Off Broadway, a Vital Part of New York Theater, Feels the Squeeze

New York’s nonprofit Signature Theater has three modern performance spaces designed by the starchitect Frank Gehry, a long history of cultivating and championing major playwrights like Edward Albee and Lynn Nottage, and a board chaired by the Hollywood star Edward Norton.

What Signature doesn’t have this fall are plays. The company, a mainstay of the Off Broadway scene, closed its most recent production in July and is not set to start its next show until the end of January.

Even as Broadway claws its way back from the coronavirus pandemic, New York’s sprawling network of smaller theaters, many of them noncommercial in both tax status and taste, is struggling.

“This is the hardest season yet,” said Casey York, the president of the Off-Broadway League, citing the combined effects of smaller audiences, shifting philanthropic patterns, rising wages and costs, and labor shortages at a time when the emergency government assistance that helped many theaters stay afloat through the lengthy pandemic shutdown has largely run out. “There is an incredible squeeze.”