Five Questions With: Josh Short

"From the beginning, the group has been concerned with supporting the development of new works and emerging artists in the Providence area."

Rhode Island native Josh Short is founding artistic director of the Wilbury Theatre Group. Established in 2010, the theater group aspires to produce plays by “the greatest and edgiest” contemporary writers, along with modern classics, according to its website. Since 2013, the group has been the official resident theatre company in Trinity Square Theater at the Southside Cultural Center in Providence. Short also has worked as an actor at the theater. Here, he discusses the goals and growth of the nonprofit.

PBN: Why did you start the Wilbury Group and how has it met your expectations?
SHORT:
As busy as the Providence and Rhode Island arts scene is, there have always been only so many opportunities for working actors to keep busy. So at first, for the first couple of productions, the Wilbury Group was just a way for me and some like-minded friends and artists to keep busy working during times [when] we weren’t cast in anything somewhere else. The goal was never to start a theater company; the goal in the first couple of years was to just keep busy doing challenging work we loved with people we enjoyed working with.
As times have gone by and the Wilbury Group grew from the loose collective to the nonprofit theater company it is today, we’ve been careful to keep the same values that got us started, keeping busy doing challenging work with people we enjoy working with. And in the way that it’s gone from being a “fill-in gig” to an actual nonprofit theater company with the budget to pay its artists while producing a full five-play season, supporting a “New Works” and an education program, and the Providence Fringe Festival, it’s completely exceeded any of those early expectations of just keeping us busy during downtime.
And somehow we still manage to enjoy ourselves doing it all.

PBN: Ben Jolivet is your first playwright in residence. What do you expect his residency to bring to the theater group?
SHORT:
From the beginning, the group has been concerned with supporting the development of new works and emerging artists in the Providence area. We first met Ben last fall when we did a staged reading of one of his plays. From there, he started teaching a playwriting class for us, which became incredibly popular and consistently sold out. In addition to being an extremely talented playwright, Ben has an incredible ability to bring artists together and to do their best work.
As our first playwright-in-residence, Ben will have the chance to develop his own work, as well as help us tap into and support the network of talented playwrights in the Providence/Boston area.

PBN: When did you first offer theater classes and has this proved fruitful and profitable?
SHORT:
We brought on Education Director Seth Finkle just over a year ago and under his leadership the classes and education program have grown in leaps and bounds. In the past year, we’ve had well over 100 children and adult students take classes with us, and developed partnerships with a number of education nonprofits in Providence. That included an enormously successful partnership with CityArts! which involved Wilbury artists developing their own work with students in their afterschool programs. That work was then performed by the students in our theater.
So far, our education program has proven extremely profitable for us in terms of the revenue it provides the group and our teaching artists, and we’re already on track to again grow our education programs exponentially during the 2014-15 season.

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PBN: How many members do you have and what are your plans to grow that membership?
SHORT:
Last year was the first year we offered audiences the opportunity to subscribe to our season, and this year we’ve moved away from that more traditional model of subscription to the membership model – a model used most notably by the Public Theater in New York. This allows members of our audience to make a low-cost tax-deductible donation to the group, and then entitles them to an extremely reduced ticket price of $10 throughout the season (in addition to a few other perks).
We like this model because the lower price provides an easier entry point for our generally younger audience members. By not requiring upfront payment for all productions, we’re giving them the flexibility to see whatever they want to whenever they want to see it.
With this new model, we’ve already seen our subscriber count double to just less than 50 for the 2014-15 season. We expect that as word gets out about it, it’s something that we’ll continue to be able to grow.

PBN: Which contemporary playwright do you consider reaches the most audiences today and why?
SHORT:
This is a hard question, because while he may not be among the most produced playwrights of the last few years, I think it’d be difficult to think of any great playwright working today (or playwrights that I tend to appreciate most) that wasn’t influenced by the work of Tony Kushner.
Occasionally, Broadway might forget it, but we’ve seen time and time again that audiences appreciate smart, socially engaged work that challenges them to think and see things in ways they hadn’t before; and I can’t think of any playwright in the last 30 years who’s done more to advance the cause of honest, dynamic storytelling in the theater while having such a profound influence on every playwright and young theater company that followed.

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