Among professional thespians in America's major urban hubs of theater, there is an old saying: "If you aren't a tour de force, you're forced to tour."
It's a stinging truism for actors in places like New York City, who often find they must hit the road with touring productions of the latest Broadway hits - living out of hotels, sleeping on buses - in order to pay the rent at home.
That place is Missoula, and that company is the Montana Repertory Theatre.
This month, Montana Rep celebrates its 40th anniversary as a professional touring company. There exists no longer-lived performing organization in Missoula, save the Missoula Symphony Orchestra. Even more remarkably, only one touring repertory theater company in the entire country (the Acting Company, based in New York City) can boast anything approaching the longevity and scope of Montana Rep.
For those of us who live here in Missoula, it's perhaps easy to lose sight of Montana Rep's success and influence. After all, the company only proffers a scant few performances in Missoula each year - fewer than most student productions at the University of Montana, as well as some independent local theater productions.
But go to places like Plains or Plentywood and the story is different. There, and in other small towns across Montana and surrounding states, Montana Rep is often literally the only theater to come through town, professional or otherwise.
Moreover, in the past decade especially, Montana Rep has established a nationwide reputation as one among a small handful of top-drawer touring theater companies. Whereas the vast majority of touring theater productions today are built around the name recognition of a hit show - "Spamalot" or "Wicked" or "The Lion King" - Montana Rep is known as much for its own merits as for the plays it performs: a great company that performs classics of American theater.
"I think a lot of people in Montana don't realize how unusual and special Montana Rep really is," said Seattle-based actress Suzy Hunt, who has appeared in several Montana Rep productions (including the company's current production of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," which opens next Tuesday in Missoula) as well as professional shows on Broadway and elsewhere around the country.
"Theaters have a very high death rate, even here in Seattle," Hunt added. "So, to see a company based in a small city in Montana survive like Montana Rep has - that's a real testament to the community and the people who have made it happen."
It is a community story set against a national backdrop.
Four decades ago, a wave of expansionist optimism was sweeping the arts world in America. In 1965, the U.S. Congress created the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, with the express intent of expanding great arts beyond the bounds of major urban areas and into the great American outback.
Bo Brown, then a theater professor at the University of Montana, recalls watching as top-quality professional theater companies appeared, as if out of nowhere, in cities such as Minneapolis, Houston and Washington, D.C.
"In those days, anything was possible," says Brown. "There was a spirit in America, across the country, about the arrival of the arts in the consciousness of every American citizen and how essential the arts are to our survival."
Brown himself had already built a small but successful theater company here in Montana: The Bigfork Summer Playhouse, which he founded in 1960. But as he contemplated the successes of various projects funded by the NEA around the country, Brown began to notice a gaping hole in his own culture.
"There was no regional theater anywhere in this intermountain west area," says Brown. "There was stuff going on everywhere it seemed, but not here."
Brown decided to do something about it. In 1967, with the blessings of the University of Montana and a pittance of money from the newly formed Montana Arts Council, he founded Montana Repertory Theatre. The company's mission: to bring great performances of great theater to every nook and corner of the Northern Rockies.
In spring of 1968, Montana Rep hit the road in a pair of U-Haul trucks and four cars. That year, the company - which then was comprised entirely of students and faculty from the University of Montana - took three plays on the road: "She Stoops to Conquer," "Julius Caesar," and "The Devil's Disciple."
"It was a pretty ambitious set of plays," says Brown, looking back with a laugh. "The idea was that we would go to these little towns and put on three plays in three days. Sometimes we did that; sometimes we'd only end up doing one."
Money was tight in the beginning, and audiences were sometimes scarce. Even here in Missoula, when productions were staged at the University Theatre (these were the days before the PAR/TV building), Brown recalls that, "the audience sometimes looked totally lost in that big space."
But the audiences that showed up to those early performances were deeply appreciative, according to Suzy Hunt - who was then a student of Bo Brown's.
"In Montana there used to be a circuit of theaters that famous people like (pianist Arturo) Rubinstein toured," said Hunt, a Butte native. "But when all that went away because of damn television, those Montana towns were left bereft of live entertainment, unless it was rodeos or country-western singers. The classical arts were gone essentially. So when (Brown) came along, it was such a void he helped to fill, and you should have seen the way people responded."
Despite the positive response, Brown left the University of Montana after two seasons running Montana Rep, due to frustration over the state of financial support for the arts in Montana. He went on to teach and direct theater at Ithaca College in New York, and later at Ohio State University.
But over the years, he continued to watch his brainchild grow.
"It's amazing what has happened here since I left the state," says Brown, who returned to Missoula after he retired in 2006. "It's great to see what this company has become and how it has thrived, particularly given the desperate situation for theaters across America right now. It's remarkable, really."
By 1990, Montana Rep was, in ways, an established institution in Missoula and around the state. Beginning in the mid-1970s, under the leadership of Jim Kriley, the company had expanded to hiring a partial cast of professional actors to complement the student forces. With a focus on performing western-themed plays to audiences in Montana and surrounding states, Montana Rep had fully embraced its regional role as a theatrical mirror of the best that the West had to offer.
But behind the scenes, the Montana Rep was suffering. Its bookings had begun to dwindle, and fiscal support from the state legislature was on the downswing. In 1991, the Missoulian published a story which posited that, during much of the late 1980s, "the Rep (had) been seen as a theater company on its fiscal deathbed."
That began to change in 1990 with the arrival of Greg Johnson, a seasoned director and producer from New York City. Johnson initially came to Missoula to serve as the company's temporary director to replace departing professor Jim Bartruff; Johnson was hired permanently a year later.
One of the first things Johnson did was eschew the western-themed repertoire of the company in favor of a focus on well-worn classics.
"I went to Broadway hits," says Johnson. "We realized that what we needed most was to rebuild familiarity and excitement surrounding the company, and the best way to do that was with familiar titles."
Thus in 1992, Montana Rep dropped the western-themed focus in favor of two popular Broadway hits, "Romance/Romance" and "The Real Thing." Sure enough, bookings for the tour increased, as did attendance.
"We started getting our feet under us," recalls Johnson. "People were talking about Montana Rep as a going concern again."
Then, in 1997, Johnson decided to take a tentative half-step away from surefire Broadway fare and into the classics with "To Kill a Mockingbird," a play based on Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same name. That same season, Johnson contracted with a new, New York-based booking manager for the company.
The result was a success unlike any previously enjoyed by the company. Bookings were so strong that the company had to repeat the play for its 1998 tour.
"That's really how we hit on the niche theme that has carried forward to today: The great American story," says Johnson. "We're focused on Tenessee Williams and 'Steel Magnolias' and the great American canon. There's plenty out there to investigate, and at this point people have begun to trust us to do those stories well."
Today, Montana Rep tours typically encompass upwards of 50 performances over the course of a three-month tour, in places as far-flung as New Mexico, Florida and Pennsylvania.
Montana Rep is not the only American theater company to have struggled with painful transitions over the years. It is not the only company that has come back from the brink of disaster. Technically, at this point, it's not even a repertory company - a term that usually refers to a company that performs multiple plays in rotation, utilizing the same cast.
But Montana Rep is a success story in an era of theatrical flame-outs. And that's a big story, in today's arts world.
Greg Johnson attributes the company's success to many factors - from the longevity of many key staffers, to the luck of finding the right booking manager and the right play at the right time. But two factors stand out in the company's success, he says: Its relationship with the University of Montana and its revenue model.
Montana Rep earns between 75 percent and 80 percent of its overall budget through ticket sales from its performances on tour. As a point of comparison, the Missoula Symphony Orchestra - one of the most established and successful performing arts organizations in Missoula - only earns about 35 percent of its income through ticket sales (the rest comes primarily from donations and corporate sponsorships).
"We figured out early on that in order to survive, we needed to survive primarily on earned income from tickets," says Johnson. "That's kind of an obvious approach today; but back 20, 30 years ago, a lot of comparable companies were heavily reliant on public support, which ended up drying up."
At the same time, Montana Rep has been able to rely on the University of Montana for immeasurable in-kind support, including office space, student labor, and other benefits.
"For the 18 years that I've been here, from the president of the university on down, we've had unbelievable support for what we've been doing," says Johnson. "Nobody ever says no to the Rep - knock on wood. It's hundreds of thousands of dollars in in-kind support we get, and that really allows us to do what we do."
Indeed, Johnson isn't thinking simply about survival anymore. He has set his eyes on the next step for Montana Rep: international touring.
"We're thinking of doing that with 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' " says Johnson. "We have a contact in Ireland and one in China, and there's a student from Beirut who wants us to perform there. Wouldn't that be incredible, to bring that play there?"
Johnson has other ambitions as well, particular as regards Montana Rep Missoula, the fledgling local company that Johnson founded two years ago.
"For me it's all about establishing an in-town repertory company to compliment the work going on at the university with the students and on the road with Montana Rep," says Johnson. "That's the dream I'm working on most now, is making that a reality." (See related story on page E9.)
Those are lofty goals for a small company run out of a cramped office in the sparsely populated Northern Rocky Mountains. But then, a few decades ago, some might have called Bo Brown's vision lofty, too.
"When you look at the landscape from Seattle to Minneapolis, the only thing happening in between is Montana Rep," says Brown, the pride evident in his voice. "That's pretty amazing, I think."
Preview
Montana Repertory Theatre will present performances of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" Jan. 29-31, Feb. 2 and Feb. 5-9 at the Montana Theater in the PAR/TV Building on the University of Montana campus. Tickets are $5-$15, available from the PAR/TV Box Office or by calling
243-4581. A 40th Anniversary Birthday Party for Montana Rep, including a performance of "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," will be held on Satuday,
Jan. 26; the deadline for reservations, however, has already passed.
For more information, visit http://www.MontanaRep.org, or call 243-6809.
Reach Joe Nickell at 523-5358 or at jnickell@missoulian.com.
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