Press for Stolen Chair's CST

Read Stolen Chair's chapter in We Are No Longer Strangers: Four Experiments in Arts & Entrepreneurship.

Profiles of Stolen Chair's Community Supported Theatre:

"A scrappy New York theatre company draws inspiration from farming in order to attain sustained nourishment" in American Theatre magazine.

Co-Artistic Director Jon Stancato describes Sustainable Sustenance: Launching Community Supported Theatre in Center for Sustainable Practices in the Arts (CSPA) Quarterly.

Organic community-supported troupe takes root in the Greenwich Times

The CST is one of 6 Creative Ways to Mange in an Uncertain Economy in the Chronicle of Philanthrophy.

"As a huge advocate of CSA's, I loved the concept of Consumer Supported Theatre from the get go. I even wished we had thought of it at HERE first. The trick, as Stolen Chair knows, i s not to cannibalize funding you would have received from your donoros anyway and to balance the workload of communicating all those events to your constituencies."

- Kristin Marting, Artistic Director, HERE

How is a CST not just a fancy Membership program with traditional benefits? Most Membership programs offer a tiny bit of real-time events (a backstage pass here, a closed rehearsal there, some discounts on your mainstage tickets). The CST has more real-time events and thus your Members really get to know each other. It is way more intimate.

- The Field

Overlaying a CSA model onto a self-producing ensemble theatre company seems like a hole-in-one. While they fell short (very short) on their annual fundraising goal for their Community Supported Theatre (CST), I'm still impressed with their ability to pull it off in its first year. It's clear the leadership has administrative and programmatic skills, or this model would have faced many more challenges than it did. Their diverse fundraising strategy is noteworthy. Assuming they tackle the known marketing issue, I predict their second year to be much more lucrative and smoother in process. As a venture philanthropist, I would tell them to drop the online community altogether - it's proven to be a dead weight in the midst of a working model - and focus on their strengths, namely growing their donor audience and creating meaningful experienes for them.

- Heather Rees, Founder, NYC Venture Philanthropy Fund

During the first CST season, nytheatre.com's Jo Ann Rosen, participated in the CST as an “embedded journalist”, filing reports on the nytheatre blog after each event:

"[Co-Artistic Director Kiran] Rikhye’s language is rich; her ideas are big. It is a privilege to have access to her writing method. For her part, it can’t be easy to share this part of the process, however sophisticated the membership. She must have nerves of steel and a firm grip on her imagination."

Listen to or watch below the CST model presentation for ERPA's Public Display of Invention at WNYC's Jerome L. Green Performance Space, Sept. 21, 2009.

ERPA Clip 5 Jon Stancato/Stolen Chair Theatre Company from The Field on Vimeo.

Stolen Chair's CST is made possible by The Field's Economic Revitalization for Performing Artists (ERPA) program, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation's 2008 New York City Cultural Innovation Fund. Community Supported Theatre is a trademark of the Stolen Chair Theatre Company, Inc.