A Look at Other Theaters

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, the nation’s largest professional resident theater with an annual budget of $13.7 million, offers 43-week contracts to a company of about 60 actors. None are founding artists.

Trinity Repertory in Providence, R.I., with a budget of $3.9 million, has a resident company of 15 to 20 actors--just one a founding artist, Barbara Orson--including a handful who have been there 30 years each. Although they work from season to season, they are guaranteed only half as many weeks as South Coast Repertory offers its six founding actors.

American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Mass., with a budget of $6 million, has two founding actors working in the company: Jeremy Geidt and Alvin Epstein, who moved with ART’s founding artistic director Robert Brustien from Yale Repertory in 1979. They and a core group of about 10 actors average two to four shows a year, but they have no minimum guarantee of work.