I am a tremendous admirer of the verses of Robert Frost. I’ve been studying his work for as long as I’ve been studying poetry, which is (at happens) more than a couple of decades now, and it continues to yield new discoveries for me. He was a prosodic genius—a fact that I fear goes largely unrecognized by most fans of his work, who react largely to his occasionally folksy and deceptively simple diction—and a deeply complicated thinker. I will probably return to his poems time and time again throughout my life.

Although I’ve read two or three autobiographies of Frost along the way, I don’t presume to know his true character. What I do know is that Frost the poet and Frost the man are often mistaken for one another. We imagine him to have been a slightly curmudgeonly person, a stolid New England patriarch with the wisdom of hard soil and tough winters in his bones and a half-smile in his eyes. His writing, by contrast, has many moods and tones and voices that do not always square with the grandfatherly image we have of him. The truth, as always, is probably still buried under a pile of leaves in a woods somewhere… and may remain buried forever.

And still: that image of Frost is compelling. So many of us—even those of us with little exposure to poetry—can conjure him up. He has become one of the few iconic American poets (along with Whitman, Dickinson, and perhaps to a lesser extent Ginsberg). He’s important to our country’s history. You might be aware that he actually wrote a poem for the inauguration of President Kennedy (an event that pre-figured what I would call the dismal artistic failure of Maya Angelou at Clinton’s inauguration). What you probably don’t know is that Frost was also viewed with enough gravitas and respect to actually advise President Kennedy on a variety of sensitive political issues. Can you imagine that? A poet advising a President? He really mattered.

Why has the same never been true of a playwright? I’m not asking why, say, Tony Kushner hasn’t been seated at President Obama’s right hand during difficult discussions about Afghanistan. I’m asking why we don’t revere playwrights in the same way Frost was revered in his lifetime. And I’m not talking about celebrity, either, or Arthur Miller and/or Neil Simon might quality: I’m talking about something bigger and more permanent than that.

Yes, there are playwrights working today whose names we all know—and by “we,” I am referring to the run of theatrically-educated folks who read this blog—but there aren’t any living playwrights who’ve entered the general public imagination, with possible exception (because of his work in Hollywood, perhaps?) of David Mamet. Do you want to make a case for the notoriety of Edward Albee, or the aforementioned Tony Kushner? Fine: that’s not my point.

My point is that none of these fine folks, nor anyone else you’d care to name, have the general respect and admiration of the American populace. They don’t appear on the Sunday morning news programs, they aren’t on David Letterman, they don’t write for Reader’s Digest or USA Today, they don’t back non-profit campaigns, they don’t pitch (even high-end) products of any kind, and they certainly don’t advise sitting politicians. They just (primarily) write plays.

Is there something about our art form that makes us ineligible for icon status? Is it our association, however remote, with the seemingly-shallow glitz and glamour of Broadway? Is the fact that we only rarely act in our own plays, while poets have to stand up behind the podium and air their own verses (on the rare occasions on which they are called to do so)? Is our work generally too accessible, too much “of” the people, to be seen as grand or elevated in any way? (Not likely…)

Or is it that the current state of American culture simply does not allow for artists of any genre to be icon-ified? I have a hard time thinking of anyone, short of a few actors, who are granted such treatment (whether they merit it or not). We may no longer be living in an age in which that’s possible.

If so, that’s sad to me. I wish the world wanted what playwrights have to offer, which is (at least in part) the ability to think about narratives: to help us edit the stories we are living publically, politically, and personally and make them more liberating, more healthy, more imaginative, more invigorating, more revealing, and more useful. I think we could make a difference if we popped into the Oval Office for five minutes now and then. I think we’d be useful in times of national crisis, or to help dramatize complex scientific ideas vital to our nation’s health, or to rally people to important causes. I think we would earn the same respect the world afforded Frost.

If time hasn’t passed us by, that is.

I’ve been thinking lately about why, how, and by whom new plays are commissioned.

I’ve been fortunate enough to have earned a few commissions myself, and it won’t surprise anyone to learn that in all of those instances, the commissions have come from theater companies. The companies in question needed plays to produce; they thought their audiences might like the plays an artist like me would write, so they asked me to write some. That’s their job, after all, at some base level: to find artists and pay them to make art that they think their audience members will pay them, in turn, to see.

Well, that’s a capitalist version of their job, anyway.You don’t like the crass commercialism of my last sentence? Fine: try this. It’s a theater’s job to find artists and provide them with the necessary support and resources to create art that the theater thinks its audience members will benefit from seeing and be glad to support. How’s that?

What’s been troubling me lately about commissions is the assumption that, for reasons either commercial or creative, the theater has to act as an intermediary between artist and audience. Why must it be so? I can think of two reasons.

First, because that’s the way we’ve been doing it for a long time now. I think it’s safe to say we can dismiss that one out of hand.

Second, because arts institutions have an important role to play as cultural curators. They serve as experts, determining what art needs to get created. Their imprimatur—the fact that they’ve commissioned the work—automatically makes it “important,” whether in the short term people like it or not. In the long term, more often than not, they are proven correct.

As much as I’d rather not grant this second argument merit, I have to give it some… not too much, but some. There are too many examples of brilliant works of art that exist and survive into posterity only because institutions commissioned them (or in other ways kept them alive) to dismiss the idea out of hand.

And yet… how good are theaters, really, at commissioning work their audiences want to see here and now, rather than in some distant future? Has anyone ever assessed in a large-scale way how well-attended and well-liked and critically-acclaimed commissioned plays usually are? Furthermore, as audiences for theater become more and more challenging to find, shouldn’t we be working harder than ever to figure out what stories they’re interested in experiencing?

So that got me thinking: what if theaters handled the commissioning process in a very different way? What if they stepped to the side a little bit and gave their audience members a direct say in the work they might ask playwrights to make for them? Here’s a rough sketch:

• The theater begins by doing some limited-scale curatorial work: selecting five or ten potential projects they might commission and posting overviews of all of them online.
• Next, the general public is invited to weigh in on the candidates: not only by voting for their favorites, but also by submitting comments.
• Subscribers’ comments might be weighted more heavily; even those people entering a special code on the back of a ticket stub might get more attention for their feedback.
• The theater then chooses to fully commission the project or projects that draw the most interest from their audiences.

Naturally, there are questions about intellectual property and copyright that might need to be addressed… but I feel confident, frankly, that if the Dramatists Guild’s lawyers were put to the test, they could craft the right legal language to keep everybody happy and protected.

Yes, there might be a few egos to assuage. I certainly wouldn’t want to be the playwright whose project didn’t get picked more than a few times… but it definitely wouldn’t stop me from trying, because it sure does feel great to be nominated. Artistic directors would have to give over some part of a season to the vox populi… but if the populi end up loving what gets put on stage, the vox is going to be mighty complimentary, isn’t it? Eminently surmountable problems in both cases, I hope you’ll agree.

Of course, if you don’t agree—and, more importantly, if theaters don’t agree—we playwrights can always just go ahead and get commissions for new plays without them.

What’s that, you say? A commission without a theater? Who, then, will be doing the commissioning?

Theatergoers.

Bear with me while I take you on a small detour to a website you might not be familiar with called Eventful. With a free Eventful membership, you’re able to “demand” an appearance by your favorite artist in any number of genres at the venue of your choice. You want Lady Gaga to play the Kiwanis Club in Grand Rapids, MI? Demand it. You want to get Jim Gaffigan to do his new routine at the State Theatre in Falls Church, VA – you can say so. Get enough other people to make the same demand, and (assuming Gaga’s manager and Gaffigan’s press agent are paying attention) you can make things happen.

So… what’s to stop audience members from using a similar technology to convince a theater to commission a play by a certain playwright? Let’s say I’m compelled by A. Rey Pamatmat’s oeuvre. (Easy to say because, in fact, I am.) Let’s say I’d like to see one of his plays in my home city of DC (which, again, I would) and that I think Forum Theatre might be a great home for it (because, well, I like what they do with contemporary work). Why couldn’t I “demand” they produce it, and convince other people (using the various and sundry tools offered by social media) to do the same? Wouldn’t both Forum Theatre and A. Rey Pamatmat be unwise to ignore the message?

There are some who would argue that audience members aren’t generally informed well enough to issue demands like that. I’ll grant that perhaps that might be the case: how many typical theatergoers have even heard of A. Rey Pamatmat, for instance? (Author of Edith Can Shoot Things and Hit Them, a poignant and immensely important play that I was lucky to see at the Humana Festival earlier this year.) Perhaps not enough.

So maybe the “demand” isn’t for a certain author’s work. (How many “demands” would be issued for the same few playwrights with name recognition anyway? Probably too many.) Maybe the demand is for a certain kind of play (a farce for young audiences, for example) or for certain subject matter (plays about neuroscience). We may need to experiment to get it right.

Or maybe the right model to emulate isn’t Eventful, but Kickstarter. (If you’ve been living under a rock, Kickstarter is an online platform that allows both artists and arts institutions to solicit funding for creative projects.) Theater companies are already using Kickstarter to raise money for productions… so why shouldn’t playwrights use the same technology to fund commissions of new plays? Here’s one way it might work:

• The playwright creates a profile for the work in question on Kickstarter, describing it in enough detail to inspire people to fund it and setting a reasonable (not $50,000) but not paltry ($50) funding goal.
• Again, the good folks at the Dramatists Guild might need to be consulted to ensure some measure of legal protection for playwrights putting their ideas out so publicly.
• Those contributing funds to the project might be given a variety of perks, from a chance to read an early draft of the script to having the chance to name a minor character (or choose from a list of names) to a meal or a dinner-and-theater date with the playwright to attendance at an early reading.
• For large donors, accommodations might certainly be made for credit at the play’s first production, should it land one; yes, theaters would need to be willing to do that… but if they wouldn’t be, that would be small-minded, I hope you’ll agree.

This last idea has tremendous appeal to me… and as soon as I finish working on my current commission–which came from a theater–I might very well give it a shot. But I find myself wondering whether there are other models as well… and, honestly, whether any of these have been tried yet. If not, I suggest they should be.

I’m live-blogging the first-ever Dramatists Guild conference. Please feel free to log on and either lurk or join the conversation. If there are opportunities for questions, and you submit any, I’ll try to sneak them in.

I may also be tweeting from time to time if you’d rather follow along that way, too. You can follow me at @GwydionS or check out the #2amt hashtag.

You can also view several sessions live, embedded below or directly at the New Play TV page at Livestream.

I don’t like to talk too much about the employment situation I’ve enjoyed for the last nine or so years, because I’m not inclined to brag… but the truth is, for a playwright—for any sort of artist, really—I’ve got it good: very good.

Of late, though, I’ve begun to think it’s time I talked more about it. Given how hard it is to support oneself as a playwright—there are too many sources to quote on that front, but the place to start is still Outrageous Fortune—and given the current culture for governmental support of the arts, we need to consider ways we might re-invent what an artist’s work life looks like. (I was particularly moved by the candid confessions this young playwright offered on HowlRound.com, as well as the spirited comments his blog post generated.)

So, here’s my situation (without going into too many details): I have a 25 hour/week job doing something for which I’m well trained that pays me enough of a salary to support myself and contribute to my family’s well-being, though not much more than that. The job comes with health insurance, which is spectacular, and plenty of vacation time, plus a generous helping of other benefits, too, including things like a 401K and paternity leave. And here’s the kicker: I like it, at least as much as anyone ever likes a job, if not a good bit more. I learn a great deal, and I feel creatively challenged, and I work with terrific people.

With only 25 hours of work during the week, however, I’ve still got plenty of time to write. I usually give my mornings to playwriting; I write in my study at home till about noon, head to my office for five or so hours, and then return home for dinner with the family. (I put in my share of overtime, of course, like any white collar worker, but that’s the gist of it.) My day has balance. My bank account has balance. My life, in general, has balance.

I realize how spectacularly lucky I am. I know there aren’t a lot of companies out there trying to hire people on similar terms… but why aren’t there?

Believe it or not, there’s no actual rule that says a stable career must demand 40 hours a week.  In fact, the idea that every single job in the world must be in performed in the same amount of time is ridiculous, isn’t it? If employers were thinking flexibly and creatively, you’d have to assume that more of them would realize this. Few of them, however, do.

So convince them! I didn’t just walk into an office and expect the deal I have. I developed a skill set over many years, alongside my work as a playwright; held a few traditional full-time jobs for a while, building up my resume; and eventually came to merit (if I may be so bold) the opportunity I now have. I don’t take it for granted, either; I work my tail off, and I continue to do whatever I can to earn the arrangement. I don’t walk around wishing I could be writing full-time; I’m not waiting for five o’clock so I can punch out and head home. As I’ve said, I like what I do.

Naturally, there are weeks during the year when one or the other of my careers gets so demanding I need to pull back from the other. I take vacation from my company, or I grant myself vacation from my work as a playwright. There are times while I’m home writing that I answer emails from the office, and times while I’m at the office that I’ll answer a query about a play. I find a way to give both careers the attention and respect they deserve.

The truth is, I’m not a half-time playwright or a half-time employee: I’m a full-time member of both worlds, in my heart and mind. And I find they echo and influence one another in ways I’d never predicted. Ideas I encounter in my day job become fodder for my storytelling; the creative application of narrative in playwriting helps me frame my thoughts with clients.

This is why I would prefer NOT to hold a full-time theater job… or even a half-time theater job similar to the one I now hold. I think it makes me a better writer to pass half of every day in the company of people who think about very different things. My mind and my heart are enriched a great deal. If I were offered a full-time “staff playwriting” position, similar to the positions recently created by Arena Stage—as some have argued should be standard operating procedure in the theater—I would probably have to think a great deal before accepting. Might it stunt my writing to live and work in a theater-only bubble? That’s my fear.

If I were a nationally-prominent arts leader—say, the head of the NEA, for example—I would be devoting my time to figuring out how to incent businesses to create more positions like mine, with the sole purpose of giving them to artists. (The NEA should directly fund the playwriting half of my day, too, but that’s a different story.) I would advocate for arts education programs of all varieties to begin training students to take on two careers, rather than one. Most importantly, in the spirit of the Heath brothers’ recent smash hit Switch—a book that has, curiously, been immensely influential in both of the spheres in which I work—I would look at the bright spot I’ve just outlined and try to clone it, too.

Because I shouldn’t be the only one who has it this good.

Tomorrow night, two different things are going to be done to one of my plays that have never been done before, and I’m really excited about both of them.

Thing one is this: my play is going to be bootlegged. No, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be secretly recorded on a cassette tape (remember those?) and traded among theatergoers in seedy black markets. What it means is that the Taffety Punk Theatre Company – of which I was recently named Resident Playwright – is going to mount a full, one-night-only production… with only one day of rehearsal.

Yes, you read that correctly: one day. And yes, that includes tech. It includes everything except the play’s four actors getting off book, which they’ve valiantly done on their own. The cast will arrive at the theater at 10 am, block the entire play, do a queue-to-queue, take a lunch break, do a complete run-through, take a dinner break (and hopefully a nap), then put the whole thing in front of an audience at 8 pm EST. That’s what I mean by “bootlegged.”

This act of derring-do isn’t new for the company. They do this once a year, in fact… until now, always with Shakespeare.  Last year it was TWO NOBLE KINSMEN… which required a whopping 36 actors. The event, which is typically held at the Folger Theatre in DC, is immensely popular; last year, a line of would-be ticket buyers who had to be turned away stretched all the way around the block.

This year, thanks to the second thing that’s happening to my play, those unfortunate patrons have another option: they can watch the production online via Arena Stage’s #NewPlayTV channel. Yes, not only is the company performing without the new of a proper rehearsal process, they’re doing so in front of a potentially huge internet audience. Quite brave, if you ask me.

So… why am I taking up space here on 2amTheatre.com to promote this event? Because this bootlegged and live-streamed event is actually the first in what’s going to be a series of 2AMT readings featuring new plays and new companies from around the world, all of them streamed live online. Our hope is that the series will help showcase new work, connecting playwrights and theaters in a new way.

Each new reading is going to be introduced, furthermore, with a brief “Playwright’s Notes” introduction here on 2amTheatre.com, which will also host an archive of prior live-streamed readings. (In other words, if you can’t tune in tomorrow night at 8 pm EST, you’ll be able to watch any time thereafter.) Which brings me to the very thing I’ve yet to talk about: the play itself.

I first started thinking about the play that became REALS with the release and subsequent popularity of The Dark Knight.  I thought to myself: half a billion dollars worth of tickets for another Batman movie? I love the caped crusader as much as anyone — probably a good deal more — but I was nonetheless astonished by how powerfully America craved him.

I began to believe that there must be something in the superhero trope that our culture needs. What are people looking for? What are we missing? It had to be something. Why, I wondered, shouldn’t I try to tell a superhero story on stage? I couldn’t think of a reason.

I’d read an article about a costumed crusader in DC named Captain Prospect, a man who dressed up in a costume and walked around cleaning up parks and doing good deeds, so I started to do a bit more research.  I was quickly immersed in the world of real-life superheroes, and I knew I had my subject. Of late there’s been a tremendous surge of coverage, too – notably about a Seattle-based real-life superhero named Phoenix Jones who stopped a car theft. The story won’t go away.

What has continued to compel me about the subject is the psychology of the transformation involved in becoming a real-life superhero.  What makes an ordinary person decide to devote such care to creating an alter ego and inhabiting it so fully?  Is it escapism?  Fantasy?  Is it the ego boost of being a hero and upholding the law, or the secret transgression of taking the law into your own hands?  How much of the whole thing is theater, and how much is meant to be taken literally?  Does the costume create strength or hide weakness?  And finally, when you take off the costume, what’s really there?

REALS isn’t anything like some of the recent pop-culture stories that have been told about similar subjects: the film Kick-Ass, for example, is far more cartoonish; the television series Heroes and No Ordinary Family feature actual super-heroes, which (sorry to have to be the bearer) don’t exist.  My story is darker and more introspective… though also, I hope, very funny.  If you want to read a synopsis, you can do that here. You can also tune in and watch for yourself!

Toward the end of last year, I began to get a series of emails from theater companies and arts organizations I’ve worked with in the past asking me to consider making donations in support of their efforts. This has become a late-December custom for me; I’m sure you experience the same thing.

In previous years, I simply deleted them all as they came in. I know that a great many people whose professionalism I respect put a lot of work and thought into those emails, so it pains me to admit that publicly, but it’s true.

The simple fact of the matter is that my wife and I make a careful determination together about which organizations we’re going to support each year, then make our donations as we can afford them long before December arrives. No manner of emailed appeal – save for one relating some unique and special tragic circumstance – is going to move us to make a new decision. And no, you falling short of your fundraising goal is not a unique circumstance. An unexpected tsunami killing hundreds of thousands of people in Indonesia, on the other hand…

This year, for some reason, the donation request emails started to get under my skin a bit. With the addition of a baby to the family and the loss of my wife’s income, our financial picture has changed drastically, so I attributed my annoyance at first to a general worry about money… but the more I started to think about the question of these organizations asking me for donations, the more confused I became.

For example: Theater X (name, of course, redacted) produced a play I wrote some time ago. We had a great time working together, we built a great rapport, and I earned a small royalty from the collaboration: a very small royalty, in fact. So small that if I’d given them a donation equal to the suggested amount in their email solicitation, I’d have essentially been giving half of what I earned right back to the theater.

Should they be asking me to do that? Is it okay? Does it strike you as tacky? Is it a natural evolution or continuation of our relationship?

The answers to those questions seem to me to hinge on whether I want my connection to Theater X to adhere to market norms or social norms. If it adheres to market norms, then I was effectively a temporary employee, paid by Theater X for my work, and to ask me to return my paycheck is definitely not appropriate. If our relationship adheres to social norms, however, then it’s based around a mutual support of each others’ artistic goals, and money changing hands is simply a reflection of that support.

I haven’t seen messaging like that in even ONE of the donation-appeal emails I’ve received, however. Nobody says “Because we’ve worked with you before, and because we feel like your personal artistic mission overlaps with our organizational mission, we thought perhaps you might care to support our upcoming season.” My inbox is filled with one-size-fits-all generalized appeals that make me feel as if my contributions as an artist are undervalued and that the organization doesn’t understand how hard it can be financially for artists to make ends meet.

Is it too much to ask that an arts organization segment its email list – artists in one category, subscribers in another category, and former donors in a third – and create unique emails for each segment? That’s standard fundraising practice for a non-profit organization. We should expect that much from theaters as well. We should expect them not to take us for granted.

The truth is that if I had enough money not only to support my family solely by writing plays, but also to support the organizations I work with, I gladly would… but I don’t, and I don’t know how many artists do. I’m genuinely surprised, in fact, that appeals to artists for donations actually work… but I know from asking around in researching this blog post that they definitely do. My theory is that we’re sensitive to organizations needing money because we usually need money ourselves, so we know what it feels like.

Ultimately, I’ve decided that except in rare instances, an arts organization really ought not to be asking for donations from artists unless there’s clearly a special connection at play. This has only been true, incidentally, of a small number of the requests I’ve gotten. In many instances, in fact, I’ve received requests from theaters I’ve never worked with at all: those to whom I submitted plays for consideration, who really ought to be embarrassed for emailing me to ask for money.

Even when a strong bond exists between an artist and an arts organization, however, the solicitation ought to at least acknowledge the nature of the request, and the appeal level ought to be set appropriately low: don’t ask for ten thousand bucks, in other words, when you only paid me three hundred for our last project. And when that strong bond doesn’t exist? I think it’s wise to avoid blurring the line between a social relationship and a market relationship, which does us all harm.

Finally, I think it’s worth noting that we should probably be reaching outside our own artistic networks for support anyway. After all, we’re not making theater for each other… or if we are, we shouldn’t be. We’re making it for other people, and it’s those other people from whom we should be asking for donations. (Heck: as long as we provide them with stories and experiences they value, they should be glad to offer financial support.) It’s perhaps more difficult, I realize… but it just makes sense.

There are times I wish I was a social scientist. Nothing answers a question as definitely, for me, as evidence-based reasoning. Unfortunately, when it comes to curtain speeches and their ability to actually convince audience members to silence their cell phones, we largely seem to be working from received wisdom instead. We give the same speeches we’ve always given – “Please take a minute to silence your cell phones,” or a variation thereof – rather than experimenting to determine whether other approaches might get better results.

Let’s imagine a year-long test, conducted at perhaps a dozen theaters around the country.  Three different curtain speeches could be recorded – one with a fairly nondescript message, one with a more aggressive message, and one with a Southwest Airlines style comedic message – then played an equal number of times at each theater. The number of cell phone rings could be tallied throughout the season, and then we’d know with a bit more certainty which approach worked more effectively.

It’s not hard to imagine similar experiments, either, designed to answer a variety of related questions. Is the curtain speech more effective at getting audience members to silence their cell phones when the person giving the speech is holding a cell phone as a prop? How does a curtain speech compare with no curtain speech at all? Do certain audience profiles – older or younger, for example – respond differently to different message styles?

Then, of course, there are important questions that could be asked about the other needs that are typically met (or that could be met) by curtain speeches. Often they’re used to thank donors for their contributions… but in thanking generous patrons, what effects are we having (if any) on the rest of the house? Often curtain speeches serve as an opportunity to sell patrons on season ticket packages or tickets to future shows – the theatrical equivalent, in some ways, of the advertising that certain movie chains screen in their theaters before the feature film begins. By introducing a sales message at that moment, are we changing how audiences respond to what they subsequently see on stage?

I’m certain there are many anecdotes and traditions that speak to all of these questions… but anecdotes and traditions don’t make for hard evidence, and hard evidence is necessary for reasoned conclusions.

Have there been any studies? Does anyone know a good sociologist or behavioral economist with a passion for theater who might like to do a few? I’m sure we’d all be smarter for the effort. Heck, if all we do is reduce the number of cell phones that ring during critical theatrical moments, won’t that be reward enough?

My last 2AMT post – on civil discourse around the subject of pricing – generated a great deal of lively commentary.  While some of what was said flirted with the gray area between “passionate” and “heated” – the former I consider intense and devoted, the latter inflammatory and aggressive – there were a great many compelling questions asked.  Late in the discussion, Mike Daisey asked me to share my thoughts about one matter in particular, and initially I demurred.  After some consideration and consultation, I’ve decided to share my thoughts.

The issue he asked me to respond to was whether it’s a false dichotomy to say that theaters have to choose between keeping ticket prices low and paying artists well.  Isn’t it possible, it was argued — not by Mike, but by another commenter — to raise funds from other sources instead?

The short answer is that yes, it is a false dichotomy, and yes, it is possible raise funds from other sources in order to keep ticket prices low and still pay artists well. It’s been done: that’s how we know it can be. But I’m not sure it’s the best possible route for theaters to take.

To explain the reasoning behind this speculation, I want to introduce a hopefully simple formula. (I know – you didn’t expect to have to do math.) The variables in the formula include all the possible sources of funding for non-profit theaters:

A — Corporate
B — Government
C — Individual donors
D — Ticket sales
E — Other non-profits
F — Revenue from other activities (concessions, souvenir sales, etc.)

Those six sources need to provide the resources necessary to make theater, which brings us to the formula:

A + B + C + D + E + F = X, where X stands for a non-profit theater’s budget.

For the sake of this discussion, we can immediately simplify this formula further in two ways.  First, we can eliminate F – revenue from other theater activities – from our consideration, since the number is typically so small as to amount to a rounding error in a theater’s budget.  (Surely there are ways to increase F, but we can discuss those – and perhaps should – in another 2AMT post.)

Next, we can turn our attention to E – other non-profits, a category that includes everything from foundations to advocacy organizations.  The money that comes to theaters from E was itself originally raised from other sources – typically, corporations, government entities, and individual donors.  In other words, E = A + B + C, just one step removed.  So we can also eliminate E from our equation as well, at least mathematically.  There may be room to quibble here, but again, let’s save the quibbling for another discussion.

The resulting equation is the one I’m going to consider:

A + B + C + D = X, where X stands for a non-profit theater’s budget

Naturally, for any given theater, A, B, C, and D aren’t equivalent in how much they contribute to X. For the theater I sit on the board of, for example, the mix looks something like this: A = 0%, B = 0%, C = 35%, and D = 20%; the other 45% comes from E, which (for our purposes here) is composed of some measure of A, B, and C.  I expect the mix is quite different for, say, Arena Stage.  I’ve seen data that suggest the percentage for category D (ticket sales) is often as high as 40%.

There are also variations, I understand, from country to country.  In Europe, for example, X contains a far higher percentage of B (government funding) than it does in America.  Many of us – and by us, I mean my fellow big-time lefty liberals (I might as well admit my biases) – wish we had what they have.  I’ve come to think it’s not so simple.

The criticism of too much government funding of theater, for example, is that we’d end up having, well, government-approved theater: nothing that threatens the state, nothing very adventurous, etc. After all, they’d have some sense of ownership, wouldn’t they? The same might be said of corporate donations. Personally, the thought of big businesses “owning” theater frightens me even worse.  I have a similar concern about individual donations; I don’t want America’s owning class “owning” the stories we tell, either.  (If donations were always – or even very often – small and from large numbers of diverse donors, I’d have less concern).

On the other hand, I don’t want to do without A, B, and C either.  I want X to be bigger, after all, not smaller. I also think there are positive reasons to want support from all three of those sources.  I want my tax dollars to support the arts; I want corporate profit to be funneled toward social good; I want America’s well-to-do to put their resources toward theater. The best way, then, to make sure that no one of those sources has too great a stake in any one theater’s budget? Let them all contribute as equally as possible.

So that leaves D – ticket sales.  And at this point, I’m going to turn the conversation back to values, because that was the premise of my previous post: that the most civil and rational way to discuss pricing models is to begin with an ethical discussion.

One of the values I hold – that I think many of us hold – is that no one should be turned out of a theater for lack of enough money.  Another value I believe most of us share is fair compensation for artists. Finally, a third value: I believe we all agree that audiences should be engaged by and with the theaters they visit.  (Again, I’m willing to debate and discuss those values… in another 2AMT post.)

The first of these values explains why some of us advocate so strongly for low ticket prices. If ticket prices are low, however, that comes with quite a cost.  To return to the equation above, if D is lower, then X has to be lower as well. If X is lower, however, then we run counter to the second value: fair compensation.  Thus we arrive at the seeming false dichotomy with which I began this post: that lowering ticket prices means lowering artist salaries.

The solution seems clear, then, given my equation: to keep X the same while lowering D, you simply have to raise A, B, and C, as some have suggested. But I believe that comes with a significant cost.

Assume for the moment that we could lower D to $0 – that we could make all tickets free. If we did, wouldn’t theater become inherently one-way? Wouldn’t any given show become, in essence, a gift given by A, B, and C – corporations, the government, and individual donors – to audiences?  How much would audiences value theater if it was just given to them? I don’t think that’s a recipe for long-term engagement, and I believe there are significant volumes of economics research to substantiate that claim.

When audiences pay for their tickets, they invest in the theater.  Language fails me here – it’s inevitably capitalistic; perhaps it would be better to say they’re active participants in the creation of theater, given that their resources are directly supporting it. They have a share. And the more that their share is balanced in comparison to the shares contributed by corporations, the government, and individuals, the more empowered those audiences will be. And that speaks to the third value: audience engagement.

So there’s an argument to be made for keeping D (revenue from ticket sales) low in order to live up to the first value, accessibility.   There’s also an argument to be made to keep D high in order to live up to our second and third values, fair compensation and audience engagement. So, how do we reconcile the two positions?

The only way I believe we can reconcile them is to increase the money that theaters make from ticket sales, in total, while still keeping most ticket prices low enough to allow people without resources to come through the door.  Practically speaking, however: how do we do that?

First, we could tie ticket prices magically to each audience member’s wherewithal: if you can pay more, you pay more, and if you can’t, you don’t.  Since we don’t have real-time access to balance sheets and bank accounts at every ticket point-of-purchase, it just isn’t practical.

Second, we could allow audience members to choose their own ticket prices, either before or after the show. I love that idea, in theory. It would make us, as theater practitioners, even more responsible than we already are to tell stories that people value.  If I ran a theater, I would love to hitch my wagon to this star.  It does, however, subvert capitalism – and while I honestly believe that if anyone can do that, it’s creative people like us, I also think it’s a long, hard mountain to climb. (There’s also probably very complex psychology involved in the resulting payment behaviors – psychology I’m not prepared, at this moment, to parse.)

Third, there’s that often-vilified two-word phrase: dynamic pricing. While dynamic pricing can be implemented in many different ways – and is often implemented in what amount to very greedy ways by corporations – I don’t believe it’s inherently evil… at least, not any more than a shovel is evil. Like any tool, it can be used poorly or constructively; to ignore that fact is to view it in a rather shallow way. I’d like to focus on the more positive possibilities.

The way dynamic pricing gets used by non-profit theaters, as I understand it, is to offer lower ticket prices to those who buy their tickets early, penalizing those who buy later in a run.  Given that procrastination knows (I believe) no class preference, and given that dynamic pricing doesn’t preclude discounts for other reasons (student tickets, rush tickets, and so on), that seems rather fair to me.  (Heck, those who don’t procrastinate and get their tickets at the early prices can put the savings toward babysitters or dinner before the show.)

One complaint about dynamic pricing seems to be that it means people sitting side-by-side in a theater will have paid different prices for their tickets… but given the different price points for single tickets, group tickets, subscription packages, student rates, senior discounts, and more – not to mention the varying costs of seats in different sections of the house – isn’t that the case already?

A second concern about dynamic pricing is that it seems to be motivated by greed: that it’s really a profit-driven exercise in disguise. I don’t even think this is true for corporations, frankly. I think the last available seat for the last performance of the play you want to see (or the flight you want to be on) is a lot more valuable to you – and thus worth paying a higher price for – than the many seats that were open during the first week of the run (or the plane tickets you could have purchased months in advance). Scarcity always increases desirability.

Aha, you say! Only the well-off can afford those last few seats, so we’ve run counter to our first value of accessibility. Not true, however – not if other discounts remain available even for those last few seats, just as airlines will offer bereavement fares even on last-minute airline tickets.

A third concern seems to be that dynamic pricing is somehow sneaky… but must it be? Couldn’t a theater be entirely up front in telling audiences what it’s doing? Transparency would give patrons control over their ticket-buying fates – and, in fact, might help remove some of the obfuscation surrounding subscription rates, package deals, and group plans. After all, the goal in selling tickets for a non-profit theater isn’t, obviously, profit, which is the only reason that businesses confuse consumers about prices.

Finally, one last comment about D – the revenue from ticket sales. In the end, isn’t it true that we’d all really like theater to be so essential to people’s lives that they’d be willing to spend more and more money for it? For a subscription to a theater to mean as much as, say, a cable subscription? For my money – pun intended – I don’t consider it a useful goal to keep ticket prices low, in and of themselves. My goal is to make theater so essential that everyone “has” to have it the way they have to have, say, HBO, then make sure they can afford it. That might, in the end, make ticket prices even higher than they are now, if you think about it.

Before I consider the equation balanced, however, I have to look not only at the left side, but the right side: that great big X that stands for a theater’s budget. One objection raised in the conversation about my other post was that theaters should be reducing non-artist expenditures to help keep ticket prices low. To this exception I can only say: perhaps. I’ve written before about my belief that theaters may be devoting too much attention to putting polish on their work – that a few rough edges and a bit more simplicity would make theater more accessible for audiences. Would a change like that reduce budgets? Perhaps a bit. Am I prepared to go further than that? In an age in which people are losing jobs all over the country and work in the country’s creative economy is hard to come by, no, I’m not.

So, I believe that addresses the question Mike wanted me to answer, but let me make my response crystal clear: yes, it’s a false dichotomy to suggest that we either raise ticket prices or fail to pay artists properly; we can, in fact, raise other funds to offset the costs.  Ultimately, however, I just don’t think it’s the right idea. We can, and should, do better.

Why is it so difficult to discuss how we price tickets?

I want to note right away that I’m not asking why we struggle to SET ticket prices; for very good thinking about pricing, I suggest you read through Trisha Mead’s posts on the subject. I’m asking why we struggle to TALK about setting ticket prices.

In his very thought-provoking book Predictably Irrational, behavioral economist Dan Ariely tells an instructive story about the AARP that I think begins to answer this question.

A few years ago, the AARP tried to solicit lawyers to offer their services at deeply discounted rates – $30 an hour, to be exact – to help retirees. No dice. When the AARP subsequently asked lawyers to donate their time, however, there was suddenly great interest. Not exactly rational on the lawyers’ part, no?

Ariely explains that in both instances, the lawyers were being asked to be part of the social contract: to do good for the sake of doing good. In the former instance, however, there was also a small market element at play as well. As has been shown quite exhaustively in behavioral economics research, he illustrates, the presence of market norms in an exchange or relationship significantly undermines (if not destroys) the effect of social norms.

A quick definition of terms: social norms are the touchy-feely, largely-unwritten rules that govern the ways in which we live together as human beings; market norms, by contrast, are the rules that govern the ways in which we transact business.

As theater practitioners, we live in a world in which social norms predominate and market norms are seen as vulgar and distasteful.  This is because our art relies on social norms to function; as Ariely makes clear, market norms obliterate social norms; therefore, we are instinctively afraid to bring market norms into our theaters.

The conversation about pricing would seem, on the surface, to require an engagement with market norms. That’s why we get anxious when we talk about it. We don’t want to harm what really matters to us.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Instead of using market norms to talk about, think about, and determine pricing, we can use social norms.

For example, instead of commodifying seats – as in “How do we sell seats?” – we can think about the services we provide, and the value we receive in exchange for those services.  Instead of talking about “pricing models,” we can talk about rewarding loyalty and discouraging unwanted behaviors.

If we do that, I believe we’ll find that we have more in common than we realize.

We all want our work to be seen by lots of people. We all want lasting, valuable relationships with our audiences. We all want people to value the work we do very highly. And we all want everyone who wants to see our work to be able to see it.

Most importantly, we all want the prices that people pay for their tickets to represent the value they find in the work, modulated by what they can afford.

(Note, for the record, that none of the above desires or values are solely the province of not-for-profit theater; they apply equally well to commercial theater, too.)

Once we acknowledge our common ground, the conversation should become easier. Decisions about what pricing models will make our shared vision manifest might still be complicated – again, I refer you to Trisha Mead for clarity – but they shouldn’t be heated.

I want to start by asking a simple question: what plays would get produced if artistic directors were only allowed to select from anonymously-submitted blind scripts?

What if, in other words, artistic directors had to choose plays without knowing the names of the people who’d written them – or their genders, their ages, their races, or whether they had  MFAs or not (let alone where those MFAs were earned)?

Whose plays would get produced?

Before you answer, let me paraphrase a story from Malcolm Gladwell’s very compelling and much-discussed book Blink.

For many years, the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra was a no-girls-allowed he-man club. They literally didn’t have even a single female musician. In fact, they didn’t even audition female performers out of a misinformed belief that men were – get this – inherently better musicians: a belief that, sadly, used to be prevalent at orchestras around the world.

One day, however, they accidentally invited a woman named Abbie Conant to audition. It was a clerical error that quickly got out of hand.

As it happened, because one of the other candidates they were auditioning was a relative of the conductor, they seated each performer behind a screen so that nobody knew who was who – which meant, of course, that nobody knew Abbie was a woman when she did her thing.

Her audition was a rousing success – so much so that the evidently-misogynist conductor, upon hearing her play, cancelled the remaining auditions: “That’s it,” he announced very loudly, “We have found our new orchestra member.  Send everyone else home.”

The resulting conflict – which took years and untold legal fees to resolve – completely transformed not only the Munich Philharmonic, but the entire classical music sphere. More and more, orchestras began to adopt the behind-a-screen audition process, and in short order – a couple of decades – every orchestra who used it became gender-balanced. The “men are better musicians” theory was dead.

So… back to plays and playwrights.

A great deal of attention has been paid of late – and rightfully so – to the fact that plays by men vastly outnumber plays by women on Broadway (and elsewhere). What do you think would happen to that balance if scripts were always considered without names attached to them?

The question could be asked about ethnicity as well, couldn’t it? And maybe even age? Or how about city of residence? What if an artistic director had no idea whether a particular playwright lived in New York or in Hays, Kansas?

Thanks to Outrageous Fortune, we learned about a significant bias toward the work of playwrights who have emerged from a small subset of the country’s MFA programs. Do you think their work would be produced as often as it is if it had to be submitted blindly?

I suspect, without knowing for sure, that things would change significantly… and for the better. Work would be judged on its own merits. More stories by women playwrights and playwrights of color would enter our national dialogue, which would be an immeasurable gain. Playwrights would make different decisions about which MFA programs to enter – and whether to enter them at all.

So why doesn’t every theater start doing this right now? What are they afraid of? Are there case studies from theaters that have tried blind submissions that would illustrate how they worked? Are there any problems that need to be considered?

Why shouldn’t we transform our industry, the way the world’s orchestras seem to have transformed theirs? What are we waiting for?

David J. Loehr’s recent post about warming up an audience with a trailer has put me in mind of another way to extend the theatrical experience that I’ve been thinking about for some time.

A few years ago, the Intentional Theatre Group commissioned me to write a short play for the Midtown International Theatre Festival.  The IT Group had decided to produce Daniel McIvor’s NEVER SWIM ALONE, but his (terrific) play wasn’t long enough to fill their festival slot.  Rather than abandon the extra minutes, they asked me to think about McIvor’s work, let it inspire me, and then write whatever came to my mind in response, with the caveat that I only had so many minutes to play with.  (I think it was 20.)

The resulting evening of theater was wildly successful.  The IT Group earned Best Production from the festival, and the woman who starred in my solo one-act – CRACKED – won Best Supporting Actress.  Critical plaudits aside, my impression is that audiences really enjoyed the contrasting stories.  It gave patrons more to think and talk about after the evening was over, and it also created a sense of surplus: having purchased a ticket to see only one show, they were nonetheless granted a chance to see two.

What the evening brought to my mind were the short subjects that used to accompany virtually every movie shown in every theater in the world, even as recently as my early childhood: newsreels, cartoons, or sometimes short features – and sometimes more than one of the above.  These were high-quality pieces of art, at least some of the time, and in some cases they were even more entertaining than the full-length features they preceded.  They were certainly worth getting to the movies early for – unlike the insipid advertisements and movie trivia we’re forced to sit through today.

What I’ve been wondering ever since that festival is why theaters don’t do the same thing.  How hard would it be to stage a short curtain raiser – ten minutes or so – before the show begins?  Let’s think first about what would make it difficult, and imagine a few ways around the problems.

Obstacles Become Opportunities

First, there’s the question of resources: producing a second play would tax a theater’s already stretched budget.  Rights, a set, salaries, and so on – as we all know, it adds up quickly.

But what if the rights question weren’t really that intimidating?  Personally, I’d settle for a small figure to have one of my short plays produced that way – I did, in fact, with the IT Group.  What young playwright wouldn’t think of the opportunity as a way to get her work out in front of an audience – a stepping stone toward production of a full-length?  In the months since the end of the Midtown International Theater Festival, furthermore, CRACKED has since gone on to two other productions, one in Chicago, another (forthcoming) in the Minneapolis area.  Opportunities abound.

Think of the possibilities with regard to scenic design, too.  Naturally, you wouldn’t want to make use – at least not always – of whatever set the full-length play would require… but what if curtain-raisers were written (again, as mine was) to require minimal-if-any sets?  Again, costs would be minimal… and the constraints might actually inspire great creativity.

As for salaries: is it that much of a stretch to imagine that the cast and crew for the full-length might just consider the curtain-raiser just, you know, an extra scene to memorize/block/direct/light/and so on?  And not ask for a bigger paycheck?  Okay, perhaps it is… but maybe the unions in question might be willing to be flexible, at least somewhat, if only to offer additional creative opportunities for their members.  I can imagine the curtain-raiser being cast, for example, from among the actors playing smaller roles in the evening’s full-length.

While I may be pipe-dreaming here, I do maintain that there are always inventive ways to overcome resource limitations.  And if I am pipe-dreaming… so what?  So we raise more money to cover the costs of the curtain-raiser.  If we give our audiences more, they’re likely to show up in larger numbers… so maybe increased ticket sales would help offset the costs.

(There’s a future post in there somewhere, BTW – I fear we have a culture of scarcity in the theater.  What if we inculcated a sense of abundance instead?  Sigh…)

So what do folks think?  Is this a serious possibility to be considered?  Are there obstacles I haven’t thought of?  Has anyone tried this recently?  If so, what was it like?

The Washington, DC area loves Shakespeare.  I’m not sure I can say why, exactly – perhaps he’s the most bi-partisan playwright – but the facts are indisputable.  Year after year, the Shakespeare Theatre Company, the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, the Folger Theatre, and the Washington Shakespeare Company, among others, put the Big Bad Bard front and center, and a fat handful of other companies take a whack at him for a play or two, too.  His work is so prominent you’d think his face was on the one dollar bill. (Maybe even a little too prominent, but that’s a subject for another #2amt post.)

Most of what the nation’s capitol sees are fairly safe (if often very high-quality) interpretations, but we do have our share of out-there, experimental productions, too.  In recent seasons, for example, we’ve had an extra-gorey Titus, a radio play version of Merchant, a movement-based adaptation of Midsummer, and two different versions of Macbeth: one with an all-naked cast and one with illusions designed by none other than the great Teller himself.  You can definitely get your iambic pentameter served up any way you like it.

For my money, however, nobody quite lights the folios on fire like the Taffety Punk Theatre Company.  (Full disclosure: I’m a member of the board, as well as a playwright whose work the company has produced several times; they also commissioned me to write a new prologue to Cardenio Found, a little-known possibly-written-by-Shakespeare relic.)  They’re doing things no other Shakes-centric company in the area seems to be doing; the past two seasons, for example, they’ve staged all-female productions of Romeo and Juliet and Measure for Measure strong enough to make you forget the performers’ genders three minutes in.

None of the company’s work is quite as audacious, however, as its annual one-night-only Bootleg Shakespeare production.  Here’s the drill: actors are cast, they learn all their lines on their own, and they gather the day of the show to rehearse for a whopping six hours or so before the show goes up.   The show’s director stays on book during the performance – the actors call for lines maybe a dozen or so times at most – and blocking is… well, let’s call it organic.  The company makes use of whatever set is already on the Folger Theatre’s stage, improvises costumes and props at the last minute, and relies on the simplest light and sound cues imaginable.  It’s nothing short of acrobatic.

Most impressive, however, is the fact that it all comes together brilliantly, which is largely a testament to the skill of the thirty or more performers with the talent and daring to pull it off.  Every year the event (which is ticketed, but free) earns the company riotous standing ovations, high critical praise, and standing-room-only houses.   (Last year, 30 or so people had to be turned away at the door.)  It just plain WORKS for everyone involved.

But why?

At least part of the event’s tremendous appeal is the derring-do of the whole thing, to be sure.  Everyone likes to watch high-flying maneuvers performed without (much of) a net.  But the Bootleg is a great deal more than a gimmick: it’s damn fine work, and it’s radically different than the typical Shakespearian rag we see in DC.  Its rawness is what sets it apart; the shows are distinguished by their lack of polish.  Most of the city’s shows are thoroughly rehearsed, carefully costumed, brilliantly lit jewels – or, if they aren’t, they’re at least trying to be.  The Taffety Punks, by contrast, are made of rougher stuff: coal instead of diamonds.  Yes, diamonds sparkle… but coal ignites.

The secret of the Bootleg’s success is that the company’s ever-growing audience genuinely prefers a less “perfectly” constructed theatrical experience.  The flaws in the shows – if you want to call them that – really are quite minor (an incident with a missing dead body in Cymbeline notwithstanding), but they’re enough to make Shakespeare’s epic scale more human, more accessible.  Taffety Punk shows aren’t meant to sit on a shelf like museum pieces – they’re to be handled, used, tossed around, chewed on, and lived with.

Frankly, I think we could all use a lot more theater like that: productions that focus less on achieving the perfect illusory qualities – the right scenic design or sound design, the perfect beat between two uttered lines – and more on the urgency and importance of the story being told.  I honestly don’t believe that the audiences we aren’t reaching (but would like to) give a damn about the nuances we care about – the Taffety Punk audiences are among the youngest and most non-traditional in the city, I hasten to note – and we’d probably do our work a lot more light-heartedly if we stopped sweating the small stuff.  Besides: the play IS the thing after all, isn’t it?  (And by “play” I mean the script, of course, not the production.)

So what if we stopped worrying about buying the best material for our costumes, scrounging the budget for an extra week of rehearsal time, or pouring money into some visual effect only a few audience members are likely to even notice?  What if we stopped focusing on what we don’t have, or absolutely need to have, and started putting our energy into just making it happen, earnestly and with complete dedication, no matter what resources we have?

I think we’d all be Taffety Punks.  That’s what I think.  And that’s a very fine thing to be.

What do you think of when you think of the word brand?  Do you think, first and foremost, of a logo?  The swirled “G” of the Guthrie Theatre?  The lowercase red-and-white “tkts” next to the discount booths in New York, or the lowercase white “tcg” – inside an orange circle – associated with the Theatre Communications Group?  How about the big blue box with the white-lettered 2AMt inside it over there on the upper left of the screen right now?

If what you think of when you think of the word brand is a logo, you’re in good company – that’s what most people think of.  This is, however, a misperception – it comes from the notion of “branding” cattle.  But a brand isn’t a logo. A logo can represent a brand, but a brand is a different thing entirely.

So… what is a brand?  What do we mean when we use the word brand?  What are we referring to?

There are two definitions that I find particularly useful:

1)      A brand is the promise that an organization (or individual) makes to everyone it (or he or she) interacts with about its (or his or her) core essence.

2)      A brand is the way in which others perceive and experience your core essence.

The fact that there are different definitions of brand – there are far, far more than these two, though they all get at the same idea – speaks to the confusion that exists around the concept.  Understanding brand, however, is too important to the vitality and success of theaters and theater professionals, so we march on in search of greater clarity.

Brand as a Promise

When Walt Disney began drawing cartoons, he couldn’t have had any idea of the extent to which the Disney brand would flourish throughout the world.  (Stop for a second.  When you just read the words “Disney brand,” did you think of mouse ears?  That’s not the Disney brand – that’s an old Disney logo.)  All Walt was doing was pouring his heart and imagination into creating a family of fun characters… but that very essence has grown beyond Mickey Mouse to become the Disney brand.

Let me repeat some of that last sentence, this time with a new emphasis: “All Walt was doing was pouring his heart and imagination into creating a family of fun characters.”  Over time, those four italicized words have come to form the essence of Disney: heart, imagination, family, and fun.  Those words make up most of Disney’s brand attributes: the essence of what the Disney brand stands for.

Disney takes this essence very seriously.  It’s why they’ve been so tremendously successful at almost everything they do.  Whenever they think about making a decision – any decision, big or small – they ask themselves whether the decision would reflect their brand attributes.  When they design a new theme park ride, they do it in such a way as to minimize waiting in line, because waiting isn’t fun.  When they decided to offer domestic partner benefits to Disney employees (many years ahead of the rest of the country), it was because they believe in family.  And whenever they change their logo – from the old Mickey Mouse ears to the new script-font Disney – they ask themselves whether the new design reflects those attributes as well.

So, a brand is made up of attributes… and a brand is a promise to live up to those attributes in every single interaction between an organization and its constituents.  We call it a promise because failure to live up to those attributes, especially after they’ve been long established in constituents’ minds, is emotionally tantamount to the breaking of a promise.  A promise is a sacred thing – it must be kept, because once broken, it can be hard to restore.  As stewards of theatrical brands, we should all take this seriously.

For example: if a theater’s brand attributes are, say, preservation and intelligence and quality, it would make perfect sense for that theater to produce nothing but Shakespeare, and to do it well.  If the same theater tore down the façade of its well-architected 1920s Art Deco building and replaced it with cheap brick, however, or fired long-tenured employees with great institutional knowledge and replaced them with low-paid interns to save money, those would be broken promises, and they would undermine our ability to trust that brand ever again.

Note that this doesn’t mean you always have to do the same work.  The 3M company used to make scotch tape; then they invented Post-It notes; now they offer a range of products and services that would literally make your head spin – but all along they’ve continued to stand for innovation and security, and the attributes of the 3M brand haven’t changed.  A theater that produced nothing but imploded and reconfigured folk narratives and fables (whatever that means – I just made it up) could start producing mash-ups of classic musicals and anime (made that up, too) and still be manifesting the same brand attribute of reinvention.

Brand as Perception

The sad fact about brand – the thing that calls most type A control freaks, which (let’s face it) many of us are – is that it isn’t what we say it is… it’s what others say it is.

You work and you work and you work… but if your constituents don’t think you’re getting it right, you aren’t getting it right.  If your audiences see you as stodgy, you are stodgy… even if you think of yourself as forward-thinking.  And you probably are behaving in a stodgy way, too, or they wouldn’t be thinking that – because when it comes to brand, reality becomes perception… and perception is reality.  The qualities that people ascribe to you (positive and negative) are called legacy brand associations, and the only thing you can do to change them is to start behaving differently: to live up to the positive attributes you want to associate your brand with, over and over for a long time, and let the perceptions correct eventually themselves.

A brief case study… actually, more like a cautionary tale.  I think we all fear that our art form is increasingly perceived as irrelevant by the general populace.  Another way to say this is that the theater brand is suffering from a negative legacy brand association: irrelevant.  Among the many ways we might change our behavior to address this perception is to engage with our constituents on the communication channels they increasingly prefer – namely, social media.  As such, a great many theaters have begun marketing their work on Facebook and (to a lesser extent) Twitter – what better way to seem relevant, no?

Unfortunately, most theaters have actually been making the problem worse – perhaps because they failed to see it as a brand problem in the first place.  The social media space is about conversation – about engaging in a two-way dialogue that asks questions, connects, gathers feedback.  By simply “inviting” people to performances, sharing news about upcoming productions, making season announcements, and tooting their own horns about positive reviews, by contrast, what many theaters are doing is tantamount to talking, but not listening.  They’re missing the point of the most far-reaching social innovation of our time.  How that for irrelevant?  (Thankfully, TCG is doing a pretty fine job, so far, of getting it pretty close to right – if you want to see what I’m talking about, just “like” American Theatre magazine on Facebook and you’ll see.)

Brand Is for Everybody

Everything I’ve said so far has been oriented toward institutions… but it’s equally applicable to individuals as well.  You, as a theater practitioner, have a brand.  You have brand attributes; you make a promise to the people you work with about your core essence.  If you’re a playwright, like me, the nature of your work speaks volumes about that essence… but so does the way you communicate about your work, and interact with your collaborators, and support your peers.  If you’re a lighting designer or director or actor, the same things hold true.

If you break your brand promise, you can generate negative legacy brand impressions you’ll have to work to overcome.  Does this sound like reputation?  In many ways, it’s the same… but it’s also not the same, either.  Reputation is about people liking you.  Brand promise is about people knowing you, whether they like you or not – believing that you always remain consistent to your core values, even if one of those value is, say, brashness or directness or crudeness.

Those of us who are independent theater professionals are independent business owners (of businesses with one employee each).  We are the stewards of our own brands.  In a moment of self-reflection, as you start to think about yourself in this way, ask yourself what your ideal brand attributes are.  Develop a list of four to seven adjectives you want people to associate with the essence of you.  Keep them in mind when you’re talking about your work… creating your work… updating your resume… building yourself a website… writing a blog post… rehearsing… having coffee with a playwright or an AD or a costume designer you might like to work with… and so on.  And then be true to them.

Closing

Unfortunately, brand is still a bit more complicated than I’ve made it seem here.  We could talk about a great many exercises you can use to determine your brand, and several analyses you can perform to make sure you’re making that brand manifest in everything you do… but I hope this serves as a useful introduction that will get folks thinking about brand and beginning to sharpen the brand-inspired decisions they make.

I leave you now with a video I found on Twitter recently – one that I think represents an organization making its brand manifest in a fun way.  (And one that illustrates how marketing is really all about changing brand perception… but that’s a post for another day.)

When you think of Volkswagen, what do you think of?  What brand attributes?  Let me propose a few: freedom, delight, zip, evolution, simplicity. Does that get close to it?  Those are words I’d ascribe not only to the Volkswagen Beetle, but also to the company’s long track record of advertising and the social relevance it earned in the 1960s and 70s.  In any event… how well do you think they apply to this?

As we start thinking about ways to promote ourselves as artists and as theaters, that’s the way we should be thinking.  Not “What designer should I get to do my new poster?” or “What should I include in this cover letter?” but “What can I do to act as a steward of my brand?” and “How can I express my brand promise to the world?”  Not that we all need to go into metro and subway stations and build sliding boards, mind you.  (For those of you who didn’t click the last link, that’s what the video depicted.)  We just need to focus on brand first and foremost – and keep our brand attributes in mind no matter what marketing strategies we employ.

Disruptive technology and disruptive innovation are terms used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically by being lower priced or designed for a different set of consumers.

– Wikipedia

I think the world of new play development is ready for some disruption.

Like everyone here, I’m assuming, I’ve read Outrageous Fortune with the same mix of resignation and melancholy, wondering whether the rift between artistic directors and playwrights can ever be healed, whether the practice of developing new plays for the American stage is dying a slow death, whether audiences can ever be lured back to the theater in greater numbers.

Naturally, I’ve pondered these things from the perspective of the playwright, because that’s what I am… but I’ve taken to heart the admonishment to look beyond myself, to think about these struggles as systematic.  The things playwrights have been asking for over and over again just aren’t getting it done; the things artistic directors want from us aren’t working, either.  Audiences still feel, I think, like we don’t hear them, like we aren’t telling the stories they want to see, like we aren’t serving them well enough to entice them to buy tickets.  Yes, there are exceptions, but in the main, we are still struggling… and struggling to make a living while we do it.

Lately, I’ve begun thinking about the ways in which radically new technologies can completely change the ways in which we live.  We tend to be a bit technophobic, sometimes, in theater, but technology has great transformative power.  Here’s just one example, from what you might imagine would be the slowest-moving government bureaucracy in the country: the DMV for the enormous state of California.  Thanks to Twitter, you can now “tweet” your questions to the DMV’s help desk and get answers in real-time, rather than the hours it used to take; thanks to YouTube, you can now watch driver’s ed videos online and qualify to earn your license in days rather than months.  If technology can revolutionize those things — if it can fix the DMV — it can do anything.

Yes, I know… technology and the DMV is one thing, but technology and new play development?  Believe me, I know it sounds strange… but the revolution is possible.  I can think of several places we could start.

Script Submissions

Let’s begin with how technology could completely revolutionize play submissions… since that, in some ways, is where the new play development process begins.

It sometimes seems to playwrights as if there are as many different varieties of query packet as there are theaters.  One theater wants a ten-page sample, another wants to see fifteen pages, another wants to see the whole script; one wants a short synopsis, one wants an in-depth synopsis, and one wants nothing at all.  There are always going to be theaters that are going to insist they need special components… but what if playwrights began to coalesce around what WE decided a standard query packet consisted of?  And what if, rather than printing and binding and mailing a new packet every time we needed to send one out, there was – here’s the disruptive technology – a database-driven website that would allow playwrights to upload the relevant materials and flag them for particular artistic directors to review?

Here’s the vision: you finish writing your script, you’ve been through whatever development processes you feel are necessary, and you’re ready to share it with the world.  You upload the script to the site, along with (say) a ten-page sample, a synopsis, a description of the play’s development history, a character breakdown, and so on.  At this point, any artistic director can choose to read your script, sorting through all the possibilities by subject matter, genre, full-length vs. one-act, and so on.  Likewise, you – as the playwright – can flag a certain script to be submitted, electronically, to a given theater (assuming the theater has agreed to accept un-agented submissions)… with the click of a button.

How much would you pay for a service like that?  Assuming it would save you the time and money involved in submissions not only for theaters, but for contests and residencies as well?

Yes, there are issues that would need to be resolved.  How would a theater prevent itself from being overrun with submissions?  (The ability to “opt out” from a given playwright’s submissions?  A limit on the number of submissions per month each playwright could make?)  How would we encourage both playwrights and theaters to adopt a system like this?  (How did anyone encourage most of the world to adopt Facebook?)  Who pays to build the thing in the first place, and who keeps it going? (A non-profit organization of some kind, either new or existing?)

Before you dismiss the idea, consider the fact that a solution very much like this – the nascent iScripts project – is currently in development.  I really believe it’s possible.

Commissions

To build on the idea above: what if instead of uploading finished scripts, playwrights simply uploaded proposals for commissions?  These could consist simply of beautifully-worded descriptions of the plays we want to write, or they could include everything from sample dialogue to suggested commission structures.  Naturally, the contents would have to be copyright-protected as necessary… and maybe only accessible by those with usernames and passwords for the system in question.

These “rough sketches” would be reviewable by artistic directors, who would be able to find stories they’d be interested in developing for their audiences – thus, perhaps, beginning to bridge the artistic director/playwright/audience divide. They might also be tied to Kickstarter-style campaigns that would allow playwrights to do direct fundraising for commissions themselves… and eliminate the need for an artistic director’s interest (and resources) before getting started.

Season Planning

To take the concept one step further: what if we stopped asking artistic directors to plan a season by themselves and started asking audiences directly to share their thoughts about what plays they wanted to see?

The model here is a service called Eventful, which allows users to “demand” appearances by their favorite performers in a variety of genres in their local areas.  What if we had a similar system for the theater, tied into the database-driven site I’ve been describing so far?

What if the audience members for Regional Theater A could “demand” a new play by Playwright B for the 2011-2012 season?  What if they could actually read a description of that play, or a ten-page sample of dialogue, on the site – and what if, being so moved by the story, they could simply click a link to suggest the play to an artistic director?  In time, when a particular play or playwright (or even genre) had enough interest, the artistic director in question would almost be guaranteed an audience.  It would be hard not to make that programming decision… or, more accurately, to let the theater’s audience make it.

Or, alternately, artistic directors could assume a semi-curatorial role.  What if they were to select, say, 25 plays from this increasingly feature-rich site I’ve been describing, post links to their profiles on their theaters’ home pages, then let their audience members vote directly on which plays from the 25 they are most interested in seeing?  Audiences could even comment on the particular choices, discussing them in great depth before they’ve even been programmed: how much excitement would that generate for the theater?

In Outrageous Fortune, the very forward-thinking and insightful David Dower talks about the difference between institution-centric, artist-centric, and audience-centric theaters.  In this last scenario, I think we’d have all three.

Closing

I’m not naïve enough to think that technology’s going to address all of the issues we’ve been facing.  Personally, I think the main way to bridge the gap between artistic directors and playwrights is for artistic directors and playwrights to simply sit the heck down and talk to each other more – and I’ve been trying my hardest to do that.  But I do think there might be a role for technology to play here – a disruptive role, even – and I hope we’re all open to it.  I offer these ideas, finally, not as finished thoughts but as starting places, and I offer them copyright-free for everyone’s fair use and implementation, for whatever that’s worth… as long as you promise to use them to make things better for everyone.

I’ve just finished reading this passionate post by Michael Billington on the Guardian’s Theatre Blog imploring Jeremy Hunt, the culture minister of the new coalition government in the UK, not to cut funding for the arts.  It’s a fairly straightforward argument, complete with the requisite data showing quite clearly that the return on investment for arts funding is solid.  It may not win the day in the UK, even with a new Beckett-loving Deputy Prime Minister, but that’s not why I’ve been thinking about it.

What I’ve been dwelling on (with some jealousy, I must admit) is just how well-funded the arts seem to be in the UK — certainly more well funded than they are here in the US.  (I’m speaking about government funding, of course.)  Even if they do suffer the 20% cut that Billington’s worried about, they’re almost certainly still getting reams more funding than we are.  Life is pretty grand in a social democracy, no?  (The answer is yes.  Yes, it is.)

Now, I’m not pointing out anything new here, of course.  Everybody knows the only tea parties in Europe come with scones and cucumber sandwiches.  The new thought I’m having is this: when we’re struggling to make a living in the theater, when we can’t seem to find a way to make ends meet, when we can’t scrape up enough dough to get a new project off the ground, even though we really have the best intentions, even though we know we’d be of service to our fellow citizens… sometimes we just have to realize it isn’t always our fault if we can’t make things work.  It isn’t always that we aren’t talented enough, or that our ideas aren’t good enough, or that we didn’t work hard enough.  Sometimes it’s just that the system is really screwed up.

Yes, I said it: the system is screwed up.  There aren’t enough human resources allocated by our society, plain and simple, to bring enough of our theatrical visions to life.

Do I sound like a 1960s refugee?  Well, maybe at heart I am.  We need to change the system, man!

I’m not saying that every playwright’s every idea should be indulged — believe me, I’m not.  That way lies self-indulgent crap, if you ask me.  I am saying, however, that there are still too many thoughtful, generous, imaginative, good-for-the-world projects that wither, rather than blooming, for lack of funding.  Too many talented artists that just give up and go home, or live less complete lives than they otherwise should, for lack of funding.

That’s why I think all of us, with some part of our hearts, always need to be activists.  (Like the folks in my hometown, DC, who are working to protest a plan to start adding a new tax to theater tickets, which will surely hurt our industry.)  Why should we settle for a pittance?  We deserve more.

More importantly: if the government gave us more, the return on that investment would be tremendous.

In the meantime, though, I hope the thought that at least part of the problem is the system, not the quality of the work we do, offers you the same modest comfort it offers me… as well as the same inspiration to make things better for all of us, by hook or by crook.