage” website. This play also addresses the immigration issues caused by Trump’s Muslim ban, but it skims the surface. In the end, Sara returns home after her trip to Damascus but is stopped by immigration. While this story line felt rushed, its call to action couldn’t be clearer. In an era where Arabs and Muslims are either invisible or perceived as problems, Mosque4Mosque demands for us to be seen as whole. At the same time, it sends a message to MENA and Muslim communities that they are seen.

Read More

Taylor Hanna taught herself to cook on the job. “I don’t have formal training,” says the 17-year veteran of nine restaurant kitchen lines, and one half of the pickling power duo Vargo Brother Ferments. “Chefs would give me tasks to do and I wouldn’t know what they were talking about. I’d go into the walk-in and google on my phone, ‘What is soubise?’ And you’d just have to be quick on the fly with it. It’s a luxury if your chefs and managers are willing to teach you. Oftentimes, there’s no time in the shift to go, ‘Hey, can you spend 15 minutes with me to teach me how to sharpen my knife?’”

Jennifer Kim learned the fundamentals in culinary school, and sharpened them in kitchens such as Blackbird and Avec, but when it came time to open her first solo brick-and-mortar Passerotto, she was flying blind with respect to financial operations. (She sought help from industry friends.)

During the pandemic both Hanna and Kim emerged as ardent participants and organizers in the semiunderground microbusiness economy that flourished in its first 18 months. They didn’t just rely on skills learned on the fly to further their own ends, but shared them with the loose collaborative community that grew up within this alternative economy. Through pop-ups, workshops, and a barnstorming cross-country tour in the summer of ’21, Alt Economy—the open-source mutual aid platform Kimstarted—provided hospitality workers with educational resources to survive and thrive outside the established restaurant industry.

“You could kind of fly under the radar with certain things,” says Kim. “We were working at homes, working without licensing. There was flexibility with creativity on how you got to operate your microbusiness.”

But ask any number of cooks, bartenders, and servers who supported themselves within this decentralized labor movement how it’s going now, and the thrilling autonomy that came along with it has lost some of its shine. The reopening of brick-and-mortars drained blood from the microbusiness model, while a shift in algorithms withered the robust Instagram engagement many of these businesses depended on to get their food in front of eyeballs. Burnout and/or the need to make rent sent many workers back to brick-and-mortars—or out of the industry altogether.

“The pop-up scene was on fire,” says Hanna. “It was very trendy and cool. But you can’t rely on something to be cool to sustain you. It has to be deeper than that.”

“A lot of people are trying to figure out, ‘How do I keep this a viable business?’” says Kim, who’s currently teaching a fine dining course at her alma mater, Kendall College. “’How do I work within these rigid systems again? How do you compete with these giant businesses?’”

That’s why the pair, building from an informal fish butchery class Kim led in her home last winter, are launching a series of free industry worker skill-share classes, entirely funded by the community. “It was just, ‘Bring over some fish, and we’ll learn how to break it down from whole into filets,’” says Kim.“Participants felt empowered to continue building butchering skills. A few felt more confident to order whole fish versus filets, which has a financial impact on their food cost.”

Kim also posted a series of free financial worksheets that give “workers and biz owners a road map on how costs, cash flow, and profits work within whatever ecosystem they are currently participating.” In the meantime, she and Hanna began imagining how to go bigger: “Is there something that we can build out that people can come and share information, share skills, share resources in an environment that’s driven by the community and taught by the community?”

Earlier this month they put out a call for resources to support a series of three classes, the first beginning December 12 and featuring hands-on sessions on pickling, canning, curing, and fermentation (taught by Hanna and partner Sebastian Vargo); knife sharpening (Kevin Silverman of Northside Cutlery); whole fish butchery (Hatchery instructor Matt Miller); and fish curing and fermentation (Kim). They’re working on adding a pastry class. This first set of classes will be held at Impact Kitchen at the Hatchery, a space they’re renting out through donations. Others have offered drinks, snacks, or their own bar and kitchen spaces for future classes, but Kim and Hanna haven’t yet hit their goals to finance the next two sessions yet.

They’re still looking for support for December’s microbusiness courses on financial acumen and cash flow; business plan development, graphics, and design; and food photography. In early 2023 the plan is a series of introductory courses for BIPOC and undocumented workers interested in food photography and styling; bartending; coffee and barista work; and wine 101.

“We heard a lot from industry workers who are interested in entering the specific positions within hospitality that are typically gatekept from BIPOC or undocumented workers,” says Kim. “A lot of those positions, you need prior experience. We can at least jump-start the process of, ‘Here are the basics of behind the bar; all the tools that you’ll see; the language that they use.’”

Networking is a natural outgrowth of these classes, both for potential job leads and brainstorming on larger systemic issues within the industry. “It gives us a chance to almost have a town hall,” says Hanna. “We’re all gathered. Let’s start talking about the realities of what’s happening. For people who do want to keep doing this, what are the changes that we need to make? It’s a part of a conversation that needs to be had collectively.”

Donations of money, food, time, space, or equipment to support future classes can be made via Venmo @itsforpickles or Zelle at [email protected]. Kim and Hanna pledge to publish transparent financials on how all dollars are allocated.

Read More

When Elder emerged in Massachusetts in the mid-2000s, they worshiped at the altar of stoner-doom heavyweights such as Sleep and Eyehategod. But in the years since, they’ve emerged from behind the weed to establish a voice of their own. By their fifth LP, 2020’s Omens, most of the band had relocated to Berlin, and as a group they’d shed much of their early sludge and grime in favor of heady strains of prog, psych, postrock, and more. Unfortunately, it came out just as the music industry shut down. Elder’s new album, Innate Passage, arose from that period when the very definition of time felt like it’d come unmoored—days and weeks blurred together, and it became a morbid half-joke to wonder how many months long March 2020 could possibly be. Though a global pandemic is by definition a collective experience, prolonged isolation rendered each person’s experience of it intensely personal. Innate Passage loosely explores the notion of life and time as an individual journey—not just the paths we take, but the lenses we use to filter reality. Heard in that light, it feels appropriate that the record’s five long-form tracks sometimes feel simultaneously kaleidoscopic, fantastical, and yearning; “Coalescence” pairs motorik chug with celestial melody and delves into forlorn atmospheres, then jets off to space with intergalactic synths. Innate Passage is a milestone from musicians who’ve proved themselves unafraid of reinvention. There may be more rocky waters ahead, but Elder’s silky, exploratory rock doesn’t get mired in turbulence—and it’s inspiring to hear them sail on through it.

Elder’s Innate Passage is available through Bandcamp.

Read More

Theatre Communications Group, the national organization for nonprofit theater, is about to release its latest annual report on the fiscal health of the field, Theatre Facts 2021. (Yes, it’s almost 2023, but this stuff takes time to collect.)

The news is not great.

The report, which compares results over a five-year period, tracks the startling COVID-era jolts the theaters experienced. Average income from single ticket sales, for example, was 93 percent lower in fiscal 2021 than in 2017. And subscription income took an 83 percent dive.  

It was a crash. But, says TCG communications director Corinna Schulenburg, there was a financial upside: expenses were down during that period when theaters were shuttered, while government aid kicked in. The result was a frothy blip of budget surpluses.

“Because of federal funding, and because theaters were producing less, they actually had some liquidity,” Schulenburg says. In fact, “what we call their working capital, which essentially is cash flow,” hit a peak in 2021.

It was so good that, according to a “snapshot survey” TCG conducted earlier this year, only 10 percent of reporting nonprofit theaters had a deficit budget in 2021, and over 70 percent reported an operating surplus that year.

Now, Schulenburg says, the challenge is that the federal funding has gone away, and the cash cushion is disappearing. By 2022, according to the same survey, 30 percent of responding theaters were projecting deficit operating budgets, and there’s a huge increase in that cohort on the horizon: 62 percent are projecting budget deficits in 2023.  

Meanwhile, audiences have not been fully returning. (Arts Alliance Illinois says, anecdotally, that members are seeing a  30-to-50 percent drop in performing arts audiences.)  And Schulenberg notes that board member and individual giving has also declined.

“This was a big surprise for us,” Schulenburg says. “We’ve seen individual giving continue to rise, annually. Theaters have been able to count on that kind of community support.” But from 2020 to 2021, trustee giving declined 26 percent, while individual giving was down 7 percent. “The pandemic is still active, shows are being canceled, and audiences are not totally returning. From our perspective, we know how resilient our field is, but we’re deeply concerned.”

The bright spot in all this, Schulenburg says, is the success of advocacy for federal funding at the height of the pandemic. It was “really remarkable; the investment from the shuttered venues operators grant and especially the PPP, as well as the ERTC [Employee Retention Tax Credit].” Over 97 percent of surveyed theaters received some form of federal relief funding, a level of investment not seen since the Federal Theatre Project during the Great Depression.

Goodman Theatre executive director Roche Schulfer Courtesy Goodman Theatre

Schulenburg mentions a presentation on nonprofit theater economics (“Why Not-for-Profit Theatre?”) that Goodman Theatre executive director Roche Schulfer delivered at a TCG forum in 2017. It was “prescient,” she says.

I went to the source for an update.

“In 1966, two economists, William Baumol and William Bowen, wrote a book [Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma] illustrating the basic economic challenge of the performing arts, which is that you can’t take advantage of gains in productivity or technology like other sectors of the economy. It takes the same number of musicians the same amount of time to play Beethoven’s symphonies, or actors to do Shakespeare’s plays, as it did when they were written,” Schulfer says. “So, as the cost of labor goes up, unless there’s a significant gain in fundraising, there’s a gap that’s filled by increased ticket prices.”

“Over the last 50 years or so, ticket prices have risen by far more than the cost of living. At the Goodman, for example, our top ticket is around $90 now. If it had followed the cost of living, it would be in the range of $33. We’ve been raising prices to make up for the gap in fundraising.”

“Our mission is to provide new and engaging work, and not to just respond to what the marketplace wants,” he told me. “But consumers will pay more for something they’re familiar with than for something unknown to them.”  

Schulfer says this disconnect, amid a shift in institutional funding, means tough times ahead:

“I think there are going to be major performing arts organizations around the country that are going to face real crises in the next 48 months. Groups like Arts Alliance Illinois and TCG are trying to build on what happened during the pandemic, which was an awareness of the importance of the arts to the overall economy. There’s an effort to build on that through the National Endowment for the Arts or other federal programs. We’ll see if that happens.” 

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