Thoughts on How to Save the American Theatre

Lowering ticket prices is not the answer. The one universal we always hear is that "ticket prices are too high." That was a big part of Mike Daisey's How Theater Failed America. Normally, this logic stems from a comparison to cinema: it's much cheaper to see a movie than a play, and theatre people act as though if only they could get prices down low enough their theatres would be teaming with twenty-somethings. Only problem is, the argument doesn't hold water. For one thing, box office receipts have been in decline for years, so there's no magic price bullet. For another, the only commercially successful theatre in America is the big Broadway shows, particularly those produced by Disney like The Lion King. They cost a small fortune to get into (because they cost a large fortune to produce), and most theatre people deride them as mere tourist attractions. But the lesson should be clear: To get non-traditional audiences into the theatre, maybe you need production values you only get with $80 tickets instead of $10 tickets. Alternatively, if you're a "fringe" theatre charging $15-$20, that's on par with a concert at Neumo's or Chop Suey, so hipsters can definitely afford it. If no one's coming, then cost isn't the issue and see another one of our points.

"Produce dirty, fast, and often" is spot on. Kiley makes a good argument: produce more shows, not less. A small theatre should be able to stage 20 shows a year, like Annex Theatre did in 1988. Matthew Richter, the founder of Consolidated Works and former-Stranger performance editor had a theatre company on Capitol Hill that did more than 200 shows in one year. (Richter also had a good related piece on arts orgs funding a couple years ago that people should read for tonight.) Don't waste your down-time between shows, either: host concerts, cabarets, drag shows, whatever. And yes, do have a bar! Let people drink during the show. And finally, shorten your planned runs. Four weeks is untenable. Schedule a show for two, and if has buzz, extend the run.

"Produce dirty, fast, and often" is completely off the mark. Schizoidal enough for you? Here's our point: A couple years ago we interviewed the editor of a local lit mag who spent years in NYC and he said something about Seattle's arts scene that's always stuck with us (we paraphrase from memory): "Seattle has this hippie-ish idea that the intent of a work is enough." Get it? We've been to too many plays, even ones with decent acting or a relatively challenging script, that suffer from shitty sets or lack of rehearsal. Yes, sets are prohibitively expensive; yes, it's impossible to spend three months rehearsing a show. Both are realities that we have to accept, as long as we also want to accept that most shows will continue to be weak and not attract audiences. If you don't want to accept that, you have to figure out how to make a show worth coming to, because intent may get you patted on the back by your friends, but it don't sell tickets.

Make sure you're using the right indicator, OR, make up your damned mind. The great undecided in this whole affair is what theatre should be doing. Is it entertainment or is it art? Art challenges, pushes buttons, tells uncomfortable truths; entertainment, well, entertains. Most theatres can't figure out what they are. Take ACT's new show, Becky's New Car. It's good (see our review tomorrow), but it's pure entertainment, a broad comedy. If theatre can't be competitive as entertainment, if people won't buy the tickets to come see it, why produce it? Alternatively, if theatre is supposed to be art, challenging and difficult, surely you dear, sweet artistic directors and playwrights didn't expect people to line up around the corner waiting to pay you to see it? Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, perhaps the most important play of the 20th century, barely succeeded in Paris in 1953 (people walked out at the beginning of act 2 when the play started over), and flopped and closed in two weeks in the US in 1955. Sometimes, the most important art has the smallest audience. So you need to decide if ticket sales are really what you want to use as the indicator of your success.

When were you relevant, exactly? Most people who lament the current state of the theatre have in mind a golden age when theatre was socially relevant. But when was that, exactly? We can talk about great experimental companies (Open Theatre, Living Theatre) or writers (Beckett, Williams, Pinter), but those were in New York, Paris, London. We don't know of any great era for the Seattle avant-garde. Aren't we mistaking ticket sales for relevance, here? (See above point.) It's actually wholly possible for theatre to be relevant here for the first time, but it has to start pushing buttons, offending people (like liberals and gays and atheists and pro-choice people; pot-shots at conservatives will get you nothing) and getting bloggers roiled up, spewing bile and leveraging ad hominem attacks at actors' looks. That's relevance. (See below.)

Stop being theatre people. Got out there and learn about the real world. Kiley's half right with his point number ten, "Drop out of graduate school." Except, graduate school's not the problem any more than undergrad is. The problem is that theatre people don't know for shit about the real world (and advocating for Bolivian coca farmers or being in the Peace Corps is not real world experience, anymore than your summer backpacking trip through Europe is). We remember the last Seattle Fringe Fest—fringe theatre being the "playwright's theatre," supposedly—when every play was a re-tooling or response, through post-feminism or queer theory, to Hamlet. Or there were drag shows. Or punk rock musicals. Or anything and everything remotely alternative or putatively intellectual, anything but a believable play about a goddamned office environment. Or a construction site. Or computer programmers, healthy families, or people who actually make money but aren't inherently evil. In our three or so years of serious theatre coverage here in Seattle, we have seen one—one—single play that compellingly captured some sense of working in the real world: Rope Course, an experimental performance piece by Juliet Walker & Stephen Hando at NW New Works at On the Boards this last spring.

Stop producing plays about gays, OR, ditch "diversity" for actual diversity. Brendan Kiley's number one point is, "Enough with the goddamned Shakespeare already." Let's take it further: Enough with bleeding heart liberalism and tired plays about gays and AIDS. The theatre has wholly internalized the idea of "diversity," which is less actual diversity than it is white urban liberal choir-preaching. In the last two months Angels in America was produced in Seattle, and Terrence McNally's designed-to-piss-off-anti-NEA-conservatives play Corpus Christi is playing in New York ten years on. Why? Neither is risque any more, both are museum pieces in the history of the gay rights struggle and the culture wars. You know what would be risque? Putting on an anti-gay play. Christian mega-churches do stuff like that all the time, staging productions of insane right-wing fodder like Left Behind for audiences who would never go to ACT or Seattle Rep. Not that we're interested in seeing that ourselves, but the point is, if theatre wants to be part of the American social discourse, it has to be open to competing points of view instead of only representing a lukewarm contemporary liberalism. The price of relevance is defending the right of others to speak out; today, there is no free speech in the American theatre, and that, more than anything, is why people don't care.