On Sustainable Models

I want a laboratory setting in which to test theories of structure. I want to experiment in action the issues we're grappling with on this blog. I want a forum to create solutions to the problems we all face as theatre practitioners. I want the Malcolm Gladwell solutions to our strategic problems. I read the reports and look at the statistics and feel like we're inches away from producing ourselves out of existence. Or at least sustainability. What is a sustainable institutional (maybe the wrong word) model for the theatre that allows the following:

1. Living wage for the artists involved
2. Appreciation for the support team in pay, benefits and decent hours
3. Experimentation (and accepted margins for failure)
4. Ticket prices for all economic demographics

At the forefront of this model must be that we are operating under the auspices of a public trust-- that the art itself is a valuable commodity (in the words of another theatrical evolutionary "it makes you a better person") like a cultural think-tank. We shouldn't actually expect the art to make a monetary profit. The business investment is in the betterment of society. (too lofty?) And I think we may also need to think of that society as the neighborhoods or communities we live in. (Have you noticed how theatres always start in less expensive neighborhoods because of the rent, but often choose not to program toward their immediate surroundings? I've seen them be at the forefront of a "transitional" neighborhood, enabling the neighborhood to become "trendy" and then lose their leases to "trendier" shops when the rents increase. But that's another topic entirely...)

Is this possible without major Medici-style patronage? Is this possible without promising a tangible financial return on the investment? How can we start a lab environment to practice some of the rants we're preaching? (America itself was an experiment until the Revolutionary War.)

Go ahead. Discuss.