five years (!) of nothing for the group

the annual report/subs brochure/in-my-feelings reflection

Hi friends,

Nothing for the Group turns five next month. No one is more surprised than me! The pandemic permanently warped my experience of time. I don’t think I’ll ever fully understand how these last five years passed both science-fiction fast and achingly slow.

Before March 2020, ambition was my religion. It dictated where I lived, where I worked, how I spent my evenings and weekends. I worshipped at its altar, believing in the holy doctrine of deliberate striving and a five-year plan. So I’m deeply amused that something I never planned—a theatre newsletter hastily conceived while I was unemployed and unmoored—is now read by thousands of people every week. This project unlocked an artistic life for me beyond the literary management ladder to nowhere. Nothing for the Group has given me more than my before-times girlbossing ever did.

I usually begin these anniversary posts with metrics: subscriber counts, page views, worldwide reader maps that delude me into thinking I’m running a miniature media empire. I’m still going to do that, but I wanted to share two reader anecdotes that reminded me why numbers and infographics only tell part of the story:

• A few months ago, I featured a production in the final week of its run in the weekly Friday round-up. The playwright emailed me a few days later to tell me that within 30 minutes of the newsletter going out, two different theatres had contacted them for the script. Later that afternoon, their agent reached out for the latest draft after an influx of requests.

• An artist DMed me after reading through the Bills, Bills, Bills archive to thank me for publishing this diary from a director supported by multiple channels of family money. Reading about someone else's financial advantages had helped them feel better about their early career struggles. "The creative headspace you can have when you're not worried about money and your parents foot your therapy bills!" they wrote, and I felt that exclamation point in my whole chest.

For those who find comfort in concrete data (my people!):

• Nothing for the Group’s readership is just over 9,500 subscribers located in all 50 states and 86 countries.

  

  

  Like any true DC resident, I love to deride NYC, but New Yorkers clearly have excellent taste in theatre newsletters and mayoral candidates. (Most of those international subscribers are probably VPNs, but I choose to believe in my vast global readership because delusion is a survival skill.)

• This year, I wrote 49 weekly round-ups sharing productions, workshops & readings, festivals, digital offerings, season announcements, various debacles and clownery, and the latest moves in the regional theatre game of thrones. Each round-up averages around 11,000 views. I still don’t advertise, so thanks for sharing it with your friends (and enemies), forwarding it to your co-workers, and including it on your syllabi. Here are the three most-read round-ups this year, all variations on the theme of institutional dysfunction:

  • May 9 - 15, which explained the NEA chaos

  • February 14 - 20, which chronicled the Kennedy Center mess

  • February 28 - March 6, which documented even more Kennedy Center nonsense

• Jenna and I published 11 Bills, Bills, Bills money diaries (plus a compilation of readers’ financial advice) from theatre workers across the country. This year’s anonymous diarists included a director living in two different cities, a former Kennedy Center staffer, a stage manager juggling rehearsals with restaurant shifts, a grad student rehearsing Sweet Charity, and the two most popular columns in BBB history: a Broadway GM and a production shop head who left the industry eight years ago. (A regular reminder that we accept diarist submissions on a rolling basis.)

• I wrote a few longer pieces, including The 2024 Year in Review and two 2024-25 season analyses. I hoped to write more premium content, but this output feels like a victory given my bonkers schedule this year.

• Nothing for the Group is partnering with 3Views on Theater on Dear Fefu, a new advice column for theatre workers written by industry experts. More details in this Friday’s newsletter, but here is the Instagram announcement for a preview.

I’m a vocal living wage advocate, but I still feel squicky writing subscription pitches. I’m surprisingly uncomfortable talking about money in relation to myself, an aversion that might be regional (New England bred) or professional (recovering nonprofit worker) or simply human. But I've learned that paying people for their time and labor is how we build the world we want to live in, and the world I want to live in is one where creative work is valued.

The Bills, Bills, Bills diarists get paid. The Dear Fefu columnists will get paid. I pay for subscriptions to newspapers and magazines and trade publications, because I’ve always felt a real kinship with journalists. (Theatre and journalism: two industries perpetually flirting with economic collapse!)

The weekly Friday round-ups and Bills, Bills, Bills will always be free. Paid subscriptions keep Nothing for the Group accessible to everyone.

I want to emphasize that a paid subscription isn't a blood pact. We're on the verge of another recession, the job market is a nightmare, and there are countless urgent causes competing for our limited resources. I understand that personal budgets and priorities fluctuate. I'm grateful for whatever support you can offer, for however long you can offer it. You don't owe me an explanation if you need to unsubscribe.

If it makes financial sense for you right now, if you think this newsletter is a valuable resource, if you're an artistic director making six figures and using this as a free season planning tool instead of paying an actual literary staff—well, you know what to do.

As always, there are three subscription tiers:

• $100 a year

• $50 a year

• $5 a month

You can also support through Venmo (@halvorsen) or Paypal if a paid subscription doesn't work for your situation. Or you can keep reading this for free. All of it counts.

If you’re an existing paid subscriber, you will receive an email notification seven days before your auto-renewal date. If you’re currently a free subscriber, you can upgrade to a paid tier by clicking the subscribe button below. Payments are securely processed via Stripe. (The lone upside of Substack handling payments—and taking 10% of my earnings 🙃—is that it’s very hands-off for me, but if you run into issues, let me know. Substack also has a great reader FAQ on subscriptions and payments.)

Every week, I choose to write this newsletter. I prioritize Nothing for the Group because it makes me feel useful—to the artists making work despite impossible economics, to the companies and collectives surviving on fumes and determination, to everyone organizing for a more equitable industry. Annie Dillard was right: how we spend our days is how we spend our lives. This is how I choose to spend mine.

Thank you for five years of reading, responding (even the unhinged emails), sharing, and showing up for the featured artists and productions. Thank you for transforming what began as an unemployment distraction into something sustainable and meaningful. Thank you for trusting me with your attention, for letting me be part of how you think about theater and money and the strange business of making art in America. I love Nothing for the Group and I hope to keep writing it for many years to come.

xoxo
Lauren