About a week ago, I met a friend for coffee. "Meeting for coffee" being the non-literal verbal phrase to denote "sitting at a table and talking in a relationally-neutral setting for an extended period of time" -- I don't drink coffee, but I assumed (rightly) that anywhere peddling caffeinated beverages in an environment that encouraged loitering was likely to serve tea as well. We've been friends since our undergraduate days, and we later became graduate school classmates. In both situations, we were prone to spontaneously striking up what would turn into long conversations that pleasantly wandered their way through whatever was floating on our minds, which was generally theatre, the latest developments in society and culture, and an overwhelming sense of existential doom. Now that I'm no longer reaping the benefits of being confined to an academic environment (which, as insular and suffocating as it could sometimes seem, strongly facilitated social interactions with one's peers by virtue of sheer proximity), I'd unsuccessfully tried to arrange a hang-out when I was back in New Haven in December and jumped on his reciprocal offer when he was back in town in between semesters.
I was supremely proud of myself for this event happening. Once I had passed the playdates of elementary school, I had from that point onward pretty much failed at the art of purely social "hanging out." Between living at least a 30-minute drive from any of my new peers (with no local public transportation), not forming any strong personal connections until high school, and, while enjoying the company of others, being well content with solitude, it had never developed into a normal or regular activity for me. (When a friend was helping me move from New Haven, a particularly well-liked mutual friend came up in conversation, and I remarked "Oh, I really like that guy!" My friend replied with surprise, noting that the two of us never hung out. "Do I hang out with anyone?" I asked. To which he replied, "Point.") Also, meeting a friend at a coffee house in Gramercy to engage in bantering conversation seemed as though it would further me along the path of becoming an attractive character in a popular novel to later be turned into a hit television series, or at least a quirky indie film.
This isn't about how ridiculously accomplished having adult human social interactions makes me, though. One of the topics in particular that we touched on during our chat-and-caffeinate session was one that is often on my mind, and the particular neural pathways that were lit that afternoon haven't calmed down since then.
One of the things that I did over my holiday unemployment was attend the Welcome to Night Vale live show. For the uninitiated, Welcome to Night Vale is a podcast that started in June 2012 and takes the form of a local news radio broadcast for the small American city of Night Vale -- essentially a (mostly) one-man radio play. As for the city of Night Vale and its inhabitants, though -- well, the best description that I've heard of it so far was if Stephen King and Neil Gaiman created a community in The Sims and then just left it to run on its own for ten years, though I'd also add in a healthy heaping of late-night radio conspiracy theory. It's largely humorous, with what seems bizarre to the listener being simply mundane to the radio host and his local audience, but is also by turns touching, horrifying, and thought-provoking.
While I'm a fan of the show in the traditional sense of one who enjoys the content, I'm also extremely intrigued by its model as media and art. There are two episodes of the podcast per month, on the first and the fifteenth. It is completely free (though you can donate directly to the show and they have items available in the show's online store). It has no sponsors and contains no advertisements. It largely flew under the radar until around July 2013, at which point Tumblr got interested... and then it exploded. While still relatively small and niche in the overall world of popular culture, it was, for a time, the number one podcast in America, beating out NPR, and remains near the top. Their live shows sell out in thirty seconds (literally, speaking from the experience of trying to buy those tickets). The writers recently got a book deal. The fans are massively enthusiastic, supportive, and invested -- sites like AO3 and Tumblr show a lot of work (fic, art, crafts, etc.) being created and a lot of attention being paid.
Meanwhile, over in my industry, it feels to me as though we're in a near-constant state of low-level panic over trying to create demand that will support the work we are trying to do. And when I say "my industry," I mean theatre. (Which is a realm in which the writers and main actor of Welcome to Night Vale also reside, having made their initial connection via the experimental theatre group the New York Neo-Futurists.) More specifically for me, it's regional/non-profit theatre rather than commercial/for-profit (i.e., "Broadway") theatre. (Though Broadway Producer Ken Davenport just today gave highlights from and commentary on the Broadway League's report on Broadway ticket-buyers in the 2012-2013 season, which is both interesting and hardly irrelevant.) How do you keep your organization afloat when you see audience attendance stagnating or dropping? How do you get people to come see your little grass-roots show in a basement somewhere? On a practical/business level, it's necessary to bring in audience and/or donors to provide you with the resources to do theatre. But also, if you're telling a story that you feel is worth telling... don't you want people to see it? And the more the better? Without the people, theatre ceases to be culturally relevant, becomes a calcified tower of economic and cultural elitism. Or at the very least, it is limited -- it's seeing the same small demographic of people in the audience time and time again (we've all seen those audiences filled with the Old White Rich group), the creation of an echo chamber.
Before turning to stage management professionally, I worked for an organization where our audience kept on decreasing -- and the year after I left, the organization was merged with another, effectively closing. That organization was a Roman Catholic parish where I was the director of the music department. At staff meetings, we'd hear local statistics about decreasing congregation sizes, how there were more funerals than baptisms and weddings combined. And indeed, fears were not misplaced, as the dissolving of that particular community evidenced. One would think that moving from the Church to the theatre would be one of the biggest industry changes that one could make, but I've found it to be quite to the contrary. It's not for nothing, it seems, that theatre's roots are in religious ritual.
So... how does this all fit together? Or, at least, how might it? I'm sure that others far more studied and directly involved than I am have thought these things before, but it's been so much on my mind that I'm curious to see where I end up just from analyzing my own observations and ideas in relative innocence, like a modern-day philosopher in the wild. And it's taken up so much of my thought-processes when I'm running and showering lately (when all of the best thinking occurs, of course) that I figure that I might as well put it down into written words.
Here are some facts that I am considering:
1a) Theatre can be really expensive. It doesn't have to be, but one ticket to a mainstream show at a prominent organization can set you back $50 to $100. Hell, a ticket to The Book of Mormon on Broadway could cost as much as $300. And that's just for seeing a show and not doing an entire evening out (e.g., dinner before, drinks after, etc.).
1b) Theatre can be really expensive. It is a highly collaborative endeavor, there are a lot of people involved in making a production happen (writers, directors, designers, stage managers, theatre managers, technicians, actors, crew, audience services, etc.), and if you're paying them all as professionals who deserve living wages vaguely commensurate to the amount of work they are doing, it adds up. And that doesn't even take into account costs for the physical production, like the raw materials for building the damn set and putting clothes on people's bodies. If you are incurring those costs, then you have to pay for them somehow.
2) Theatre takes time. Not only are you committing a couple hours to sitting in one place, but you have to travel to that place (which also adds to the cost) and you have to do all of that on someone else's schedule, not when it might fit most conveniently into your life. (A friend of mine once posited that it was erroneous to say that theatre was competing with television and internet entertainment for people's wallets. Rather, he said, the competition was activities such as going out to eat at a restaurant -- events that required leaving the house and coordinating with other people.)
3a) Theatre can be really weird. In general, attending the theatre is not a given experience in a random person's life. If a person says that they never watch television or movies, that would be considered a little out of the ordinary, whereas someone who never attends theatre just "isn't a theatre person." On top of that, some of the material that is presented is then even further from the norm of the average consumed cultural content, so you potentially have both an unfamiliar experience and unfamiliar content.
3b) Theatre can be really boring. It can become beholden to making enough money, which means bringing in enough people, which means not alienating anyone (either prior to or during the show), which means not taking risks.
3c) Theatre can be really bad. It's important for art to have room to fail, but man, being in the audience for a clunker is not fun.
Facts #1 and #2 involve resources. A person has a limited pool of resources that must be prioritized. The fact is, if you are dirt poor but seeing Waiting for Godot with Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan is more important to you than eating or having a roof over your head or avoiding jail, you could get your ass into that show. Even the greatest theatre lovers among us, however, generally do not hold those priorities.
Fact #3 is about risk. Investing money, time, and energy in theatre as audience involves the risk that we do not get what we consider to be an acceptable return on the investment of our resources.
These combine to make theatre something with potentially a high barrier of entry -- it's not easy to see theatre, particularly relative to the myriad of other options one has.
So... what about Welcome to Night Vale?
Welcome to Night Vale has a very low barrier of entry. Each episode is only about 30 minutes long. They can be listened to on one's own schedule. It's absolutely free. There is a moderate amount of energy involved, given that the content of the show has a moderately-high level of verbal and narrative intricacy. But still, on a whole, it's very easy to sample Welcome to Night Vale's goods.
And the overall low barrier of entry means that there is not a lot at risk. Don't like it? You can stop listening at any time. But if you do like it, that means that you have gotten a positive return on your investment. If you really like it? Then you've gotten a huge return on a very small investment, and you are probably driven to not only continue making that investment but to increase it: spending mental energy thinking about the show and discussing it with other fans, time and effort creating things about the show, money on show-related products (such as attending one of the live shows). The show, which you now love, has become a high priority in your life. It also becomes a connector to other things -- since that investment was such a success, maybe so would be an investment in other works by the same creators or other works that bear the description "If you like Welcome to Night Vale, then maybe you'll like..."
So it seems like one possible tool is reducing barrier of entry. Just because theatre can be expensive doesn't mean that it has to be. But then we run into the problem where we're no longer giving people a working wage -- and then it's the creators balancing investment and priority, deciding if this piece of work is worth giving up a meal, paying rent. For some, it will be. But certainly not for everyone, and not even for most. And as romantic as the archetype might be, being a literally starving artist doesn't help most people to concentrate and create their best work. While theatre can be done on the cheap, that is also restrictive, limiting the resources given toward a wide range of creative expression. Not every show has to be Cirque du Soleil... but wouldn't it be sad if no show were Cirque du Soleil? And as for time, not every show has to be a multiple-day Ring cycle, but not every story can be honestly told or every experience optimally realized in 90 minutes, either.
And so, we can decrease the barrier of entry, but that is not always a good thing. Besides, even if the barrier of entry is low, that's of no use if theatre is still low priority. So how to move it higher up the priority ladder?
It's here that I have been mulling for the past days. Because while there are limits to the flexibility of the barriers of entry for theatre, what low-resource methods are there for increasing the priority level of theatre?
I've been trying to think of what increases priority levels for me. It really doesn't seem to be any different than way that I choose to spend my time in the realm of entertainment and media.
There's the personal aspect. I have attended many shows because I have friends who are in them. I have also attended shows because even though I may not personally know the people involved, they nevertheless mean a lot to me (e.g., Sirs Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan, who aside from being masters of the craft have embodied characters from stories that I grew up with). I read news stories about my hometown because I have a personal connection. I read news stories about Robert Downey Jr. because he's Iron Man. So: personal and celebrity.
There's the social aspect. Will doing this thing allow me to take part in a cultural conversation? If I don't do it, will I be left out? Can I do this with a group of friends? Will it allow me to make new friends?
There's the content aspect. Will it be enjoyable? Exciting? Beneficial to me, intellectually or otherwise? Beneficial to others, such as raising money for an organization or cause that I believe in?
There's also the element of risk. How likely is it that the above aspects will or will not be satisfied?
There are challenges involved in these aspects. The personal aspect may be limited, as not everyone knows someone who works in theatre, and theatre's place outside of mainstream pop culture means that it does not have many high-profile mainstream celebrities. (One of the recent trend has been bringing mainstream celebrities into productions. As far as I can tell, results have been mixed.) If theatre isn't considered relevant to society, then how great can the social aspect be? And as for the content aspect, doing risky, new content and creating an unknown, untested product is vital to theatre -- how can that aspect be attended to without stifling the very things we're trying to support?
Let's say that you hear about this podcast by word-of-mouth. Let's say that the podcast is free and relatively short, giving it a low barrier of entry. You like it a lot. You excitedly talk about it with your friends and start some more people listening to it in the process. You buy the show's merchandise and attend one of their live shows. You know that the lead actor is a member of the New York Neo-Futurists and that the writers met through them. You vaguely remember using the Chicago Neo-Futurists as part of an academic project in graduate school because a member of your team knew them and said that they were very exciting. When at work one day, you see on the facility schedule that the New York Neo-Futurists will be working in one of the other rooms the next day, and you can't help but feel excited that you share this physical space in common, fuzzy though the connection is. You start following the lead actor on social media. He links to a TDF video about the New York Neo-Futurists. You'd never gotten around to actually checking them out, but this new connection puts them at a higher priority. You follow the link and watch the video. You learn more about the New York Neo-Futurists. You think that they look really awesome. You make a mental note to try to make it to one of their shows
Round-about, yes. A long-game, yes. But if most theatre's barrier of entry can only be lowered so much, what other means that do have a low barrier of entry can be used to create personal, social, and content-related connections to theatre? And I don't mean a youtube trailer for a show. I hate most theatre trailers because they're useless to me -- seeing a two-minute montage of people wearing clothes moving about a set while some background music plays does absolutely nothing to tell me if I might like a show. And I don't even mean like the way that music has become advertisements for concerts. I don't think that it has to be so direct. As mentioned before, I could know absolutely zip about a show, but if a friend is in it or it's relevant among my friends, I am so much more likely to attend.
Is it about creating celebrities? Nurturing cults of personality? What if playwrights wrote radio plays or short videos that could be produced cheaply and distributed easily? But hey, not every playwright writes for media other than the stage -- and that's all right. But what if someone else on the team attracted people to their music or their words outside of the show? What if we encouraged everyone to fully express themselves as artists -- or hell, just as people? Most people have at least a low-level general interest in other people. Humans are nosy as fuck. And we can become personally attached to other people with whom we aren't actually acquainted, let alone share real friendship with. And if someone I like is involved in something, it becomes more worth the risk. And if those connections are made to enough projects, if that habit and culture is established, then such outreach isn't necessary for all projects.
Is it about creating social environments? What if there were a cheap café near the venue that offered low-cost mingling events before and after shows, facilitating community among those who attended shows? Fantasy and comic book geeks, who can discuss the objects of their focus endlessly, are now mainstream and bringing in the rest of the crowd. They've gone from underdogs to experts. How does the rise in the status of these geeks relate to the mainstreaming of the objects of their devotion? Chicken and egg? What, then, of the theatre geeks, who create fantasy dreamcasts from the different productions that they've seen, worship Sondheim (except for those who don't and tend toward either shame or defiance), know the lyrics to every song and can always pull out an appropriate Shakespeare/Stoppard/Williams quote?
I don't have any answers. I didn't have any intention of writing 3000+ words about theatre audience cultivation. I'm sure you didn't have any intention of reading 3000+ words about theatre audience cultivation. But this is where I have gotten to so far, and from where I am likely to continue at some point.
Let's meet for coffee again, okay?
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