Do More Recent Theater Plays Feature Fewer Roles?

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1 Do More Recent Theater Plays Feature Fewer Roles? Sacit Hadi Akdede Department of Public Finance, Adnan Menderes University, Nazilli İİBF, Aydin, Turkey Victor Ginsburgh ECARES, Université libre de Bruxelles Aynur Uçkaç Department of Public Finance, Adnan Menderes University, Nazilli İİBF, Aydin, Turkey May 2018 ECARES working paper ECARES ULB - CP 114/04 50, F.D. Roosevelt Ave., B-1050 Brussels BELGIUM

2 Do More Recent Theater Plays Feature Fewer Roles? Sacit Hadi Akdede 1 Department of Public Finance, Adnan Menderes University, Nazilli İİBF, Aydin, Turkey Victor Ginsburgh ECARES, Université Libre de Bruxelles Aynur Uçkaç Department of Public Finance, Adnan Menderes University, Nazilli İİBF, Aydin Turkey May 28, 2018 Abstract This paper shows that the number of roles in international theatre plays has been decreasing over time. Playwrights seem to internalize the costs of producing plays with too many roles by downsizing. This downsizing is not a recent phenomenon: it is going for many decades. We also analyze the case of Turkey for which we have data that make it possible to compare the number of roles in produced and non-produced plays. Keywords: Number of roles, cast size, Baumol cost disease, playwrights. 1 Corresponding author. shakdede@adu.edu.tr; Tel.: /136; Fax:

3 JEL codes: Z1 1. Introduction Is theatre, as an art form, shrinking in terms of the number of roles? Do more recent and contemporary playwrights feature smaller number of roles? If so, it would imply that playwrights internalize the fact that their plays will not be performed if the production costs get too important. The number of roles is one of the most important elements of a play. Playwrights tell their stories by writing roles, main characters and minor roles, that is, they are creating the main body of a theatrical event. Directors or actors, on the other hand, create atmosphere to interpret and transmit the message of the playwright to the audience by using stage sets, sound or music, lighting design, and other sceneries of a stage. Managers or producers, however, think mostly in terms of production costs and prospective revenue from ticket sales. Producers in the private sector and bureaucrats in state theatres are decision makers who are supposed to know about the theatre business, as well as supply and demand conditions. A reasonable interaction among these three groups of agents (playwrights, directors/actors, and producers) of live theatre creates a script a produced stage product, a theatrical performance. Nicholson (1993, p.1) suggests that Everyone involved with theatre readily admits plays truly exist only in performance. Therefore, playwrights have to take the concerns of producers and directors seriously if they want their plays to get staged. Nicholson (1993, p. 3) also mentions some other factors which directly affect what a playwright writes: Audiences might have a shorter attention span and/or need to go back home or attend other activities earlier in the evening, which, in more recent times, triggered managers to produce shorter plays. In fact, it is an empirical observation that the duration of contemporary plays is shorter than that of theatrical events of Shakespeare s time which are reported to be three hours or 2

4 sometimes four hours long (Hirrel, 2010, p.165). Close substitutes of live theatre such as cinema, television, and other attractions can affect negatively the demand for live theatre and the revenue stream of theatre organizations. Costs have increased over time, and producers or managers, even in non-nonprofit theatre organizations, operate under tight budget constraints, and have to take into account possible earning gaps. If income is not increasing as much as costs, producers or managers have to decide which plays to produce. It is an empirical fact for a long time now, that earned income (ticket sales) does often not cover the production and operating costs of a play (McCarty et al., 2001). This might cause producers to produce shorter and low cost plays, which in turn affects what playwrights write in terms of number of roles since production costs are positively related to the number of roles, or the cast. 2 Balio and McLaughlin (1969) give some historic evidence for the period by investigating 105 Broadway plays in terms of cost structure and cast size. They find that, ceteris paribus, real production costs (corrected for inflation) were increasing with cast size. Contemporary playwrights are inclined to write plays with smaller casts. To show this, we use a unique dataset compiled by the Turkish State Theatres (TST), which includes international and Turkish plays that we use to test two assumptions: Do authors write plays in which the number of roles declines over the centuries and do theater directors choose to produce plays in which this number is not too large if they face financial constraints. 2 We make a difference between number of roles and cast size The number of roles is decided by the playwright, the cast, by the producer of the play, who frequently takes that artistic liberty to eliminate some (minor) roles, or have the same actor playing several roles. See Werck, et al. (2008). 3

5 The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 briefly summarizes the existing literature. Section 3 describes the data and conducts the statistical analysis separately for both types of plays. To examine whether theaters prefer to produce plays with smaller number of roles, we use data on Turkish productions. Section 4 concludes. 2. A Brief Survey of the Literature Although there are many papers studying the cost disease in the arts, very few investigate the relationship between earning gaps and cast sizes in the performing arts. Most studies (Anderson et al., 1978; Baumol and Bowen, 1966; Baumol and Baumol, 1985; Werck and Heynelds, 2007; Werck et al., 2008; Heilbrun, 2011) claim that reduced cast size helps coping with the cost disease. We found no empirical study that investigates this issue. Baumol and Bowen (1965, 1966) Brooks (1997), and Last and Wetzel (2011) observe that the cost per unit of output in the live performing arts, including live theatre, has been increasing faster than that in the economy as a whole. Baumol and Bowen (1966) give some historical evidence that the average cost per performance was 157 in the five-year period to They also estimate that the average cost per performance at the Royal Shakespeare Company in was 2,139, that is, 13.6 times more than during the eighteenth-century, while over the same period, the general price level in England rose by about 620 percent. Production costs went thus up much faster than the general price level. Davenport (2011), a Broadway producer, shows that musicals with casts of over 30 people have decreased during the last sixty years. In the 1950s, 69 percent of all new musicals opening on Broadway had a cast size larger than 30. These percentages 4

6 dropped to 67 in the 1960s, 31 in the 1970s, 28 in the 1980s, 38 in the 1990s, and 27 in the 2000s. Heilbrun (2011) suggests that one of arguments of Baumol and Baumol (1985) is that an obvious way to suppress the cost disease is to cut down the number of artists the performing organization has on its payroll. In the theater the obvious way to do so is to produce plays which call for small casts. He (2011) also quotes Baumol and Baumol (1985) who show that the average cast size for all non-musicals produced on Broadway fell from 15.8 in to 8.1 in Theatre companies might prefer original plays with a small number of roles instead of giving artistic liberty to directors to shorten the cast in the original play by assigning multiple roles to one actor, crush some minor roles, or parts of the text. This might indeed reduce costs, but it also decreases the artistic quality of the original play. In the words of Peacock (1996), removing Judge Bouck from the cast of Hedda Gabler would certainly reduce labour input to Ibsen s masterpiece, but it would also destroy the product. Therefore, we found it worth to investigate whether playwrights have written plays featuring smaller number of roles over time. If so, this implies that theatre as an art form has evolved into a situation in which a new theatrical aesthetics develops with smaller numbers of roles. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first that explicitly uses the number of roles as an investigation unit. It tests whether playwrights feel the cost pressure and adjust accordingly. We test the following first hypothesis: H1: The number of roles in theatre plays decreases over time. Using the Turkish case, we also test a second hypothesis claiming that public subsidies given to theatres make them more flexible in their choice of repertoire, and put less emphasis on the number of roles (see also Werck et al., 2008), thus: 5

7 H2: The number of roles is not the main criterion for what is produced in fully subsidized Turkish State Theatres. 3. Data Table 1 displays descriptive statistics concerning both international (columns (1) to (4) and Turkish (columns (5) to (8)) playwrights identified in the Turkish State Theatres (TST) repertoire database, which contains roughly 1,300 plays of each origin. TST is one of the important cultural institutions in Turkey, which was created at the very beginning of the modern Turkish Republic. It has many goals including the promotion of westernizing Turkish culture. It has performed many important western plays over the last 80 years with a big administrative body and twelve branches now scattered all over the country. In fact, there is no corresponding cultural institution in any other Middle Eastern country or in Europe (Akdede, 2011). TST keeps the records of plays included into the repertoire over the last 60 years. Every year, many plays written in or translated to Turkish, are submitted to the drama department of TST to be evaluated and possibly included in the repertoire. Plays go through a very technical examination. Evaluations for acceptance are based on theatrical quality only. The number of roles is not a criterion for acceptance and, therefore, there is no selection bias. Since we had no or uncertain information on the first creation of the plays, the date in which a play was written is the year in which its playwright was born. Most international plays in the database were written during the 19 th and 20 th centuries, and there are only 108 (10 percent) that go back to the previous centuries, including Shakespeare s time. The average number of roles in international plays is 11.1, but column (1) of Table 1, shows that it decreased from 20.3 in the 16 th century to 9.1 in the 20 th century, with a small bump upwards during the 19 th century, which may be the 6

8 result of the capitalist boom and philanthropy by the riches. All Turkish plays in the database were written in the 19 th and 20 th centuries. The number of roles they feature is larger, but also dropped from 15 in the 19 th century to 12 during the next century. Male authors largely dominate in both international and Turkish playwrights. The database classifies plays in terms of their genre as comedy, tragedy and drama, plays with various identifiers including psychological, historical, modern, documentary, political, experimental, epic, youth, realistic, and absurd plays (that will be called various plays in the sequel), children plays, and plays with no identifiers. Unfortunately, almost 60 to 70 percent have multiple identifiers or no identifier at all. A little more than half of the plays have been staged in Turkish theatres. Finally, almost 60 percent of the playwrights are Anglo-Saxon or written by in former socialist countries authors. The 42 remaining percent were born in very diverse countries. [Table 1 about here] Table 2 provides statistics about the 50 percent of all plays that have already been produced/staged in one of the 12 branch theatres in TST. It shows very similar averages to those of Table 1. [Table 2 about here] 4. Regression Analysis and Results 4.1. The number of roles in theatre plays decreases over time Assuming that playwrights internalize the effects of the costs of each additional role and want their plays to get produced, the number of roles in plays is modeled as a function of the birth dates of playwrights and some other control variables listed in Tables 1 and 7

9 2. Playwrights write plays that capture the attention of audiences but also the concerns of managers to reduce costs. Tables 3 and 4 show the results of different regressions for international and Turkish plays. The dependent variable is the number of roles, while, with the exception of the date of birth of the playwright, all right hand-side variables are dummies representing characteristics of the writer (gender, and citizenship for international plays) or the play (genre). We also added a dummy variable that takes the value 1 if the play was staged in a Turkish theatre, and 0 if not. Table 3 is devoted to the analysis of international plays. It shows the results obtained by Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and Poisson estimation, since the left-hand side variable (number of roles) is a positive integer. The effects of date of birth of playwrights are negative and significantly different from zero in all cases, implying that the number of roles is decreasing over time: Playwrights in earlier centuries or decades featured a larger number of roles. It is somewhat easier to interpret the coefficients in the three OLS regressions, though the Poisson regressions give similar results. In the one run over all playwrights, the value of implies that a play that is 33 years more recent than the one to which it is compared, has one role less. The decrease in the number of roles is thus three per century. But the two other equations (19th and 20th centuries, and 20th century only) show that the reduction became more rapid (3 roles every 37.5 years) during the 20th century. We also find that plays written by women feature less roles and that those with no identifier (the omitted reference category which picks up a coefficient of 0) feature larger number of roles than other genres. It is highly likely that musicals belong to this category. Though one may think that staged plays would include smaller number of roles, this is not the case, since the coefficient picked up by the variable is not 8

10 significantly different from 0. Finally, plays written by Anglo-Saxon authors feature significantly less roles. This may be the consequence of lower public subsidies to the performing arts in Great Britain and the United States than in other countries. [Table 3 about here] Table 4 displays the same regressions and results for Turkish plays. They lead to very similar results than those just discussed, so that all the results show that we cannot reject the hypothesis H1 above: The number of roles in theatre plays decrease over time. [Table 4 about here] 4.2. The number of roles is not the main criterion in Turkish subsidized theatres Since we use Turkish State Theatres (TST) to test Hypothesis H2, a few words on their structure are needed. State theatres are almost fully subsidized: Their earned income is equal to 4 percent only of their total budget (Akdede, 2011). The whole staff (including directors, actors, and design artists) is appointed for lifetime, until legal retirement age. In Table 5 check whether, given their large subsidies, state theaters are sensitive to the number of roles in staging a play. Therefore, we use a probit model in which the left-hand side is a binary variable that can take two values only: One for staged and 0 for not (yet) staged plays. The independent variables are the same as those used previously in Tables 3 and 4, except that we add the number of roles. The results show that neither the authors birth date nor the number of roles matter for a play to get staged in subsidized venues: The coefficient that they pick up are very small or not significantly different from zero. We can thus not reject hypothesis H2 either. This is not so for private theatres: In a personal interview with managers of such institutions in 9

11 Istanbul in February 2016, we were told that one of the main criteria for a play to be staged in is the number of roles. [Table 5 about here] Table 6 shows the results of the regression that analyses the number of roles written by playwrights born in the 20 th century for already staged plays only. They are very similar to the findings of the previous regressions in Tables 3 and 4, though the downsizing is somewhat larger: One less actor every ten years (10x0.09). [Table 6 about here] We find interesting to use the regressions coefficients to compute cost savings. We unfortunately have no information on the historic development of the average salary of a cast member, and had to collect data by interviewing some private theatres in Istanbul. This made it possible to set this salary as being roughly equal to US $50 in February In regression 3 of Table 4 for 20th century playwrights, the coefficient of birth date of playwright is equal to and is significantly different from 0. This means that on average plays written today have seven roles less compared to those written 100 years ago. Therefore, today $350 (=7x$50) can be saved per performance of a contemporary play with respect to an early 20 th century play. In Istanbul, private theatre groups performed 202 plays between February 2016 and May Each play was shown 12 times, 4 leading to a total of 2,424 performances, and thus a total saving of $848,400 with respect to the beginning of the 20 th century. 3 State theatre actors get a fixed monthly salary regardless of the number of performances. 4 In terms of number of plays, private theatres dominate the theatre scene of Istanbul. During the same period, subsidized public theatre produced only 36 plays. 10

12 The income and costs for the performance of a play today can be computed as follows. The average ticket price in private theatres is $15 and the average venue has a capacity size of 200 seats. Assuming that, on average, each performance attracts 100 people, the average revenue per performance amounts to $1,500. The average per performance rent for the venue is roughly equal to $300. The cost of actors can be evaluated at roughly 12 actors per play times $50 per performance, which leads us to a total cost $900. Therefore, the $350 saving per performance alluded to earlier might be important for private theatres since they also incur some fixed costs. Rehearsals take 6 weeks on average. During rehearsals, actors are paid a fixed salary, but private theatres were not willing to give any information on this. However, we know that the monthly fixed salary of public theatre actors is around $2,000. Assuming that private theatre actors would get the same salary per play (production) for rehearsal periods, one can estimate that they save $14,000 (7 x 2,000), thus a total of some $2,8 million(14,000 x 202). Adding the $848,400 of, this makes for a total of $3,6 million saving for a half season and thus $7,2 million for the whole season. This is a huge amount for private theatres since total government subsidy to all private theatres in Turkey during the season was much smaller than $7.2 million. 4. Conclusions There is some empirical evidence that the number of roles in theatre plays has been getting smaller over time. One of the reasons is the consequence of Baumol s cost disease: all wages, including those of actors and musicians have increased over time, and the only way to control their influence on costs, is to reduce the number of roles (which is often impossible in the case of music as often suggested by Baumol: a quartet 11

13 today needs the same number of musicians as in the 18 th century). This downsizing does not seem to be a recent phenomenon. Instead, it is structural as our regressions analyze playwrights from many centuries. If big productions are considered important for cultural policy makers, then theatre productions should be subsidized, and certainly so for older plays. The subsidy should be based on the cast size as well as the artistic quality of the plays even though the latter is very difficult to assess objectively. References Akdede, Sacit H. (2011). Kültür ve Sanatın Politik Ekonomisi Devlet Tiyatroları Örneği (The political economy of culture and arts Turkish State Theatres). Ankara: Efil Yayınları. Anderson J. Robert, Baumol, Hilda, Sonia, Maltezou, Sonia & Paul & Wuthnow Robert (1978). The Condition and Needs of the Live Professional Theatre in America Phase I Report: Data collection and analysis prepared for NEA. Princeton, NJ: Mathteck Inc. Balio, Tino & McLaughlin, Robert (1969). The Economic Dilemma of the Broadway Theatre: A Cost Study. Educational Theatre Journal, 21, Baumol, William & Bowen, William (1965). On the performing arts: the anatomy of their economic problems. American Economic Review, 50, Baumol, William & Bowen, William (1966). Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma, New York: The Twentieth Century Fund. Baumol, William & Baumol, Hilda (1985). On the cost disease and its true policy implications for the arts. In Ruth Towse, (ed.), Baumol s Cost Disease. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Brooks, Arthur (1997). Toward a demand side cure for cost disease in the performing arts. Journal of Economic Issues, 31, Davenport, Ken (2011). The incredible shrinking cast size. Last accessed on Feb. 10, 2017 on Heilbrun, James (2011). Baumol s cost disease. In Ruth Towse (ed.) A Handbook of Cultural Economics, Second edition. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar. 12

14 Hirrel, Michael. J. (2010). Duration of Performances and Lengths of Plays: How Shall We Beguile the Lazy Time? Shakespeare Quarterly, 61, Last, Anne-Kathrin & Wetzel, Heike (2011). Baumol s cost disease, efficiency, and productivity in the performing arts: an analysis of German public theaters. Journal of Cultural Economics, 35, McCarty, Kevin, Brooks, Arthur, Lowell, Julia, & Zakaras, Laura (2001). The Performing Arts in a New Era. Rand Corporation Report Nicholson, James (1993). Theatrical Evolution and the Playwright or Why Do Theaters Want to Become Museums When They Could Be Making History? The Kenyon Review, New Series, 15, 1-5. Peacock, Alan (1996). The Manifest Destiny of the Performing Arts. Journal of Cultural Economics, 20, Werck, Kristen & Heyndels, Bruno (2007). Programmatic choices and the demand for theatre: the case of Flemish theatres. Journal of Cultural Economics, 31, Werck, Kristen, Stultjes-Grinwis Plaat, Mona & Heyndels, Bruno (2008). Budgetary constraint and programmatic choices by Flemish subsidized theatres. Applied Economics, 40,

15 Table 1. Descriptive statistics (all TST plays) Mean (1) Author birth date 15th century* 16th century 17th century 18th century 19th century 20th century International Playwrights Median Std. dev. No. of obs. (2) (3) (4) Mean (5) Turkish Playwrights Median Std. dev. (6) (7) No. of obs. (8) No. of roles 16th century 17th century 18th century 19th century 20th century Gender Female author Male author Genre Comedies Tragedies Various plays Children plays No identifier Already staged Citizenship Anglo-Saxon c. Former Socialist c. All other Source: Based on TST database *There are only 4 plays for the 15th century and the number of roles is available for one play only. 14

16 Table 2. Descriptive Statistics. Produced/staged Plays Mean (1) Author birth date 15th century* 16th century 17th century 18th century 19th century 20th century International Playwrights Median Std. dev. No. of obs. (2) (3) (4) Mean (5) Turkish Playwrights Median Std. dev. No. of obs. (6) (7) (8) No. of roles 16th century 17th century 18th century 19th century 20th century Gender Female author Male author Genre Comedies Tragedies Various plays Children plays No identifier Citizenship Anglo-Saxon c. Former Socialist c. All other Source: Based on TST database *There are only 4 plays for the 15th century and the number of roles is available for one play only. 15

17 Table 3. OLS and Poisson Regression Results. I nternational Playwrights All plays 19th &20th century plays 20th century plays OLS Poisson OLS Poisson OLS Poisson (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) Author birth date -0.03*** -1*** -0.05*** -4*** -0.08*** -0.01*** (2) (007) (0.01) (02) (0.01) (07) Female author -2.79*** -0.33*** -2.59*** -0.31*** ** (0.73) (0.05) (0.75) (0.05) (0.8) (0.06) Genre Comedies -3.89*** -0.35*** -3.52*** -0.34*** -3.57*** -0.36*** (1.1) (0.04) (1.1) (0.04) (1.12) (0.05) Tragedies -2.82** -0.25*** -2.59** -0.25*** -2.95** -0.30*** (1.12) (0.04) (1.13) (0.04) (1.15) (0.05) Various plays -2.17** -0.18*** -2.22** -0.19*** -2.35** -0.22*** (1.05) (0.03) (1.07) (0.03) (1.05) (0.04) Children plays -2.33* -0.20*** ** -2.10* -0.20** (1.37) (0.05) (1.41) (0.05) (1.25) (0.07) Already staged , ** -0.14*** (0.49) (0.02) (0.51) (0.02) (0.53) (0.03) Citizenship Anglo-Saxon -1.23** -0.13*** -1.54** -0.15*** *** (0.54) (0.02) (0.57) (0.02) (0.61) (0.03) Former socialist c (0.64) (0.02) (0.66) (0.03) (0.72) (0.04) Intercept 62,58*** 6.29*** *** 11.45*** *** 20.45*** (4.94) (0.15) (13.65) (0.48) (27.6) (1.44) Adj. R squared F-stat *** 13.03*** 6.79*** LR-stat *** *** *** No. of obs Dependent variable: No. of roles 16

18 Table 4. OLS and Poisson Regression Results. Turkish Playwrights 19th & 20th century plays 20th century plays OLS Poisson OLS Poisson (1) (2) (3) (4) Author birth date -0.05** 3*** -0.07*** 5*** (0.01) (03) (0.02) (05) Female Author -1.63** -0.15*** -1.61** -0.15*** (0.68) (0.03) (0.68) (0.03) Genre Comedies -3.32*** -0.25*** -2.30* -0.17*** (1.11) (0.03) (1.24) (0.04) Tragedies -2.40** -0.17*** -2.16* -0.15*** (1.08) (0.03) (1.11) (0.03) Various Plays -3.70*** -0.27*** -3.77*** -0.28*** (0.89) (0.02) (0.94) (0.03) Children Plays -4.21*** -0.33*** -3.86*** -0.30*** (0.91) (0.03) (0.93) (0.03) Already staged (0.57) (0.02) (0.62) (0.02) Intercept *** 9.37*** *** 13.07*** (0.91) (0.03) (0.93) (0.03) Adj R.squared F-stat. 8.39*** 7.57*** LR-stat *** *** No. of obs Dependent variable: No. of roles 17

19 Table 5. Probit Regression Results. M arginal Effects All plays 20th cent. plays International Turkish Internat. & Turkish (1) (2) (3) Author birth date *** -4*** (02 (002) (07) Number of roles (2) (2) (1) Female author *** -8 (0.07) (0.05) (0.08) Turkish author 0.13*** (0.02) Turkish fem. author -0.20** (0.08) Genre Comedies *** 0.10** (0.06) (0.06) (0.05) Tragedies (0.06) (0.06) (0.04) Various plays 0.21*** 0.28** 0.22*** (0.05) (0.05) (0.03) Children plays 0.18** 0.14** 0.14*** (0.07 (0.06) (0.04) Intercept Pseudo R-Squared Wald chi-square 51.21*** *** *** No. of obs Dependent variable: Staged = 1, Non-staged = 0 18

20 Table 6. Regression Results. Already staged plays Coefficient Std. Error Author birth date -0.09*** 0.02 Female author -2.46** 0.90 Turkish author 3.978*** 0.56 Turkish female author Genre Comedies -2.60* 1.30 Tragedies -3.63*** 1.27 Various plays -3.08*** Children plays -2.42** 1.13 Intercept *** R-square 0.10 F-stat *** No. of obs. 859 Dependent variable: No. of roles 19