Boston’s Theatre Resources After StageSource’s Sunsetting

During the COVID-19 shutdowns, life as we knew it became unmoored. We felt the impacts culturally: Many of us baked bread for the first time. Yeast and toilet paper were out of stock everywhere. We made telehealth doctor appointments for the medical issues we’d been ignoring. Self-identifying non-artists developed their passion projects in their kitchens. Individual artists took breaks. Theatre companies streamed productions online. With the globe as their community, the performing and designing possibilities seemed limitless—for a time. 

As the world slowly reopened to in-person meetings and masked rehearsals, regional theatre organizations began announcing their intentions to reopen to the public. It was a time of tremendous joy and of stark pain, because as some companies announced reopenings with socially distanced performances, other companies announced they were closing for good. In the Boston area, we lost the New Repertory Theatre (New Rep), a handful of fringe theatre companies, and in 2023, the biggest crush of them all, StageSource.

StageSource was Boston’s go-to online and in-person resource for acting gigs and, for many in the local theatre world, the beating heart of the Boston theatre community. StageSource announced it was sunsetting its operations on 23 January 2023. The news came as an email from the board of directors that shocked its thousands of members. StageSource’s website said the organization had united “New England theater artists and organizations to realize [their] greatest artistic potential” for thirty-seven years.

StageSource supported its community primarily through its weekly newsletter and yearly auditions. It was founded in 1985 to support the growth of new theatre companies in Boston such as Speakeasy Stage Company, the Huntington, New Rep, and others that started in the 1980s. Its reach spanned Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont. 

StageSource offered an audition telephone hotline for actors, published a yearly book of the names and addresses of theatre companies, and offered the StagePage, a quarterly book of theatre companies’ season productions. The organization also hosted its annual cattle call auditions for union and nonunion actors. StageSource was immensely popular through the 1990s, but its board of directors struggled to define its purpose since the 2000s.

In the years before ceasing operations, the board of directors was asking how StageSource could be useful to its community. They believed its membership turned elsewhere for theatre information, job listings, and auditions. The president of the board, Janet Bailey, told me in a 2024 interview, “We don't need to publish a printed calendar telling [members] what shows are coming up because the internet exists.” She believed our community’s demand for StageSource’s initiatives was low.

The StageSource board of directors cited the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting shutdown as challenges to the national theatre industry in its sunsetting announcement. Boston’s theatre scene was a microcosm of the industry’s COVID-19 challenges, it said. The organization narrowed its reason for sunsetting further to financial hardship: many of StageSource’s former members had left the industry or moved out of the area during the shutdowns; organizational members, such as theatre companies and universities, had difficulty hiring; and Boston audiences were slow to return to in-person performances. Thirty-nine percent of StageSource’s operating budget came from membership dues, Bailey told me. The rest of the budget came from donations, fundraising, or philanthropy. The board decided the most responsible and practical path forward would be ceasing operations.

But the pandemic didn’t force StageSource to close; it exacerbated the organization’s ongoing challenges. Bailey said she didn’t want to blame COVID for StageSource’s closing. The board was already tackling issues with their business model and whether the membership was finding their audition information elsewhere. COVID was the catalyst for StageSource sunsetting, but not the sole reason.

Regardless of the Board’s intentions, the membership’s response was dramatic. Emotions were high. “I cried,” Juliet Bowler, a local actor, told me in an interview. “This sounds like an exaggeration, but it felt like, ‘Fuck, that's the end of Boston theatre.’”

StageSource was our town square… Many StageSource events would have decades-long artistic directors of equity houses mingling next to novice fringe actors.

Playwright Ginger Lazarus, a board member for seven years and a lay member for many more, was devastated by the news, but she sympathized with the decision. “It must have been agonizing” for the board to make that decision, she said. “For me, it was a spring heavy with loss: I attended multiple funerals, including for theatre friends. The end of StageSource was nearly as painful.”

“StageSource was our town square… Many StageSource events would have decades-long artistic directors of equity houses mingling next to novice fringe actors. That’s just not there anymore,” Evan Turissini, director of marketing and communications at Actors' Shakespeare Project and local theatre artist, told me. Boston’s theatre locals missed StageSource and, despite the community’s wants and wishes, StageSource is not making a comeback. 

A large hole was torn in the fabric of Boston’s theatre industry when StageSource ceased its operations in July of 2023. Despite the Board’s convictions otherwise, many community members did not know where to find audition postings, employment listings, or reduced cost ticket information after StageSource took down its website and stopped emailing its newsletter. For months, the community relied upon New York-based websites and those of individual Greater Boston theatre organizations to find the information it needed. These sites were moderately helpful but didn’t fulfill Boston’s need for a resource like StageSource.

Hope is not lost! While StageSource may no longer exist, many of its programs live on. At its “Raise A Glass to StageSource” event in 2023, the board revealed many of its programs would be rehomed. The Prop Co-Op, a shared props storage warehouse for companies in New England, is now sponsored by SpeakEasy Stage and the Mass Cultural Council. The annual auditions were renamed the Boston Area Theatre Auditions and were last held in April 2024 at the Boston Playwrights' Theatre in Boston. The StageSource Facebook page lists the remaining programs and a contact for more information. 

While StageSource’s process of dissolution is in the hands of the attorney general’s office right now and cannot be revived, other community resources are popping up for Boston theatre artists. Three independent internet communities arose between StageSource’s sunsetting announcement and 2024 to serve Boston’s theatre community: Boston Actor Auditions on Instagram, the website Your Theater 411, and the Massachusetts Non-union Professional Theater Actors Facebook group.

The creators of these sites discussed with me how they support their Boston and greater New England theatre community. Together, the organizations hope to fill the void in audition postings and productions. As Katie Pickett of Massachusetts Non-union Professional Theater Actors said, “Every little bit helps.” 

Boston Actor Auditions

The Boston Actor Auditions (BAA) Instagram page is run by two local actors: founder Emma Na-yun Downs and co-administrator Cas Berta. They’ve dubbed it “the hub for theatre auditions in the Boston area.” 

BAA was born in the wake of the announcement that StageSource was ceasing its operations in 2023. Last April, Downs was at the New Noises Festival, a part of the Massachusetts Young Playwrights’ Project at Boston University. There were thirty other actors in the room, and throughout the weeklong education program, the actors discussed upcoming auditions backstage. 

As a low-income person, I felt I wouldn't have a chance to do theatre because of a lack of resources.

“These were working, professional actors who have been in this business for a long time,” she said. “Still, there was confusion over where and when things were happening.” Later that month, Downs created the Boston Actor Auditions Instagram page. A month or two later, Berta joined the page as co-administrator. Since then, the two have been reaching out to colleagues and theatres to post more auditions. They want to alleviate the dearth of audition information available to their community. 

“As a low-income person, I felt I wouldn't have a chance to do theatre because of a lack of resources,” Berta said. BAA, they hoped, would even the playing field. Instagram is free and easy to use, so Downs and Berta can create and share postings with followers while investing only a modicum of their time and none of their money. In turn, BAA followers can ask questions in the comment section and use the direct messages to send audition information. “It becomes a full community effort where everyone is communicating with us; we're communicating with them. They're reaching out to each other and just finding support through this one Instagram page,” Downs said. 

BAA is also working with the Boston Area Theatre Auditions, which now runs the event formerly known as the annual StageSource auditions. Together, they host community events in Boston.

Your Theater 411

Krystyana Greaves has been doing community theatre with her dad Rich Greaves since childhood. Her mother, Yolanda Daelemans-Greaves, taught dance before she retired. The family worked together on school productions. 

Krystyana studied musical theatre at Emerson College in Boston, and after graduating in 2015, she moved home and started doing community theatre in the Massachusetts Metro West region. She had not done community theatre previous to college and did not know how rewarding it could be. “Community theatre has a stigma around it,” she said. Popular culture features stereotypes of community theatre performances with unsophisticated set designs, melodramatic directors, and untalented actors. She could see that artists are missing opportunities because of that perceived stigma. 

To spread the word about community theatre, Krystyana took over Your Theater 411, a website resource for community theatre happenings that had been struggling to stay afloat since before the pandemic. For the last year, she has managed the website’s daily business tasks. Her father, a web developer, takes care of the site’s backend tasks.

The father-daughter duo contacts community theatres for listings. They also add audition calls, production staff listings, and performance notices as they find them online. “We want to support theatre, and we want to uplift community theatre,” Krystyana shared. “Community theatre is everywhere. Everyone needs similar resources. If someone moves from, say, Massachusetts to Ohio, they can still rely on Your Theater 411 to find a community theatre.”

Massachusetts Non-union Professional Theater Actors Facebook Group

Katie Pickett would love to help other actors book acting jobs while she books her own. “There is a dichotomy in theatre: When you're trying to get a theatre job, you compete with your fellow artists. Once you've gotten the theatre job, you're in collaboration with your fellow artists. It can be so frustrating to be divided into those two modes of existing,” she said. 

Pickett and another local actor Jenn Bubriski are behind the Facebook group Massachusetts Non-union Professional Theater Actors. Pickett started the group as a result of her own audition search. StageSource had recently closed, and, in its absence, she wondered where actors were finding information. 

Pickett said she did the “yeoman's work every day” of collating auditions for herself by visiting Backstage, BroadwayWorld.com, and theatre companies’ websites. She created the Massachusetts Non-union Professional Theater Actors Facebook page to organize the auditions she had researched for her own career. Two days later, she started inviting friends to the page, and they quickly accepted. Then, she changed the group’s settings so members could invite others, and the group grew to over one hundred members. That’s when Bubriski became co-administrator of the page.

Together the two post auditions for Boston-area, nonequity actors who are looking for paid work. New members must meet certain qualifications for entry to the niche page. Actors must be nonunion, pursuing paid theatre work and based around or near Boston. Pickett and Bubriski welcome members who pursue film/television and community theatre if they also audition for paid theatre gigs in the Boston area. 

Auditions are a lot like non-theatre job searches; it can take a long time to pair the right person with the right job. Pickett compared the page’s membership criteria with matchmaking; she’s trying to find the right job for the right person. 

The Massachusetts Non-union Professional Theater Actors Facebook Group, which now has 246 members, is making a small and positive impact in the New England theatre community. “There's a lot of really amazing stuff happening in Boston theatre,” Pickett said. “Positive changes are being made, but I think we still have a way to go.” Until then, Pickett and Bubriski welcome new members to their Facebook group.

It is my sincere hope that we can uplift and support each other through the next phases of our theatre community’s transformation by being resources for each other, together.

Since our interviews last winter, these organizations have expanded their good work in our communities. In addition to these sites, there are stalwart companies supporting New England theatre. Boston Singers’ Resource is a networking website for the New England classical singing community that welcomes to all vocalists. ArtsBoston is a resource for audience building and frequently offers ticket discounts. HireCulture is an employment website for nonprofit agencies in the culture sector. It is my sincere hope that we can uplift and support each other through the next phases of our theatre community’s transformation by being resources for each other, together.