IT WAS ONLY five years ago that Nicholas Martin and Robert Woodruff came to Boston with more New York swagger than George Steinbrenner and Rudy Giuliani. Martin was taking over the Huntington Theatre Company and Woodruff the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, and they were coming to a city that was undergoing an enormous upswing in the local theater scene, with the Lyric Stage Company, New Repertory Theatre, Sugan Theatre Company, and SpeakEasy Stage Company all raising the city's artistic bar. New theaters were coming on line for the first time in decades. Old ones were being restored.
That sense of euphoria now seems on hold at best. Martin is leaving the Huntington Theatre Company to head up the Williamstown Theatre Festival. Harvard fired Woodruff despite a string of daring and distinguished artistic triumphs. The downtown theater scene is now pretty much all touring musicals. The Sugan went on a hiatus that may be permanent. Subscriptions are down almost everywhere. The Boston Foundation released a report suggesting that some companies go out of business or merge.
What happened? Well, as Shakespeare said, "It's the economy, Shylock."
In times of economic uncertainty, there's a greater taste for lighter fare. People pull back on how much to spend on art and entertainment, as do corporations. Perhaps the Athens of America is more Darwinian than Athenian, after all.
That's the bad news.
The good news is that there's still a lot of great work being done locally. The Huntington seems to have found a good man in Peter DuBois, Oskar Eustis's number two at New York's Public Theater. He also worked for George C. Wolfe before Eustis, so if he inherits their Rolodexes, the Huntington should continue to see top-level artists come to the area. And there's no reason to think that the bridge the theater built to local writers and actors will collapse. Small and midsized theaters continue to do solid work, and there's more of it for local actors and designers.
But there's something else going on, too. Martin, Woodruff, and DuBois all have their favorite writers, but they're not necessarily the writers that most theater professionals would cite as the greatest living playwrights. Neither the Huntington nor the ART has ever staged a play by Edward Albee or Tony Kushner. Tom Stoppard's only showing at either theater was a weak production of his most accessible play, "The Real Thing."
David Mamet and Suzan-Lori Parks had a champion in Woodruff's predecessor, Robert Brustein, though to be fair Mamet's connection to the theater was a marriage of convenience - he lived here and ART was a great laboratory for developing his plays. The Huntington will be showing Conor McPherson's "Shining City," but neither the Huntington nor ART has shown any interest in the Anglo-Irishman Martin McDonagh since Brustein staged "The Cripple of Inishmaan."
I'm not the only one who would list the above, along with Harold Pinter, as the greatest living playwrights of the English language. So if one were looking for the best plays, as opposed to the best productions, it has made increasing sense to spread one's money around, rather than subscribe to any particular theater. Some of the best productions of recent years on any stage have been Kushner's "Caroline, or Change" at SpeakEasy, Albee's "The Goat" at the Lyric, McDonagh's "The Pillowman" and a pair of Pinter plays at the New Rep, and Stoppard's "Arcadia" at the Publick Theatre.
There's much buzz around town that the next head of the ART will not be as enamored of avant-garde directors as Brustein and Woodruff were, and those who suffered through the horrible current production of "Julius Caesar" might think that's a relief. But it's also missing the point. The ART under Woodruff produced some of the most thrilling theater the city has ever seen - or that any city has seen. If Cambridge is the first-class city and Harvard the first-class university they think they are, they should have embraced Woodruff.
That said, if the ART is going to go in a new direction, perhaps it wouldn't be so terrible a course change if it started luring the best playwrights to Cambridge instead of the best directors. What a coup it would be for the ART to have Kushner develop a play or musical here. Or to tackle Stoppard's titanic trilogy of Russian intellectuals, "The Coast of Utopia."
The Boston area seemed poised to become a great theater city a few years ago, but that growth has plateaued. Let's hope the artistic directors of the Huntington and ART can lead a new charge forward.
Ed Siegel is former theater and TV critic for the Globe.
