Welcome to the Next Act
A Regular-ish dispatch from inside the unification of Pittsburgh CLO and Pittsburgh Public Theater
Two of the city’s longest-running theater companies - Pittsburgh Public Theater and Pittsburgh CLO - have decided to create a unified new organization. When it’s all said and done, we will be one company, with one mission, under one (still-TBD) name. We have remarkable legacies to build on, and are excited to share the future with you.
This newsletter exists to document what that actually looks like from the inside. Whether you’re our biggest fans or just a little nebby: Welcome to the process.
We are storytellers by trade, and want to share this one.
Mergers in the performing arts are complicated, emotional, and rare. There aren’t a lot of examples out there. We’ve shared relentlessly about the challenges that we have as an industry: shifting funding models, audience entertainment spending, and rising material and labor costs are a trifecta that is pushing many performing arts companies into a crisis.
We’re lucky to have board and staff leaders who saw this coming and wanted to pro-actively set us up for the next 100 years of creating great stories on stage. We have had to create this process from the ground up and it hasn’t been perfect. But we’ve heard from our communities loud and clear: they want to know what’s going on.
Our organizations have spent decades as collaborators. And speaking honestly, often as competitors. It’s made this a very tricky process to get right; it’s awkward at times.
For our combined 130 years, we’ve cultivated separate identities, patron bases, donor relationships, union contracts, and artistic philosophies. These don’t simply blend together.
There have been many spreadsheets that translate our challenges into hard data. There have been many hard conversations, and more certainly will happen. But there are also moments, when we are open to genuine discovery, that have created a true excitement for what’s possible.
It’s exciting to bring together some of the most talented people in our city (really, the industry) to start working on this problem together.
What You’ll Find Here
Every week (or as close to every week as the work allows) we’ll share an update on what’s happening in the integration of Pittsburgh Public Theater and Pittsburgh CLO.
Some weeks that will mean big news: a financial milestone, a key hire, a brand decision, a board vote. Some weeks it will be smaller or stranger: what does it look like when two different prop teams try to rationalize decades of kitchenware? How do two education departments bring together programs for learners from 6 to 86?
Some weeks, when things are quiet on the merger front, we’ll zoom out and look at what’s happening nationally in theater, arts nonprofits, and the creative economy.
We will do our best to be transparent and forthcoming. There is a delicate balance to strike with information at a moment like this, and our staff comes first.
Who’s Writing This?
This newsletter will be drafted & updated by members of the staff of the new combined organization, led by Dr. Brett Ashley Crawford, the Transition Executive Director. It’s typically posted by Laura Greenawalt, the Transition Operations Manager.
This is for our Community.
If you’ve ever sat in the O’Reilly or sent a kid to CLO Academy, this is for you.
If you work in the arts, this is for you.
If you are just curious what it looks like when two institutions decide to bet on each other, this is for you.
If you’re a Pittsburgher who cares about what culture looks like in this city, especially in and around downtown, this is absolutely for you.
You don’t need a background in theater management to follow along. We’ll try to keep things as interesting as the work actually is. Which, most weeks, is pretty interesting.
The Pittsburgh CLO and Pittsburgh Public Theater merger was approved by both boards in March 2026. The inaugural season under the new entity is expected to begin performances in January 2027. In the meantime, teams from both organizations are already working together: sharing spaces, aligning programs, and figuring out what it means to build something genuinely new from two genuinely great legacies.