The good news is, Portland Center Stage exceeded its first goal in the 14-month fundraising campaign it launched in May 2025.

The organization’s financial status, though, is more complex than that fact indicates, and Marissa Wolf, Center Stage’s artistic director, says Portland’s largest theater company still has an urgent need to make up the deficit it announced last spring.

As reported in ArtsWatch last May, the company launched its Save Portland Center Stage appeal to raise a total of $9 million by the end of June 2026, with its first benchmark set to reach $2.5 million by the end of August. Although Wolf is thrilled that the company surpassed that goal, she says the fundraiser still has a way to go.

“We are a large organization,” says Wolf. “Until we get to the full goal, we are still in need of support.”

Center Stage’s financial problems are part of a national pattern for nonprofit arts and cultural organizations, brought on partly by the effects of the Covid years, tight city and state budgets, increased pressure on donors for urgent social needs, and the Trump administration’s slashing of federal aid.

While Wolf thinks Center Stage is past the point of needing to pause or shut down, the next goal is to raise another $2.5 million by the end of December 2025 “to eliminate the accumulated deficit and build an operating cash reserve.”

The company has never had that sort of cushion, which is crucial to weathering unexpected expenses. Beyond that, Center Stage aims to raise an additional $4 million “of the continued support we receive in our annual operating gifts from individuals, foundations, corporations that PCS relies on every season, by June 2026.”

Sponsor

“The continued campaign has a lot of momentum, and I feel very excited about where we are,” says Wolf. “Every day we’re getting closer to our next benchmark.” She realizes that donors are stretched, and she says end-of-the-year contributions have been sluggish for nonprofits in general.

“This is such a difficult time in the world. Resources are scarce, and there’s such a high volume of need around essential services. What I’ve been feeling so keenly this year is the way I view theater – and specifically Portland Center Stage – as an essential service, as a space of nourishment for the spirit. When audiences come here, it’s a place to fill up and to feel human,  to feel joy and connection as you go back out into the world to fight for what you believe in.”

She’s particularly proud of the number of children in the greater metro area that Center Stage has served, mainly through student matinees with primarily free or reduced-priced tickets.

“When people invest in Portland Center Stage, yes, they’re investing in art that moves and excites them, but they’re also investing in a public good in their community that serves 9,000 kids and 100,000 patrons.”

By October of this year, Center Stage had booked tickets for a record 6,000 students and had to add extra matinees to make space for them. In addition, the organization offers educational programs to another 4,000 students, both by sending teaching artists into the schools and by offering classes at the theater itself.

“I’d love to grow that program … but for now I’m so proud of how robust it is even at a time that feels like we’re navigating scarcity,” she says.

To help mitigate the effects of the funding shortage, Center Stage, which is located at The Armory in the Pearl District, is presenting its 2025-26 season on its 590-seat U.S. Bank Main Stage, leaving its 199-seat Ellyn Bye Studio available to rent to companies such as Profile Theatre, which mounted a successful production of Jen Silverman’s Witch (reviewed in ArtsWatch) there this fall.

Sponsor

Center Stage is also co-producing four shows this year, including Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (reviewed by Darleen Ortega in ArtsWatch), which is a collaboration with Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park. While that’s a move that helps cut costs for both companies, Wolf sees benefits that go beyond economics. Little Women, for example, will next be onstage in Cincinnati, giving the team of designers and actors (half of whom are local to the Portland area) a chance to be part of what Wolf calls “a national dialogue.”

Co-productions also allow Center Stage to present larger shows than it could handle on its own. Wolf notes that The Play That Goes Wrong, for example, which will begin previews on January 18, “is a massive show, and we’re only able to do that because we’re co-producing with Seattle Rep.”

Its community programs also make Center Stage a cultural hub. The company offers gallery space to local visual artists – such as Valerie Yeo, whose “Primordial” exhibit is currently on view – and hosts events such as music and dance performances as well as poetry in the lobby.

“I so fiercely believe in the work we’re doing,” Wolf says, emphasizing that the mission of the company “to create transcendent theatrical experiences and community programs that break down the barriers separating people” is what keeps her going today.

“It’s been profoundly difficult to navigate through the pandemic – 18 months of being entirely shut down – and coming back into a new world, really a new way of conceiving how we produce theater and what finances look like and having to navigate through many years of financial instability has been at points incredibly painful.”

Launching the fundraising campaign last May was another challenge for Wolf. “It’s an incredibly vulnerable thing to do,” she says. “I never wanted to have to do something like that in my career.”

Center Stage, she says, met its first benchmark last summer largely because of major funding from the State of Oregon. In addition, thousands of private donors made contributions. “Pre-pandemic, we were around 1,800 donors. And now we’re up to over 5,000 donors.” For her, that statistic feels as if the theater is “being held by the whole community, the whole region.”

Sponsor

“We will go forward,” she says.

Wolf also asserts that supporting Center Stage makes a potent social statement. “The role of an arts institution and one like Portland Center Stage is to maintain the radical act of insisting on everyone’s full humanity in the plays and art that we create.” Specifically, that means putting diverse characters onstage, including queer and women characters as well as people of color.

“I think [that’s] an act of deep humanity and of resilience and resistance, because it’s saying we will not be erased. We will not be silenced.”

Donors can make a tax-deductible donation to the Save PCS campaign here. Buy tickets to Center Stage shows at pcs.org.