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.