Layoffs Hit Playwrights Horizons, Off-Broadway Birthplace Of Broadway Hit STEREOPHONIC

Off-Broadway new work hub Playwrights Horizons, coming off a celebrated 2023-24 season which launched the Tony Award-winning Best Play Stereophonic and an off-Broadway commercial transfer of hit musical Teeth, last week laid off 5 full-time staffers and instituted a number of cost reduction measures. 

Staff were informed of the layoffs on June 18, just two days following a triumphant night for the 53 year-old institution at the Tony Awards. Stereophonic, David Adjmi’s Fleetwood Mac-inspired play-with-music, which originated at Playwrights last fall in a twice-extended, sold out run, took home five Tony Awards including Best Play. 

Three of the five layoffs took immediate effect. The positions eliminated were all junior roles: assistant company manager/head house manager, literary and community engagement assistant, and assistant to the artistic director.

The theater’s two-person casting department, led by veteran Alaine Alldaffer, was informed that both positions would be cut at the conclusion of the upcoming 2024-25 season. Following this season, Playwrights will no longer have an in-house casting department — though the theater hopes to retain its current team on a third-party basis.

As an additional cost saving measure, department heads will take week-long furloughs later this year. Artistic director Adam Greenfield has also taken a voluntary pay cut. 

A representative for Playwrights declined to comment on the cost reduction measures, and declined to provide exact figures on Greenfield’s reduced salary. Sources familiar with the situation requested anonymity to speak freely with BroadwayWorld about the cuts.

Playwrights’ staffing cuts are more limited in scope than layoffs which have recently hit other non-profit theaters. Seattle Rep, a major regional house, eliminated 13 positions earlier this month, including four artistic roles. And last July, The Public Theater in New York laid off 50 employees total. The cuts at Playwrights will impact roughly 10 percent of its full-time employees. 

Still, the reductions come at a precarious moment for the city’s leading non-profits. The combined effects of rising costs and reduced philanthropic giving has put “an incredible squeeze” on the Off-Broadway sector, as Casey York, President of The Off-Broadway League, told the New York Times last December. 

That Playwrights continues to feel that squeeze even following a buzzy season that produced two commercial transfers — Stereophonic to Broadway’s Golden Theater, where it runs through January, and Teeth to Off-Broadway’s New World Stages starting in October — speaks to the overall precarity of the field, and to a moment when all non-profits are facing tricky headwinds regardless of individual hit shows. 

Internally, the staffing changes were characterized by Playwrights leadership as not wholly costs-related, but also driven by evolving organizational staffing needs. 

It is not atypical for midsize Off-Broadway companies to utilize outside casting directors, on a show by show basis. While larger institutions such as The Public and Roundabout Theatre Company do employ full-time casting departments, Signature Theatre Company and MCC Theater — theaters more comparable in size to Playwrights — do not. 

Casting director Alaine Alldaffer assembled the widely-praised seven actor ensemble of Stereophonic, five of whom received Tony Award nominations. The full cast also received a special “Ensemble Award” at the 2024 Drama Desk Awards, and cast member Will Brill earned a surprise Tony win for Best Featured Actor in a Play. 

Organizational changes at Playwrights also impacted positions which were vacated earlier this year, in departures unrelated to the recent cuts, and not immediately filled. Rather than replace a departing digital content producer, Playwrights shifted that budget allocation to an outside agency. The duties formerly assigned to a Marketing & Audience Development Manager were split between an existing staffer and a new part-time position. 

Greenfield has spoken previously of a tough period of transition ahead for Off-Broadway, as costs rise and theaters work to attract new audiences by rethinking their work. 

Last fall, Playwrights presented three solo works in repertory, an eye-catching concept which allowed the theater to present three exciting, unusual works on a tighter budget. It was a creative success, with two of the three productions extending their runs. 

This season, Playwrights will again present three solo works — alongside two ambitious mainstage productions, In the Amazon Warehouse Parking Lot by Sarah Mantell and The Antiquities by Jordan Harrison (a co-production with the Vineyard and Goodman Theatres). 

“We’ve watched for years the cost of making theater rise at a pace that our revenue can’t match, and our inevitable problem is that without raising ticket prices, money has to come from some other source which has not yet been identified,” Greenfield told the Times in December. “It’s a moment not for us to get sad and wring our hands and despair, but to ask the tough questions about how the culture has changed and what theater’s place is in it.”