Seller: Doing play revivals on Broadway is barely a commercial venture. It’s a labor of love, it’s a labor of passion and, to some degree, it’s the easiest way to get a show on Broadway and try to win a Tony award, because you don’t have to develop it and it doesn’t run for a long time. But most of the plays that come to Broadway as revivals break even or make a little bit of money.

McCollum: We’re always trying to get young people excited about the theater, because that’s how you create new audiences. They are not geographically specific. Broadway means very little to them. A great show, seeing their peers, means a great deal to them. And that’s what we’ve done. We don’t need a Tony award. We need young people to see our shows.

Seller: We have already gained more press because we bucked the system. There are a lot of revivals on Broadway this year, including two Tennessee Williams shows—A Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire—Glengarry Glen Ross, Julius Caesar, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. If you have seven cattle over in this field and one in that field, the eye is going to blur over the seven and go right to the one. That’s why when we announced our show, the New York Times thought it was newsworthy enough to put it on the front page of the arts section, because we’re doing the opposite of what those shows are doing.

McCollum: It’s part of our nature, starting as booking agents and then as we moved into producing in 1993.

Seller: Well, when we did Rent, everyone expected us to go Off Broadway, and we said, “No, we’re going to go to Broadway.” Everyone said, “Broadway? It will never work on Broadway.” And then we blew up that concept.

Can you spell out the cost differences between Broadway and Off-Broadway runs?

Seller: For Hurlyburly, there was a Broadway budget of $1.8 million. Trying to earn that $1.8 million budget in 12 weeks meant it would have had to virtually sell out just to get back the capitalization. Meaning, once again, 12 weeks on Broadway with the rest of the cattle and no profit.

McCollum: Unless it went longer than 12 weeks, but that’s all we’re selling.

Seller: Yeah, we’re star-dependent, and Ethan is going to want to get on with his life and probably go make a movie after this. Off Broadway, it costs $650,000 to move it. In 12 weeks, it can earn back the entire $650,000 and make a profit of between $600,000 and $1 million.

McCollum: One of the things that is different about how we operate is that we’ve only made our living in the theater. A lot of producers today made their living elsewhere, then came in and approached it like art collecting. We have a small group of very, very wealthy people who are also arts lovers, who know that they are not producers, but know they’ve gotten a great return with us. We actually look at the economics. It’s not just a labor of love. We put our own money into things.

Seller: Rent has returned $100 million to its investors.

McCollum: Avenue Q is another show that’s returning very, very nice profits to its investors. If you go to our new theaters at 37 Arts, there are three: a 499-seat house; a 399-seat on top of that; and a 299-seat on top of that. We made a deal with (Mikhail) Baryshnikov to put the home of his dance empire in condos on the top three floors. So we are a for-profit with a not-for-profit arts center on the top. We are the first commercial arts center and not-for-profit. It’s very similar to what they’re looking to do at the World Trade Center site.

Was $650,000 the cost to move the show because you’re partners in 37 Arts?

McCollum: No, it would have cost that at any Off-Broadway theater. Also, here we’ve taken a show that was Off Broadway to a larger Off-Broadway theater that we happen to also be major partners in, because we felt it would meet our needs. A lot of the Off-Broadway theaters are just storefronts, and we needed a proper theater with fly space and room for sets; we had a choice of moving shows to Broadway or, if it made more sense, Off Broadway to a larger house.

There’s some resentment on Broadway that you two have decided to move Hurlyburly to an Off-Broadway theater.

McCollum: Every show finds its proper place based on who’s producing it. It made no sense to go to Broadway. Not that we’re dissing Broadway, but the economics are out of whack. That’s just reality. When you’re in the business of trying to create an economic equation and it makes sense to go to Broadway, you go to Broadway, like we did with Rent and Avenue Q. When it doesn’t make sense, and the field is crowded and you know from your experience it’s a bit of a bubble, your job is to avoid the bubble and to create a new way.

Seller: Making the establishment angry? That’s the fun of it. That’s our job. We have to reinvent what the establishment is. The establishment should be creating profitable models to see live theater, because that’s how it becomes groovy again, and that’s how you attract young people.

McCollum: Hey, if we can create some drama around the theater, which never gets its due on Access Hollywood or Entertainment Tonight, great. Broadway and Off Broadway in New York is a vibrant economy; it’s a $1 billion economy if you count road shows. And we don’t even get any play, so I’m happy for the dialogue, and I’m happy to talk to anybody about what we should or shouldn’t do at any time.

There’s another area that really needs to be described as Off-Off Broadway—the Public [Theater], those kinds of places. Those are Off Broadway, but they are noncommercial, not-for-profit theatrical organizations. What I’m referring to specifically is the commercial Off-Broadway theater, and if we can bring back young playwrights like David Rabe and their contemporaries and find audiences, then we will have revitalized a large component of the arts scene.

You’ve said you do not need a Tony.

Seller: We have some.

But does it matter to you that Hurlyburly will not be eligible now that it is not on Broadway?

Seller: It matters to people’s hearts, and we can’t speak to that. But the only Tony that matters for marketing and ticket selling is the Tony for best musical, and this is not a musical. This is not a new play. Winning a Tony for best revival is meaningless—in a commercial sense.

Why is it important to have a star like Hawke in the production? Did you take any flak for that?

Seller: We’re not the best people to answer that question because it hasn’t been part of our careers at this point. I would just encourage you to see this production, because though it does have these young stars in it, their performances are extraordinary, and every single one of them was a stage performer before being a movie star. Ethan Hawke started at Young Playwrights festival in the early ’80s. The man has extraordinary stage chops. This is not a Hollywood guy who is coming to try his hand. Ethan did Henry IV at Lincoln Center last year.

McCollum: And he came to the play and really loved it. It’s not like we cynically cast him.

Seller: We decided the best way to give this play further life was to take it to our theater, because it’s a good match between the values of the play and the values of our theater. We thought, “This is the ideal play to open our theater.” It says everything we want to say. We want to do plays by America’s—and the world’s—best playwrights, with its best actors who have enough commercial potential to sell 500 seats a night. We’re not interested in selling 100 seats a night. We can’t exist. We have to sell 4,000 seats a week. And this play has artistic credibility and commercial potential, and that’s what makes it so perfect for our theater.

Why is it so difficult for many to make money in the theater?

McCollum: First of all, you have to have an instinct and you have to understand human behavior. To get someone to go to the theater . . . there are a lot of things you need to convince them to do. You’re dealing with the image of a typical theatergoer as a 55-year-old woman. We don’t think that way. We’re trying to get our friends to go to the theater, and I still feel like I’m 28.

Seller: Jonathan Larson, who wrote Rent, taught us a great deal through his friendship and his comments as a writer. He’d say, “I love Broadway, but they’re not writing stories for us there.”

McCollum: But Broadway doesn’t have to be our father’s Oldsmobile. It’s ours to invent, and we need to create the stories that will attract young people to the theater.

You’re talking about content, but I expected you to focus on costs.

McCollum: The unions’ demands and the fact there are only so many seats to sell in a given night and that it’s a diminishing inventory business, like the a irline business, and the fact that the pricing controls the tickets—all those are obstacles that should be reinvented. But until they are reinvented, you have to learn how to navigate and not be a victim of those things. And through your success “utch” the unions and the establishment to see what everybody is responsible for if we’re going to effect change and drive audiences to this wonderful art form.

Of course, the economics are all out of whack, which is why nine years ago we produced Rent on Broadway for $3.5 million, not $6 million. Avenue Q we produced two years ago for $3.5 million. We kept our economics the same. How? We don’t overspend on advertising. The New York Times is very expensive. We open our shows typically in smaller venues to work on them, to really listen to the audience, etc., and put the whole show together. We are not valets; we are collaborators. And that’s sort of why we built our building. We had that need to collaborate, to create an arts space that would inspire young people to write and an economic threshold that wasn’t crippling before we began.

We all have a role to play, like we have to be the producers, etc. But the ethic we come from is creating an environment where people can do their best work. We’re there to support that vision, as long as there’s accountability from everyone. And what has happened in the business is that it’s become a series of vendors where the producers don’t come in the room and do that. They have different people who make those decisions.

But because we came up through the business, we understand what a technical director is supposed to do, what a general manager is supposed to do, etc. And we are involved in those decisions; we don’t subcontract those decisions. That’s a very different way of producing, and there should be more of this.

Photograph by Andrew Kist.