As a child growing up in Warsaw, Poland, Monika Browne-Ecker recalls feeling right at home as an audience member in the city’s bustling art and theater scene.
“Warsaw is a huge city and we had access to art and exposure to different ways of doing theater,” she said.
Browne-Ecker, who assumed the role of managing director at Theatre B on August 1,
intends to create a similar welcoming environment in the Fargo-Moorhead performing arts scene.
“When you’re at a show, you’re not the only vulnerable person in the room. I want more people to feel that,” she said. “I yearn to give theater experiences to others, to show them that being in the audience is a way to become inspired and emotionally fulfilled.”
Browne-Ecker has been involved with Theatre B for many years, having discovered it when she and her family moved to North Dakota in 2008.
“There’s a lot about Theatre B that reminds me of Warsaw,” she said. “I feel incredibly privileged to have grown up in a city that helped form how I think, and it’s nice to have a bit of that here in town.”
Her active engagement at Theatre B expanded over the years to include acting, directing and designing for various productions.
“I volunteered (for) front of the house at Theatre B and then auditioned for my first show, and continued to be involved as an artist, until I was invited to be part of the ensemble in 2017 and then I applied for a job here in 2018,” she said. “After that, I kind of never left.”
As the nonprofit community’ theater’s only full-time staffer, at least for now, Browne-Ecker has a lot of roles to play in an organization facing financial challenges that have plagued many in the local arts sector since the COVID-19 pandemic.
“But there are unknowns in life,” she said, emphasizing the challenges and opportunities that came with her experiences as an immigrant. “When you move to another country, you’re opening so many different paths and potential paths in your life.”
Although still in her role as operations and production manager at the time, Browne-Ecker was already thinking critically about the future or the organization during the COVID-19 pandemic. To add to the strain, she recalls the organization receiving notification in 2022 from the Minnesota State Arts Board that Theater B had lost its funding due to eligibility requirements related to spending.
“It is a very long-term process for us to recover, even though in 2022, we absolutely launched ourselves into a full season of production and everyone was so excited to come back. It just wasn’t enough to offset the losses during the pandemic,” she said. “And frankly, funders across our nation, especially ones focused on art, are somewhat less likely to be patient with that recovery and stabilization of arts organizations.”
Ecker added that compromise is a two-way street. “They (funders) also need to go back to their normal life of funding, and so this really points out to us how we need to figure out how to be dynamic without relying on those funders,” she said.
The theater plans to reapply for funding from the Minnesota State Arts Board when the next grant cycle begins in December.
While she waits for the grant window to open, Browne-Ecker is busy learning her new role, putting in place part-time staff like John Micheels Leiseth as artistic director, Bekah Forness, technical director, and Whitney McClain, operations assistant, so they can start building an organization that focuses on their art first, funding second.
“I want to release our artists to focus on what they love,” she said. “It’s incredibly important for our artists to be focused on art and not on what they used to do as volunteers for the organization. It is a distraction when you’re asking your artists to help with other things like marketing … and we are now sort of releasing our artists to truly focus on what they love and remind them what they do.”
While operating a nonprofit theater organization remains full of unknowns, what’s clear to Browne-Ecker is the steadfast vision of Theatre B’s programming, and that’s to bring the community together in meaningful dialogue with thought-provoking theater.
“I personally am looking at introducing Theater B to a new generation of patrons,” Browne-Ecker said. “We’ve been around for 22 years, and there’s an entire generation of patrons that has sort of grown up and matured with us, and they’ve been incredibly loyal and continued to support us, but there are always new people in our community who are just not aware that our company exists.”
Organizational leaders hope to connect with the community, starting with a season 22 preview celebration on September 4 at RiverHaven Events Center in Moorhead.
“We’re looking forward to becoming a stronger presence in Moorhead, and for our artists to become bolder in what they dream of now that they have a more expanded staff support,” Browne-Ecker said. “We are an organization that provides something vital to this community.”
This article is part of a content partnership with The Forum, a Forum Communications Co.
About the author
Lonna Whiting is a freelance writer and owner of lonna.co, a content marketing and communications agency located in Fargo, North Dakota. She is a frequent contributor to The Arts Partnership’s content library and also provides strategic communications consultation to the organization.
