Sometimes its not the information you consume, it’s how you use it:

Fertile Ground Festival Project Lear’s Follies did a clever thing recently. They snagged a link that was much shared around #2amt circles (the Marie Claire article about theatre being behind only sex and exercise for creating happiness)and turned it into an irrefutable, ingenious pitch to attend theatre, ANY theatre, as a cure for Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Here’s their pitch, which arrived in my inbox as part of their email promotion for their festival project:

Scientific Proof- Theatre Makes You Happier!

Are the depths of the dark Pacific Northwest winter getting you down? Forget sunlamps and vitamins.
Try cheering yourself up by going to the theatre!

It is not just our opinion that theatre is a great way to make us feel better. It turns out there is science to back us up.

According to a new UK study involving Apple and the London School of Economics – reported by Hannah Thomas at Marie Claire – people are happiest when they are having sex, exercising, and visiting the theatre!

Why? Well it is not surprising when you consider that curiosity, social interaction, and creativity are known to increase happiness. And it turns out our brains have circuits called that are specifically designed to engage our empathy and make us feel better when we are around others who are engaged in creativity, curiosity and social interactions and feeling happy about it. These circuts are called Mirror Neurons and what we do in the theatre seems particularly designed to light them up.

So if you want to beat the Portland Winter Blues, “get thyself to a theatre!”

We invite you to get out, be social, enrich your lives and take part in the creativity that makes our region such a great place to live.

They continue on with a pitch to participate in the Festival, conveniently timed in the darkest days of Portland winter. But there’s absolutely no reason not to STEAL THIS IDEA and use it to tout your own ability to combat the winter doldrums in your area.

It’s not marketing, its SCIENCE.

As the founder and now social media manager for Portland’s Fertile Ground Festival, I have recently had the delightful and curious experience of being able to dip my finger daily into the stream of material our 100 plus world premiere projects have created to promote their shows. I asked myself, how can I harness this wealth of creative promotion in ways that can be of value to our national new play community? With that in mind, welcome to Post One of a multi-post series called “STEAL THIS IDEA.”

First, some quick background:

The Fertile Ground Festival attracts projects from literally all walks of life and all levels of professionalism- from a writer who successfully overcame homelessness and the sex trade to a writer whose last piece was for NPR and whose next piece might well be for film or television. It also attracts all scales of producing partners- Portland Center Stage and Whitebird Dance both have fully staged world premieres in the festival, while the PDX Playwrights collective has probably 20 plays that will receive bare bones staged readings over the course of the festival. The common link amongst all the projects is that they are all Portland generated, and they are all world premieres.

Every project is tackling the same problem that all new work faces: How do I overcome the “never heard of it” barrier?

Audiences want to get a sense of what the experience will be like before they take a risk on a new work. The challenge is that it is nearly impossible to have real performance footage of a new work before it premieres. So how do you help a prospective audience member glimpse the future of a work that is still in the process of creation?

Here are five incredibly different, very intriguing ways this year’s festival participants are using video to address that challenge:

Variation One: Go Graphic

Festival Project Waxwing, from tiny and brand new theater collective String House Theatre employed the talents of an illustrator to take audio recordings from their new work and create a whole world of atmosphere. Check it out:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Variation Two: Showcase the Artists

The NW Children’s Theatre and School has participated in the festival three years in a row, contributing world premiere work for young audiences that often attracts some of the festival’s largest audiences. For this year’s project, Rapunzel- Uncut! created by local playwright James W. Moore, they focused their video efforts on a behind the scenes peek at the young rockers who create the ‘house band’ for this hip update on the Rapunzel story.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Variation Three: Direct Address + F word = WIN

Portland’s LORT theater Portland Center Stage, brings a main stage world premiere of Jason Wells’ The North Plan to the festival, creating a video that feels like a direct address confessional from the character’s foul mouthed and hilarious lead character. None of the language in the trailer is directly from the show, but the result is a pretty good snapshot of the show’s key ideas.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Variation Four: Inspire with the Mission

Playwrite, Inc. is a social service organization that utilizes playwrighting as a tool to help transform the lives of “youth on the edge” in Portland. Their project trailer takes a totally different tack, inspiring the viewer with the effect of the work on the young writers themselves rather than focusing on the pieces being performed (which are probably not even written yet!)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Variation Five: Fake it… Artfully

Portland Playhouse, a mid-sized theater company that’s had three very successful festival projects, uses the real actors from their performance to create a trailer that feels like an artful fake of the real show. Particularly effective are the intercuts of slightly disgusting food closeups that create the same unsettling sense of everyday foods that feel suddenly, subtly WRONG that Dexter uses to great effect in their intro sequence.

Click here to view the embedded video.

One of the things I find fascinating about these examples is that, with the new technology available for video creation, it is nearly impossible to identify these projects by budget size simply on the basis of their video trailers. Each is creative, each is polished and feels professionally produced, and each creates a very different set of expectations for the show being promoted.

What can you steal from this? And which approach works best with your mission and aesthetics? I invite you to share your own samples of newplay video in the comments below.

What can we learn from the birth of the regional theatre movement? Which arts administrator has reached a mass-critical critical mass? Where did Verdi and Shakespeare work to support their writing habits? How many theatres are we going to have to occupy? Why do we call it play?

These are the stories we’ve been following at 2amt this week. This is Follow Friday.

Michael Kaiser criticizes the blogosphere
Mr. Kaiser is afraid of the rise of the citizen critic. As Adam Thurman points out , his fear is justified, even if we disagree with his conclusions. Goodness knows Travis Bedard, Jeremy Barker and Isaac Butler did. That’s why I’m reaching out to Mr. Kaiser while in DC this weekend.

Simone Scully on the vox populi
Of course, citizen criticism might be even more widespread than Mr. Kaiser thought. At the TCG website, a profile of Barrington Stage and their iCritic project. Walk out of the show, step into the booth & record your reactions to share with the world. What’s next for iCritic? What if it could travel from theatre to theatre? What if it were mobile?

Howard Sherman & Peter Marks, together again for the first time
Conveniently enough, all this talk of criticism in the age of Twitter comes to a head the week Arena Stage hosts Howard & Peter in the Kogod Cradle, talking about the role of critics, the use of Twitter and the brave new world of interaction & engagement. The event will also be streamed live at NewPlayTV and archived for later viewing. Right before the event, we’ll be hosting a 2amt meetup at Arena from 3pm until 5pm, so if you’re in the DC area, come on down and say hi. Stay for the event, maybe we’ll all critique it afterwards.

Diane Ragsdale on making a living
Another theme emerged this week, from Zelda Fichandler’s speech on the history of the regional theatre movement while giving an award to Blanka Zizka of the Wilma Theater, from Michael Dove of the Forum Theatre’s meditation on their words and his call to change “non-profit” into “social profit” to my own post on the idea of staff playwrights as opposed to resident playwrights. Naturally, Diane is right there with a few more “outlandish suggestions” on making a living as an artist in the regional theatres.

Ben Brantley occupies theatre
As the Occupy __________ (choose your nearest protest) movement grows and gathers support, Ben Brantley takes a look at the 99% in the world of theatre, from Willy Loman to Mike Daisey, all the way up to the Civilians’ latest production, inspired by interviews conducted at the Occupy Wall Street protest in Zuccotti Park.

Scott Stratten on being awesome
Archived video of the Livestream of Scott’s keynote address at the National Arts Marketing Project Conference this past weekend in Louisville, Kentucky. The main takeaway? People follow awesome. Be awesome. Stop marketing and start engaging. Is it really as simple as that? Watch and find out. Hint. There’s a reason his website is called UnMarketing.

Garry Wills sings of Verdi & Shakespeare
You might be surprised by some of the similarities between the two. “Both were supplying performances on a heavy schedule, to audiences with a voracious appetite for what they wrote. In a career of little over twenty years, Shakespeare turned out thirty-eight plays…Verdi had a longer career of fifty-four years…in which he created twenty-seven operas…” Wonder if being core members of their own companies had anything to with that. Makes you think.

Katherine Catmull on the uses of joy
There is a reason what we do is called “play.” The women of Conspire Theatre remind us of this in the amazing work they’re doing with the women of the Travis County Correctional Complex in Del Valle, Texas.

Over the weekend, @NewPlayTV streamed three interesting, presumably unrelated talks. The first was from Steppenwolf’s First Look Festival, titled How to engage 21st Century Audiences for New Plays, followed an hour later by one from the PlayFest at Orlando Shakespeare Theater on How to Make a Living as a Playwright? Monday night’s was from New Dramatists in NYC, titled Beyond the Culture Wars: Arts Funding in America. (The links lead to the archived videos of the talks; some of them are in multiple parts, just so’s you know.)

On the surface, there are connections–they’re all about theatre and they all feature playwrights as panelists. But one common thread leapt out at me and reminded me of conversations we’ve had on the #2amt stream on Twitter. It began with Robert O’Hara and Marisa Wegrzyn on the Steppenwolf panel talking about how they as playwrights had been welcomed into the marketing process at various theatres and, in Marisa’s case, more deeply involved as a partner and co-founder of Theatre Seven. I’ve done much the same for Riverrun Theatre as a founder and co-producer, largely for the same reasons–we enjoy it.

The next panel, from PlayFest, began with the question, “What’s a playwright got to do to make a living?” Panelist Charlie Bethel answered first. “Everything but playwriting.” He was only half-joking–he went on to list all the occupations he’s had in order to support his writing. Gloria Bond Clunie noted that “Not sleeping is really essential in holding two jobs…” And, “if you identify yourself as a writer, then you have to decide what else has to fall away so you can focus on that.”

Minutes later, Jason Loewith, executive director of the National New Play Network, asked a question we’ve been asking for a while now.

“Why don’t theatre companies with budgets of more than $2.5 million have a playwright on staff?”

Steve Yockey countered with, “Why not $1 million?”

Finally, Monday’s wish-list post by Gwydion Suilebhan and that night’s debate from New Dramatists echoed and continued these thoughts. Gwydion offered the wish that more playwrights should be on staff. At the debate, economist Eric Helland asked, “Why is the Playwright the only person in the production not on salary?” (I know several designers who’d argue with that. But let’s stick with the seven-figure-budget theatres for now.)

Several months ago, Kristoffer Diaz and I went back and forth on Twitter (both on and off #2amt) about the idea of a staff playwright and what that would entail. We agreed that it meant more than a residency or a commission, more than the ability to use office equipment and have steady health insurance. It meant more than simply putting words on paper for people to speak aloud on stage. It means, first and foremost, being there, being part of the heart of the company.

Fine. But what would a staff playwright do?

What if you had someone who could shape your social media experiences, someone trained in the art of dialogue, the craft of story? We all agree that social media works best as interaction and engagement, not as a one-way broadcast for ticket info. We’ve seen several variations on storytelling-via-Twitter–I did it in 2008 tied to an original show, Such Tweet Sorrow did it last year, Bill Corbett’s presenting a novel one tweet at a time as we speak, the list goes on.

How would this work? Let’s take a real life example. The Goodman did something like this last winter, letting Ebenezer Scrooge hijack their Twitter feed. Did it work? The idea was cute, but the execution left me cold. For one thing, the character was a little too quippy and playful, which didn’t gibe with the character in the play or the book. There was no guarantee anyone would interact or engage with him. Beyond that, because the production ran beyond Christmas Day, the character had to “go back to normal” for a few days past Christmas, which contradicted the story. Worst of all, by hijacking the primary Twitter feed, it blocked out people genuinely looking for information about the theatre. After a week of watching, I used Muuter.com to hide the Goodman account in my regular day-in, day-out Twitter stream until after the show closed. I visited their page to see keep tabs on how it was going, but avoided it otherwise.

If I’d been planning that, I would have created a second, specialized Twitter account, perhaps GoodmanScrooge–that’s funny right there. I would have pointed people to that account and given them the option of following it instead of forcing it on them. And I would have had the two accounts interact with each other, effectively doubling the amount of attention paid to the theatre and the show. This would also allow each account to pull others into the conversation, whether staff or patrons, by showing that it was okay to play. But that’s because I see these things through the prism of storytelling, crafting a narrative, even if only something as silly and ephemeral as a box office and a classic fictional character bantering for a couple of weeks.

So okay, you’ve got your playwright tap-dancing on Twitter. What else?

What if you could create games and events themed to your productions? Online, mobile games using nothing more complicated than SCVNGR and Foursquare and other mobile apps? A good game needs a good storyline, and it needs possibilities. It’s got to be more than “check in here, get 3 points.” We know story.

What if you wanted to host 360 Storytelling events throughout your season? Your playwright could act as host and occasional storyteller. Strawdog Theatre in Chicago has been trying weekly 360 events of late, hosted by–you guessed it–a playwright. (Full disclosure, I would go just about anywhere to listen to Hank Boland tell stories. And if you don’t know him or his stories, you should fix that.)

In both cases, your playwright becomes another face for the theatre, another contact point for your community. And your playwright could–and should–be out in the community as well, doing outreach and educational programs as well. They would also become a liaison between visiting playwrights and the local community. At the same time, you’re not just cultivating an audience for your theatre, you’re cultivating an audience for your playwright. You’re giving the audience a stake in the work, a deeper sense of connection. It’s not just a visiting artist visiting a neighborhood, this is someone who’s part of the warp and weft of the community.

What if you wanted to design season brochures and media with a message beyond, “Hey, these are the plays we’re doing! Buy a subscription!”? There are too many theatres I could call out for awful, easy-to-ignore season brochures. The worst I’ve seen try to create a mood or theme that has no connection to the plays in the season. Maybe worse is the generic, static brochure that barely changes from year to year, changing only the photos and the blurbs. By contrast, Steppenwolf has been finding themes among their plays each season and working from there. Woolly Mammoth has been doing a great job of connecting the shows to a theme that lends itself to a clever design. Just look at Woolly’s season brochure this year–it’s eye-catching, it’s engaging, and best of all, it makes sense. Best of all, such creativity–and thematic integration–fits with Woolly’s mission. Win-win.

A great many playwrights work by day in marketing and communications already. On the PlayFest panel, Tim Bauer pointed out how that training had helped him, and how being freelance allowed him to travel as needed for productions of his plays. Marisa Wegrzyn talked about creating Theatre Seven marketing materials as well as videos for other companies that produce her plays. I work in advertising by day and naturally applied that experience to my own small theatre company. Then there’s the lovely team at Marshall Creative in Chicago, an advertising firm riddled with Neo-Futurists, New Leaf Theatre people Improvised Shakespeare and probably carny folk, for all I know. Their mission?

We believe in building brands and connecting people through storytelling and technology.

Unquote. Still, much of our work is outside theatre, and I don’t just mean the client list itself–it’s also about hustling for clients, finding people and businesses looking for that kind of creativity. What if we were all working in-house for theatre companies?

Oh yeah, we could write plays, too.

Let’s work off the template presented by the New Play Institute at Arena Stage. Maybe you commit to producing 1 play by the staff playwright every two years, for instance. At the same time, you help to workshop whatever else the playwright might be working on. Not full workshops per se, but maybe some table reads with acting apprentices or company members, a lighter version of the traditional development process to get plays on their feet. If the script winds up being produced in-house, great. If it’s produced elsewhere, that elsewhere knows the script’s already been put through its paces to an extent. Maybe you take a smaller percentage in subsidiary rights to plays developed in-house, because you’re not committing to a full-scale development process, and you’re not commissioning a one-time event from a short-term visitor–you’re supporting a staff member and getting their creativity in other departments in return. That’s just one way to do this, we’ve got more…

Can every playwright do this? No. But there are plenty who could. Look around, we’re out here.

Can every theatre do this? It depends on your budget, your mission, your willingness to change the formula. I do think every theatre whose mission goes beyond remounting classics should have a playwright-in-residence, even if it’s an unpaid position outside of actual productions. Even then, I think classics-based theatres could benefit from having staff playwrights for all of the above reasons, right down to helping the playwright develop scripts. You may not produce them, but there’s no reason why you can’t read them aloud a few times. And if you’re a company whose budget is seven figures or more, then you really have no excuse not to try this. The larger the institution, the more important the need for faces, consistent personalities and contact points within your community.

Woolly Mammoth is already doing this, expanding their definition of company members beyond actors to include playwrights and designers. As if that weren’t enough, they provide a home base for the National New Play Network. They’re well established in both their local community and in the national scheme of new play development, and yet they’re willing to shake things up.

Why do we want be on staff? Morgan Allen from New Dramatists asked yesterday, “Is it the idea of a living wage/benefits with no expectations you seek or connection to an institution?” Kristoffer Diaz replied, “I’m looking for a connection. I want to play a role in the artistic life of a company.” I’m looking for both, somewhat. I’d like enough of a wage that I wouldn’t have to worry about outside work–which is not necessarily the same as a living wage, mind you–but what interests me most is the thought of helping to shape the narrative of a company, to tell the stories of a community, or even multiple communities within a given region. I’d like the security and freedom to focus all my creativity on the world of theatre.

In short, I’d like to drop the “Everything but” in exchange for the “playwriting.”

“Everyone,” I wrote in a tweet to promote my previous blog post, “enjoys a good blurbing now and again.” Although I didn’t mind if someone read some perverse double entendre into “blurbing,” it was neither euphemism nor metaphor. I was referring to the time-honored and oft-criticized practice of skillfully extracting positive phrases from arts reportage or critique in order to employ them in service of marketing a show. As a former “flack” (if we’re going with slang, I’m going all the way), I gave good blurb; it was part of my job. When I left Hartford Stage, the graphic designer who did our print ads presented me with a framed “Ellipsis Award,” for the most skillful use of those three dots, which could cover a multitude of sins and through which one could, if they chose, drive a figurative truck.

I have not personally practiced the dark arts of blurbing, nor craftily employed the ellipsis, professionally for almost 20 years. Yet just as many came before me, others have followed, and publicists and marketers still employ “pull quotes” for press releases, ads, brochures, and the like with skill and abandon, all to pull in the rubes (that’s carny slang for marketing).

I have watched the quotes themselves grow larger as attributions grow smaller; in some cases ads are designed to appear as if the uniformly glowing words at the top are quotes, when in fact they carry neither the necessary punctuation or any source. The pinnacle (or nadir) of this practice came when a Hollywood studio was revealed to have invented both a critic and a press outlet solely for the purpose of manufacturing positive blurbs.

Several decades ago, those of us inside Hartford Stage would have philosophical discussions about the use of blurbs, as well as my artful insertion of ellipses that turned positive words into enthusiastic ones. Wouldn’t the people who saw the ads realize the quote had been subtly manipulated? No, we decided, since no one was likely to have saved the original copy  (remember, pre-internet). Wasn’t the ellipsis itself tipping people off? No, because frankly most people didn’t study them them as we did (and besides, to use an excuse popular in so many situations, everyone else was doing it). Wasn’t using quotes reinforcing the importance of critics, when we wanted audiences to decide for themselves?

To that last question, the answer, to our own chagrin, was yes. We were emphasizing critical opinion for our marketing needs. We had to. Why? Well here it is again: because everyone else was. Blurbs, pull quotes, what have you – they were a necessity. We believed that if a show had opened and we couldn’t feature at last one positive quote from a prominent media outlet in our advertising, the audience would be convinced the show was a dog. Even after the show had closed, we used those blurbs again: in subscription brochures, in grant applications, in annual reports. Blurbs were crack and we were hooked.

25 years later, little has changed, even if the media has. Despite the ability of anyone with a computer to locate a complete review, blurbs, be they accurate or artful, proliferate. The brevity of Twitter facilitates such practice. Even though the original context can be quickly recalled on Google, we still cling to quotes in our marketing, embracing reviews even as (and thus was also always the case) we often vilify the source, namely the critic.

This paradox is at the center of arts marketing. We do everything we can to make our productions critic-proof, yet we throw our arms wide open the moment a critic, any critic, praises the work.  If we bitch about critical power, why do we reinforce it? In brainstorming sessions, over drinks, we dream of cutting the cord, going cold turkey and abandoning quotes in our ads, but we can’t do it. We need our fix and seem convinced that our audiences do as well. As subscription rates have, overall, declined, blurb-laden ads are perhaps more needed (we think) than ever, since single ticket sales have reasserted themselves in our economic models (as they have always done in the case of commercial work).

I will paraphrase the producer Kevin McCollum here, only because I’m not positive I recall this comment precisely: “We are the only business that decides what to do tomorrow based on how we did it yesterday.” And indeed, we in the age of the internet deploy blurbs just as they were used by hucksters a century ago, locked in a perpetual cycle of believing that outside affirmation is the best, and perhaps only, means of assigning value to our work in order to lure audiences.

I’m not raising the paradox to pan critics; in fact I think we must do all we can to insure that full-length reviews written with intelligence and care remain part of the arts landscape. However, the attention span of both editors and consumers seem to favor ever briefer consideration of the arts – which are then further reduced to a ranking of so many stars on a scale, or a subjective, simplistic thumbs up/thumbs down summary by third party aggregators. Arts writing is coming to us pre-blurbed.

In a world of new and ever-evolving media, we are mired in an archaic marketing technique which has, to my knowledge, no empirical proof that it even works. Blurb if you must, but can’t we do better? Or are we just a …. bunch of … addicts?

Here in Vancouver, as a theatre producer, one of your greatest challenges is simply finding space. We have two major theatre companies, The Vancouver Playhouse and the Arts Club, that own their own theatres, but other than that, the 100-or-so independent theatre companies in the city all are fighting for a piece of the half-dozen theatre spaces in town.

So many have started to think outside the black box. As a publicist, I have been working for a young company, Itsazoo Productions, who specializes in site-specific, promenade-style theatre, mostly in parks, but they have done two productions in parking garages as well.

This summer, I was contracted by The Only Animal, a local indie company, to do publicity for Sea of Sand: A Play on the Beach.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Only Animal is well-known for their site-specific work here in Vancouver. Their last production, Nix: The Theatre of Snow and Ice, which took place during the Cultural Olympiad in Whistler, featured a set made of ice and snow, and the actors entering the stage via slides made of ice.

Tired of freezing their butts off, Co-Artistic Directors Eric Rhys Miller and Kendra Fanconi started dreaming of doing a play in the summer… when it was warm… at the beach. Vancouver is blessed with plentiful and beautiful beaches, so they approached the City and got permission. The play, which is inspired by the concept of memory, has been in development for several years, and has gone through a few incarnations before this final production.

Part radio-play, part film-noir mystery, Sea of Sand follows a trio of characters: a man recovering from amnesia, the wife who doesn’t want him to remember, and a woman who washes up out of the sea, a shadowy figure from their past. Memory and desire are the twin rip tides at work in this lost-and-found story. The play asks the question: what if forgetting is safer than remembering? 

There are certainly unique challenges with producing a play on the beach. They have solar-powered generators to run the computers, big tents for tiring-houses, and there was a lot of experimenting with different kinds of sunscreen. Each of the actors wears a wetsuit under their “costume”, as they spend time in the water as well as on the beach.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Previous versions of the play had the actors mic’ed, but that turned out to be a logistical nightmare. So, to deal with that, Rhys Miller recorded the entire play, in the studio, like a radio play. The actors then speak their lines in sync with, and sometimes out of sync with, the playback, which is underscored by music. This makes it possible for the actors to be very far away (as they sometimes were) or even in the water without missing dialogue.

Add to that the amazing setting, and you have a very unique and highly enjoyable piece of theatre.

Why did I go into PR? It’s simple, really. I like telling people about things that I’m excited about. Truly and authentically, and that’s it. I’m a music and theater nerd, so I sort of stumbled from oboe performance major and Michael Olmert’s British plays in performance class to student job to internship to full-time job, learning as I went, and telling myself “don’t screw up.” I’ve occasionally referred to PR as “my art” when explaining, wistfully, that I no longer play oboe.

Learning on the job is tough. I haven’t had a lot of guidance, I’m expected to produce results, and I didn’t know where to start. I spent a lot of time looking for mentors, advice, and “how-to.” The Internet was my library, and the Bad Pitch Blog became my very favorite encyclopedia.

The Bad Pitch Blog has been famous for the last 5 and a half years as a PR industry watch-dog. Co-founders Kevin Dugan and Richard Laermer ‘out’ PR people who have written really bad pitches and then sent them, untargeted, to the media masses. In the very first post on January 20, 2006, Dugan explains, “It’s our hope that the Bad Pitch blog will entertain the true victims of this practice, the PR industry, and it will help the guilty parties improve. Hopefully the blog will someday become obsolete.”

Of course, it is still going strong.

I took these case studies to heart, and the advice gleaned from PRSA panels with veteran journalists and the occasional PR pros who I sought out: journalists hate certain kinds of follow-ups. No one reads full-length press releases, unless they are looking for particular details that aren’t all in one easy-to-read format. Journalists hate phone calls. Journalists are cranky, busy people, who need certain kinds of information when they’re looking for it, and if you ask stupid questions, you will get fried. If you are annoying, unprofessional, or rude, you will get shut down.

Why do PR people keep doing the same things?

Reading these case studies, and the many outed by industry publications, TechCrunch, etc, I am baffled by the practices of many established PR firms who somehow continue to book big clients and enjoy relationships, even when they don’t have their clients’ best interests at heart. We still have PR panels where journalists repeat the same “Dos and Don’ts,” and we still have PR firms charging their clients for hours to write press releases that may never get read “because that’s how we do things.” PR professionals, unlike an in-house person wearing many hats, have (or should take!) the time to dedicate to getting their core craft right.

Does an arts organization, or a startup, or a small business really need PR?

I know that arts administrators, like start-ups, are over-worked, under-paid, and trying to stretch every last dollar. They don’t have time or money to waste on a firm that can’t deliver value or would somehow make them look bad. And worse, I know that the problematic PR people are the ones talked about the most, so non-PR folks are distrustful, anxious to let go of their baby or entrust the message to someone else.

But sometimes, you might be too close to your message, which can lead you into similar (or worse) mistakes.

How do you sort through the clutter to find someone who’s going to be right for you?

One of the reasons people are hesitant to invest in PR is the challenge of measuring results and communicating value. You want to trust that your partner/consultant understands what is important to you and timely/relevant to the press, media, and target audiences, so that, even if they are not producing results immediately, the work over time will build awareness around the right message. With PR, marketing, and social media consultants, you want to look at two things as a client: first, what is this person’s track record, and, second, what is the process by which they communicate your message, pursue coverage, and create buzz?

As I continue to learn and build my own full-time PR shop, it’s important to keep things in perspective, and hold myself to high standards.

To that end, I am delighted to announce an event sponsored by Tweetreach, Hansen’s Natural Soda, 2amt and Adobe, titled How to Choose the Right PR Solution in a Crowded Market at Adobe Systems in San Francisco on September 6, 2011. We will have Richard Laermer himself on a panel with some of my other mentors: Stuart McFaul of Spiralgroup and Rory O’Connor of Fleishman Hillard. Matt Rozen from Adobe will join us, and we’ll discuss all of these questions and more. As my co-organizer Evan Hamilton likes to say, “Blood is expected…”

It’s a great word. “Embargo.” It seems to come from a different age, or a world in which brinksmanship over major issues comes into play. Oil embargo. Trade embargo. But it’s alive, if not exactly well, in the relationship between the media and those that they cover.

In the past 36 hours, there have been some very interesting comments on Twitter via #2amt about “embargoing” reviews of arts events. The primary participants have been Trey Graham of NPR, Peter Marks of The Washington Post, Alli Houseworth from Woolly Mammoth Theatre and Nella Vera of The Public Theater. As a “recovering” publicist, I’ve lobbed in a few thoughts as well, but I though the issue was worth more than a few 140 character salvos.

In brief summary: there has been a longstanding “gentleman’s agreement” (pardon my patronymic) between arts groups and the media that cover them that while productions may be seen by the press in advance of the official opening at designated performances, reviews will be embargoed for release until that official opening occurs. This has been in place for some time, although it is not theatrical tradition from days of yore – it is something that has been in place in the U.S. for not more than 50 years and is, I believe, an even more recent phenomenon in England.

Social media has upended this polite détente (as has, perhaps, Spider-Man, but for this discussion, let’s declare that an anomaly and move past it), since we now have personal media platforms that allow any audience member to broadcast their own opinions immediately upon exiting a theatre, if not during the performance itself. So the major media, with more traditional roots, finds itself either days or weeks behind in reporting on a cultural event while the court of public opinion renders verdicts left and right, or they have to report on that very public opinion before issuing their own.

Marks has commented that he is precluded from tweeting his opinions in advance of his review appearing; Frank Rizzo of The Hartford Courant was tweeting his thoughts on a show at the Williamstown Theatre Festival the very night he saw it, although in that case it was the press opening. There’s obviously no industry-wide practice and every outlet is formulating its own approach.

I should make clear that none of these journalists are sneaking into preview performances to which they’re not invited. They are respecting whatever preview period the company or producers have requested; they just chafe against having to wait, either out of professional courtesy to an externally imposed release date or an internal policy which dictates adherence to the print date.

I also need to state my belief that the performing arts do not truly come alive until they’re before an audience, and I believe that artists should have a reasonable amount of time to work on their creations in front of an audience (yes, a paying audience appropriately advised as to the show’s inchoate form) before opinions are rendered. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter and the like have certainly made it impossible to completely manage such a protected environment and that’s just a reality of our world; to rail against it is foolish and unproductive. The question is whether major media (old or new), with its vast reach, should play by the old rules, or adopt the “embargoes be damned” attitude that the public has unknowingly employed.

For arts groups, one rationale for the embargo has been to achieve a “roadblock” effect with their reviews – a great many come out on the same day, having a better chance of achieving traction in the public’s mind. But as members of the press will often say, they are not marketing arms for the arts, but reporters or writers of opinion, so why must they adhere to a marketing or press plan? Frankly, so long as journalists don’t start writing about works of art before they are acknowledged to be complete, this practice may have to fall under the weight of the populist-driven social media.

As for tweeting a mini-opinion in advance of a full review, I have to say I don’t think that serves anyone. If the public, as some posit, want only bite-sized chunks of information, then critics are playing into their hands and hastening their own demise. After all, if you know a review is pro or con, will you necessarily look for a more nuanced appraisal a day or two later? Will the craft of reviewing at long last be reduced, in all arts, to the thumbs-up/thumbs-down approach popularized by Siskel and Ebert? Does anyone want reviews to be nothing but capsules, star ratings or a little man and his chair?

I must confess to puzzlement about how much the traditional media is approaching social media. Instead of using it to deepen its own coverage, since website space is less dear than newsprint, and the reach unfettered by geography and logistics, some papers undermine their own print versions in their race to populate a Twitter feed. The New York Times, inexplicably, shares virtually all of their Sunday arts coverage through Twitter two or three days before the Sunday paper is out, rendering the section old news by the time it appears fully online or (yes, I’m old) on my doorstep.

I will say I’m intrigued by critics like Marks or the prolific Terry Teachout, who will actively engage with their readers on social media, breaking down the ivory tower mentality cherished by critics only a generation ago. The idea that critics will interact with individuals, and perhaps artists, in a public forum, is tremendously exciting to me, and may well be the best thing to happen to artist/critic relations in many years. Indeed, might early tweets result in critics getting feedback and perspective before their final verdict is rendered?

As for the embargo: I think it has begun to crumble and that erosion will only accelerate as every single person who cares to becomes their own media mogul and true stars of the medium begin to achieve influence akin to that afforded by old media. I say, as long as the artists’ work is done, let’s be happy that the press is so eager to cover us. But I caution the press not to be so eager to adopt the new paradigm that they undermine themselves, leading to ever-briefer, ever-more-marginalized assessments of artists’ work.

I did not get to go to the Americans for the Arts and Theater Communications Group conferences this year, but thanks to an NEA funded “pop up newsroom” called Engine28 (and the smart folks at #2amt who were at the conferences) I did get the opportunity to follow along from my office.

As a bonus, a Portland journalist pointed me to a contest Engine28 was running on the art of the PR Pitch. The winner of the contest would get direct feedback on what worked and what didn’t in their pitch from the newsroom’s quite impressive pack of national arts journalists.

A had a bit of time to spare that Friday, so I posted a recent pitch for Oregon Ballet Theatre’s season opening production to see what feedback I might be able to get. And I won the press jury award. My prize? Detailed feedback on the pitch from the journalists in the collective.

The feedback was fascinating, but since it lacked a space to communicate back to the evaluators about what was learned, I thought I might post the feedback (and my take on it) here, in case it would be of value to any arts folk looking to build their own press pitches.

First, here’s the pitch I entered into the contest (exactly as initially posted despite extreme temptation to retroactively fix all the glaring typos discovered as soon as I hit “publish”):

Subject line: Will Rebirthing a Classic Be Bloody (Good) Business?

2 years ago Oregon Ballet Theatre came within a razor’s edge of closing its doors forever.

Over a million dollars in emergency community support later, the companys wavers on the brink of a turnaround.

It would be understandable if decided to play it safe for a while.

Right?

Instead, Artistic Director Christopher Stowell has upped the stakes, inviting world-renowned choreographer Nicolo Fonte and 10 new dancers from around the world to collaborate on a world-premiere re-imagining of two bloody classics, Bizet’s Carmen and Stravinsky’s Petrouchka this October.

Their goal: to create new definitive ballet versions of these iconic stories that will restore the organization’s position in the vanguard of national ballet organizations and cement the company’s financial recovery.

The stakes couldn’t be higher, creatively or financially. Will he succeed? Or will the company’s fledgling turnaround end, like Carmen and Petrouchka themselves, in a bloodbath?

What are the lessons to be learned on behalf of the national arts community?

Will it be a new model to be shared? A cautionary tale? Either way it should be a helluva story for anyone interested in taking the current pulse of the arts in America.

Petrouchka/Carmen rehearses in August and world premieres Saturday, October 8th at the Keller Auditorium, Portland Oregon.

My rationale for this pitch and how it was framed: It’s a pitch contest, not a media release contest, so the focus should be on the “hook” (what gets them to open the link) and what journalists would call the “lede,” or the first sentence that frames the conflict/opportunity/newsworthiness of the story. Assumptions: Most readers would not be ballet experts, most readers would not be Portland-based. My goal: link an upcoming show to a topic of current relevance to the journalists.

So, how did that work out in the minds of the jury? And what did I learn that might be of value to others? Here’s their feedback and my responses, with the 10 Things I Learned in bold below. Would welcome your feedback and responses as well!

- What’s great: The pitch grabs me, like good theater, with really high stakes.
What’s missing: I hear very little about the art itself and why/how this piece is going to come together.

My take: Were this a full release, I would definitely have included paragraphs with the detail this writer is looking for. A bit tricky though, since the project is a world premiere and that means its hard to get juicy details out of artistic folk this far in advance. Always a challenge, that.

Lesson 1: Keep the pitch short. But don’t forget the links to more information for the folks who like to delve.

- Too much about how the company was nearly doomed, and how “playing it safe” could be a viable option. Should lead with how daring the show is, then go to the administrative stuff. Also, the more images from something like this, which words don’t seem to do justice to, the better.

My response: This is a very good point. Having the opportunity to include a few juicy design tidbits that help frame the artistic audacity of the project would have probably helped balance the “financial risk” angle with the “creative risk” angle.

- Professional! Grammatical! Winning!

My take: Gee. Thanks.

- It’s got a grabber lede, I was sucked in pretty quickly. Watch those typos! Attractive photo composite, I liked the cliffhanger in the type before scrolling down to continue reading. Does “world renowned” choreographer Nicolo Fonte have instant name recognition? Plant a contextual clue so we remember where we’ve seen his work. Evidently this company, despite budgetary woes, still has a sense of humor and hope.

My take: Providing context on the choreographer was a tricky one because it can be dangerous to digress from the main topic of your pitch to explain who or what an element of the pitch is (you can lose their attention pretty fast if you get all “paragraph-y”). I would normally handle this in an “about” paragraph later in the release (or a link to the cool video showing the hidden yoga poses in his recent OBT performance, which I totally could have done. Facepalm.)

Lesson 2: You have multimedia resources to support your show. Use them. In an online press pitch, just making the unfamiliar name a live link to an interesting post about that person could be the difference between story or no story.

- There was no other choice for me. Written like a feature story, the pitch’s lead was full of contradiction and had me at the words: “razor’s edge of closing its doors forever … ” The great picture sealed the deal.

My take: “Written like a feature story” is a really good piece of advice I have heard a lot from journalists about how to get a pitch noticed. Good takeaway.

Lesson 3: Write your release they way you would like to have the finished story written. If they chose to print your release verbatim, would you be happy with how it read?

- Bloodbath. Emergency. Razor’s edge. These 3 phrases are powerful, clear, intense. Placed near the top of this pitch I was drawn in to read more about Oregon. Ballet Theater’s risk taking techniques in wake of its financial crisis. Who doesn’t want to know how this game will end?

My take: I was leaning pretty heavily on the dramatic language, which was a risk (it could have ended up sounding SUPER corny). Glad that worked for this writer. For fans (and detractors) of my Kill the Adjective post, I would like to point out that each of the phrases this writer points to are NOUNS. Well, except for “razor’s.”

Lesson 4: Use specific, vivid language that creates the conflict or drama clearly in the mind of the reader. This is doubly true in press pitches as it is in other kinds of copy. You are writing for writers. Words are their passion. Use them carefully.

- Do a copy edit. The lead is missing a word: It would be understandable if [?????] decided to play it safe for a while. Send the message of professionalism.

My take: CURSE YOU TYPOSSSSSSS. Take away: it is so easy to distract a writer from your pitch by a missing or incorrectly spelled word. It matters, people. It really does.

Lesson 5: Writers make a living out of being very good with, and therefore very particular about, words and grammar. Typos are a slap in the face to them and a huge distraction. If you do absolutely nothing else, make sure your pitches are as typo-free as you can make them. Every time. Even in internet contests. The interwebz are forever.

- I love the bravery of taking risks in the face of–or even as an answer to–financial adversity in the arts. This pitch goes beyond the immediate show, asking some interesting questions and luring journalists to discover the answers.

My take: Was definitely trying to raise questions rather than answer them. Glad that worked for this writer.

Lesson 6: If you can connect your show to a topic of current regional or national relevance, do it. What’s there to talk about that’s bigger than the show itself? How can the show be used to illustrate a larger theme or concern?

- As a news story, this would interest me, but I’d need a bit more information about the ways that this performance could create a “new model” before I’d proceed to write about this. Also, use boldface sparingly, please!

My take: I admit to using a bit more boldface than strictly necessary out of an attempt to make a pitch easy to “scan.” But, duly noted- there’s a point at which leading the eyes to the “important bits” can become insulting.

- It’s a good pitch because it’s a good topic. But I would like to see more information. Are you saying the company IS playing it safe? Back that up — tell me what it is programming, compared with what it used to program.

My take: These all sound like excellent follow up questions to me. I would normally expect to address them once the writer expressed interest. Unless the lack of those immediate answers would keep a writer from following up?

Lesson 7: Be sure that the core point of your release will be clear, even to the non-careful reader. But don’t go overboard on leading the person who likes to “scan” through the release or you could insult the careful readers… and the careful readers are your best prospects.

- It’s a great hook – gives the context and background, sets the stakes and offers a window on an evolving solution. Like it a lot. BUT hate the headline. Doesn’t give an idea of what this is about. Language is overdramatic and reads like PR hype. And it’s not entirely grammatical. Can “rebirthing” be a business? And a bloody one at that? It would be much better if it were more specific. I would have skipped over this one because the headline was so bad.

My take: If you’ve given birth (which I have recently, so I guess it’s top of mind) you know that it is an inherently bloody process. As to whether it can be a business, I guess you’d have to ask a midwife. Also, the slightly mixed metaphor allowed for a pun on a British swear word. Who doesn’t like punny swear words? Perhaps it was just way too much. Metaphor deconstruction aside, what I get from this is that one person’s literary catnip can be another person’s exhaustingly corny PR hype.

Lesson 8: A subject line’s job is to be memorable and get them to open the email and read the thing. But beware you don’t cross the line and become memorable for the wrong reasons.

My main thought: the story idea is a good one, but the execution in the pitch does not match the quality of the idea. It needs to sound/look more professional: that means copy-editing it before sending it out; not bolding certain phrases, which has the effect of infantilizing the journalist reading it (Don’t worry—we’ll know what the important elements are); and not using slang like “helluva” (perhaps it’s just my personal preference, but feeling like a publicist is One of the Guys (or Girls) is not going to make me more likely to write a story—plus, this is a professional interaction). Choose your descriptors more wisely. I agree with Linda–if you need to call Nicolo Fonte “world-renowned,” he’s probably not world-renowned enough to have instant name recognition, so tell us more about what he’s done that’s great (I’m a dance writer and have not heard of him, so that says something). Is “bloody” the best way to describe Carmen and Petrouchka? I don’t think so–and I don’t think you need to resort to cheap thrills to attract a journalist to writing about this story.

My take: Carmen opens with the heroine slashing another girl in the face with a knife. And ends with a duel to the death. Petrouchka also ends with a duel to the death. Neither are, say, Dracula bloody. But the plot points definitely revolve around pointy things interacting in slippery ways with body parts. Not sure what standard of bloodiness would need to be achieved if these things don’t qualify? Hm. The “world-renowned” point is a good one, and a #fail on my part for disobeying my own rule about sloppy use of qualitative descriptors. Saying “world-renowned” was just BEGGING to have someone say “Oh yeah. Says WHO?” Perhaps I should have mentioned Nicolo’s work with Royal Danish Ballet, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Royal Ballet of Flanders, Stuttgart Ballet, The Australian Ballet, The Göteborg Ballet, The Finnish National Ballet, etc. Or maybe I should have just hyperlinked to this.

As to the inclusion of the “helluva,” I have to say that I have also gotten feedback that a touch of irreverence and colloquial or casual language at the end of a pitch can help “personalize” the pitch, making it feel more like a conversation than a corporate release. But perhaps it is a tactic to be saved for writers with whom you already have an established relationship…

- The content piques my curiosity but I want to know what about these classic remixes will be new and compelling. What is Fonte’s angle and concept? Also the description of the project is vague-who are these 10 dancers, why them? Just a few more facts, please.

My take: I should absolutely have more juicy details about production concept. If only I had them! This is the tricky part about pitching a world premiere, especially when the artists are still very much in process and keeping things tightly under wraps. Many of these details would have automatically been included in a full media release, of course.

Lesson 9: Skip the aggrandizing descriptive words and focus on facts that provide interesting context. Which facts are relevant will vary depending on which arts writer you are pitching. A dance writer, for example, needs different reference points than a general arts writer might.

- Drama personified. Bravery brandished. Teetering on the edge of triumph or tragedy. Had I read this particular entry, it would have my vote, too. It deserved its landslide win and the company appears to deserve an audience, just based on its sheer nerve. But the play’s the thing, and how it plays, and how it connects and is received, will decide the company’s fate. I lived in Oregon for 7 years and never came close to going to see the ballet. And I’m on the periphery of ballet and open to it. If they didn’t reach me, who will they reach?

My take: Good questions. So, would you like me to arrange some interviews and some tickets to opening night so you can start digging up answers to these extremely excellent questions?

- A compelling headline, a hook, some tension: It’s a “helluva” pitch. One suggestion: a quick copy edit would polish it up (i.e. company, rather than companys).

- 1) something at stake, 2) someone to root for, 3) an outcome I (and readers) want to find out.

- The headline piques curiosity but I originally passed this over because of the first two lines. If you are on the brink of turnaround, is there really tension when there are still plenty of companies that teeter on bankruptcy? And I think the connection between mounting a specific production and the health of a company to be tenuous in terms of the interest to the typical reader. Reading it over now, I like the questions that finish up the pitch but, first time through, it lost me before I got to that point.

- Trisha’s pitch has three major things going for it: it gives the impression of transparency; it contains conflict; and it leaves the story unfinished. Pitches that don’t contain conflict are boring, and I delete them. Pitches that seem like they’re hiding something are deleted even faster. And pitches that contain a complete story leave me no work to do.

 

My take: Blushing. Thank you. Delighted to hear what worked.

Lesson 10: Ask for (and listen hard to) the criticism. But don’t forget to acknowledge and enjoy the successes too.

Taking your press pitches for your show from good to great is a process. A never ending process of testing, feedback and revision.  Anyone can benefit from  asking the experts for feedback. You might be surprised how happy they are to help you improve. After all, better pitches from you mean better stories for them.

So, here’s a challenge. Ask your local arts writer to coffee. Bring a copy of your most recent release. And a red pen. You’ll be amazed what you might discover.

Please. If you are a board member, artist, or employee of a theater company, understand that most people are not visiting your website because they like you, or because they want to like you. First and foremost, they are visiting your website for information. All the glossy photos, taglines, and rave reviews will not give these individuals an emotional stake in your company if you are going to waste their time by not conveniently giving them the information they seek.

The following are the basics for any theater website homepage.  A visitor to the page should be able to find them in seconds.

Address. Clearly, unambiguously: this is the street address for the venue where the show is taking place, and this is the name of the venue.

When. Dates and times. Many theater companies hide this information behind a button marked Buy Tickets, or some variation thereof. If it’s 6:20 p.m. and someone is looking at your website, it is most likely not to buy tickets but to confirm the showtime and/or location. Don’t make people lie in order to find the information they need to see your show.

Running Time. When a show begins is essential to an audience. When a show ends is also useful: a running time or end time. Imagine an overworked couple standing in the foyer of their house at 6:20 p.m., checking your website on their iPhone to tell the babysitter when to expect them home, two hours later or five hours later.

How to Donate. Blue Man Group, skip this one. (Then again, Blue Man Group, skip this whole essay: your website follows these rules already, and in Chicago you pulled in nearly $627,000 in ticket sales last week.)

But if you are a not-for-profit company, give a visitor to your website clear and immediate information about how to donate to your company—even if it’s just a mailing address. Imagine an overworked lumber baron who, sitting at his desk before a roaring fire, has five minutes to give to a charity. He momentarily thinks of his college roommate, whose niece is the sound designer for your company, and visits your website on a whim. If your site requires more than 30 seconds of time to figure out how to make a donation, that lack of clear information could cost your company a major new supporter.

Contact. An e-mail address, a phone number, whatever. Imagine the lumber baron saw your show and wants, simply enough, to thank you. Imagine the possibility of him going to your website, giving up in frustration after a minute, and moving on with his life, compliment unpaid, relationship unforged.

Quick story—this relates more to the content of that contact information than its placement on a website. I work with foundations that fund theater companies. I review proposals and see shows (often, as a representative of the foundation, looking online at 6:20 p.m. for a show’s start time). Recently, I reviewed a grant proposal from a generally healthy, artistically strong theater company that had recently undergone administrative changes. I was trying to arrange a meeting with its managing director.

The e-mail address on the application form was incorrect—the equivalent of, say, Sandbox Theater writing its address as info@sandbox.org instead of the correct info@sandboxthtr.org. The e-mail I spent 10 minutes composing was kicked back to me. Next, I called the phone number on the grant application, sat through a four-minute recorded pitch about the current season, followed by directions to the theater. When offered an option to leave a message for the company, I pressed the appropriate button and then listened to a three-month-old message about auditions for a show that had already closed. When I pressed one more option, I heard an outgoing message from the former managing director, with his personal cell-phone number for those who wanted to contact him. In this case, I finally did go to the company’s website and found the correct e-mail address on their homepage. At least there was that. (And this company does strong work—I’m rooting for them.)

Checklist. The basics—after which, but only after which, feel free to add photos, blogs, color, zingers, slideshows, exclamation marks, and sales pitches:

—Venue address.
—Correct, current, daily showtimes. (If there is no current show, tell us what is happening at your company this month, even if what you’re doing this month is taking time off until you pick your next show.)
—Running time.
—How to donate.
—How to contact the company in a way that will receive a timely response.

One more. It only takes two clicks to get from the homepage of the Lyric Opera of Chicago to its most intimate financial data. (Go to the homepage, click on About Us, click on Financial Data, and you’re there from the homepage in seconds flat.) If your company is not doing the same, why not? Would this not also inspire the impatient lumber baron to write you a substantial check? Why hide?

Indulge me in a little rhetorical drama, I have, on occasion, so indulged many of you.

The USA needs theatre.

We are a potentially free and democratic people, but when the citizens become disenchanted and politically disengaged, we disenfranchise ourselves and cede leadership to those who can tolerate swimming in a political cesspool.

Theatre makes me a better citizen, both by directly confronting me with political and philosophical content and by reminding me of the diverse and powerful ways to be human.

That’s why when I hear Rocco taking declining theatre audiences as an inevitable fact I worry, and when I see a room full of theatre professionals accepting it I get confused. A declining audience means you get to improve fewer people.

By mid day on Thursday, I was angry that we were talking about ANYTHING except how to recruit new audience members. So many of the problems people were raising were driven by tight resources, resources that are only going to get tighter if audiences continue to shrink. I was distracting myself from what should have been an engrossing discussion of new theatrical forms. I saw the need to console myself, and like any man of faith, I took comfort in scripture.

Michael Kaiser describes a four stroke heart beat of arts institutional thriving. 1) Make great art. 2) Market it well. 3) Attract a family of followers and supporters. 4) Accept money from them in order to make more and better art. Repeat.

As you were all talking about improving relationships between artists and institutions, about bringing greater diversity into our workplaces and onto our stages, about exploring new ways to invent theater, on into yesterday talking about partnerships between organizations and technologies to help people find each other to form such partnerships, especially when you were just getting ideas from each other or discovering things you might work on together – through all of that you moving towards making greater art, working on step one, which is crucial and which is your primary role in the whole scheme.

But all of us who love the theater need to devote some of our time, and I know this is much easier for me than for most of you but I can’t let you off the hook, to direct efforts to grow the family. I’ll give you a few ideas:

First, know your audience, I don’t mean broadly and demographically and I don’t mean all of them, I mean some of them face to face by name. Ask them why they came. Ask them why they value the experience. Beg them to recruit more people into the audience. By the way, you’re likely to hear very nice things about your work and yourself during this process, and most of you could use that.

Second, force your way into the marketing of your plays and productions. Make it more likely that what people learn about your play before arriving gets them ready to have the most powerful experience of the art they can have.

Third, some of you and your colleagues write for film and TV on the side. Write some scenes in which characters attend and enjoy a play. Be self serving – write some scenes in which characters attend and enjoy one of your plays. Characters in mass art are role models. Make them model behaviors we need.

Fourth, invent and act on a thousand additional ideas that an amateur like me can’t think of, but get more people into theaters. Pull playmaking and playgoing back to the center of political life, where it belongs in a democracy.

We are here talking about new plays, but those new plays rely on a traditional art form with roots that go back thousands of years. I refuse to believe that we’re going to let it die on our watch.

Passed around Twitter feeds, posted on Facebook walls: last week’s Onion joke article. Funny, but with a twinge of ouch—not because I have ever wanted to tell the story of my life onstage, but because at different times I have written, directed, and produced non-confessional one-actor plays. Doing so, if anyone is going to show up, requires distancing the work from exactly the expectations the Onion article describes.

Just by its name, the (usually gender-specific) one-man/one-woman show implies by its very name a stunt, a display of exceptional virtuosity or at least exceptional length, or exceptional entitlement to a captive audience’s attention—in any case, a show, not a performance or a play. If it’s based on a true story, the implication, without further context, can be that the purpose of the show is ego on display, a virtuoso display of craft, or a virtuoso display of confession. The expectations are not inaccurate: an extended performance by one actor is a virtuoso act, though not much more than, say, a full-length two-character play.

My first show in Chicago, as a director and (on a do-it-yourself level) producer, was a staging of Joyce Carol Oates’s story “Heat.” I wrote to Oates for permission to stage the story verbatim, and the show went well. The audience knew that we were staging a piece of fiction by a writer who was not performing—we were dramatizing a short story, verbatim; a dramatic monologue, a one-actor play. Still, when I originally staged the show in Minneapolis, paired with another story, Stephen Dixon’s “Moon,” I had to avoid the description and connotations of “one-person show” and instead prepare the audience for what the show specifically was.

Specifics shape preconceptions. An audience going to see Mike Daisey’s How Theater Failed America might know that it is, yes, a one-man show, and partly an account of his experiences and observations from working in theater for less than minimum wage. But they also know, from its title, that the show is about something other than Daisey’s ego: they know from the title the purpose of the evening.

An audience going to see Robert Lepage’s Needles and Opium may know that it is the theatrical equivalent of a personal essay, weaving the lives and ideas of Jean Cocteau and Miles Davis along with an unnamed French Canadian on a transcontinental flight. They also may know that Lepage is a wizard of theatricality, combining never-before-seen technology with the basic wonder and curiosity that comes from playing around with a home-movie camera. They may know that his show Elsinore is a one-actor version of Hamlet—spectacular, but the occasion is clear, and the occasion is not the performer’s ego.

“Solo acoustic” on its own conjures both the best and worst possible images.  As does “local jazz”; as does, “poetry reading”; as does, for many, “theatre.” And it is worth embracing what a show actually is—if it’s one actor on a stage, it’s a one-person show; if he’s playing a nylon-stringed Yahama, it is indeed a solo acoustic show. But the specifics of any of those—as well as the context of the venue, the work programmed around it, the environment of the performing space, the validation from critics and other enthusiasts—are what alter expectations.

As I wrote last year, the labels “spoken word” and “performance art” have mostly been laid to rest. Ira Glass and his crew (Sedaris, Vowell, Rakoff) do not have to shoulder the burden of an audience describing their work with either one of those label. Instead, the audience can have a different set of expectations. It might have been Carl Wilson who suggested that singer-songwriters have had a stigma ever since John Belushi smashed that guitar in Animal House. And the Onion now helpfully reminds us what audiences might picture and resist when there’s only one actor on the bill.

Of course I’ve sat through terrible examples of all of these. Anyone going to art shows in Paris in the 1920s would have seen a lot of bad paintings. It doesn’t matter. So much of the best live performance I’ve seen has been solo shows, from Daniel MacIvor to Robert Lepage to Robyn Hitchcock to Nick Lowe to Fiona Shaw to David Cale, not to mention one-actor plays like Adam Rapp’s Nocturne and Craig Wright’s Mistakes Were Made. As with any kind of show, when the work is good, audiences love them, once they’re in the door—that’s the reward of working in a form that is easy to ridicule and beating that ridicule. That’s the fun of taking a maligned form and making it new, and making it work. That’s the fun of the fight.

Your real job is relationships. No new surprise there.

You build relationships through shared meaning and narrative. Still, no great revelation.

Meaning is through shared language.

What are you creating to bring new language to the collective discussion?

Dr. Seuss (a master in the use of language) put it best when he wrote the book On Beyond Zebra. He challenged his readers to break out of the confines of the ordinary alphabet, to see what new things are out beyond what we already know.

What new words are you creating to build relationships?

2AMT is a good example. A year ago, this term had no meaning, heck it did not even exist. Now it gives people context to share ideas and build relationships. If the timing is right, a term can spread, build momentum and enter the fabric of the culture. Companies do this all the time. The word ”facebook” did not have meaning until context and activity was created behind it. But there is a potential problem when a new word is integrated in to the culture, it can become old or loose its meaning.

So, another question, what are you doing, that no one else is doing, to connect? How are you keeping it new?

@BostonCourt brought up a good point on the #LAThtr (Los Angeles Theater hash tag) when Brian tweeted:

Our tendency is to use the new with the same methods we are using the old. The easiest way to use twitter is another tool for your press releases, but that does not create relationships. The new must be used in ever changing new ways. If relationships is not the focus for people using twitter, it will soon become that thing that every one is using to promote that thing they are trying to sell, or get you to come see. Facebook invites have already become that.

Here is the catch; it takes relationships to help create new ways of using things to build more and deeper relationships. Through the #LAThtr discussion that started with @BostonCourt’s tweet, there was a kernal of an idea.

The goals in the rehearsal room for a new play is based on relationship through narrative; relationships between artists, relationships between characters, relationships between artists and audience. What happens if the marketing is run like the rehearsal process for a new play?

I worked as a teaching artist for The New Victory Theater. The education department creates pre- and post-show workshops for the touring shows that are being performed on The New Vic stage. The education staff and team of teaching artists create the lesson plans in house for each of the shows. Realizing that most of the staff and teaching artist ensemble were trained as theater professionals, they looked for ways in which the teaching artists could use their theater background in the creation of the lesson plans. They decided to model their curriculum development based on the rehearsal process of creating a new play. They created the following steps:

1. Dramaturgical Background: Research and Discovery

2. Devising and Improvisation: Brainstorm & Playful Experimentation

3. Rehearsal: Preparation

4. Tech Rehearsal: Run Through

5. Dress Rehearsal: Refinement

6. Final Dress: Activation

This curriculum rehearsal process has the overall goal of connecting with the students through a narrative journey, as a new play’s rehearsal goals are to tell a good story through the connections made on stage and to the audience. How could a marketing department go through these steps with every project they produce? Some steps might fit better than others, but here is a rough estimate of what this process might look like.

1. Dramaturgical Background: Research and Discovery – This seems to be a lot of the work Devon V. Smith is sharing over at 24 Usable Hours. In starting any marketing project, one must research how previous efforts worked (or did not work) and then look to similar companies and organizations to see if their outcomes can bring any discovery to how to set up the current project.

2. Devising and Improvisation: Brainstorm & Playful Experimentation – The story I like to tell is when I was in college I watched a video about an artist who was a former Disney Imagineer. He said at the beginning of any project, the team would sit in a room that was filled, floor to ceiling, with whiteboards. Their job was to fill them with any and every idea, and could not move on until all the whiteboards were covered. No idea was bad, and it all had to be written down. Does your devising start with every possible idea under the sun? How many whiteboards can you fill at the start of each of your projects?

3. Rehearsal: Preparation – The techy term is alpha testing. It is so rough it is not even beta yet. This is where you might start connecting what seems to be tagent ideas on the whiteboards. What connects and what doesn’t fit? Once the beginning connections are being made, this is where you come up with every scenario of how this project might or might not work to meet the end goal of sharing a narrative to build relationships. What are the outliers? What are the expectations and how are they projected to be met? What are the potential obstacles that need to be overcome?

4. Tech Rehearsal: Run Through – Now beta testing begins. Who are your audience members that you already have deep relationships who would volunteer to try this plan out? Deep enough relationships, that there is plenty of forgiveness when the mistakes happen, because they will happen. The ones that won’t talk bad if the plan never gets off the ground and are the first ones to praise it to everyone they know when it works.

5. Dress Rehearsal: Refinement – After getting feedback from those deep, loving patrons, this is where you can make the necessary edits and maybe broaden out the circle of trust. Try the newest version on a little more people, maybe not the newest patron in the organization’s family, but you get the idea.

6. Final Dress: Activation – This is the final beta step before going live to the general public. One more chance to get feedback and make edits. By this time, the project is ready to lift off the ground and buzz is already starting to leak out about this mysterious new thing the organization is about ready to do.

Dennis Baker lives the ultimate freelance life as an actor, teaching artist, fight director and also working in web design, web development and search engine optimization. You can follow him at @dennisbaker

Gwydion, this one’s for YOU.

Recently, after having pored through a stack of theater brochures that hit my inbox, I put out a whimsical challenge to the #2amt twitter community:

Describe your next project in 140 characters without using a single adjective.

Gwydion remarked that he LIKED adjectives, and wasn’t sure eliminating them would make for stronger play descriptions. A fair point, and I like adjectives too. But today I would like to take a moment to make a case for why they should DIE… or at least be used as a very occasional spice rather than a main course.

Here’s the thing. We have probably all, when staring at a blank page and tasked with describing the next show to hit our stage (or to tumble out of our typewriter), resorted to a description that looked something like this:

Hamlet is a brooding, classic tale of a haunted prince whose life takes a horrifying turn when his regal but doomed mother shacks up with his conniving manipulative uncle… and tragedy of epic proportions ensues. Exhilarating, dramatic, and breathlessly intriguing, ABC Theatre Company’s intimate production of The Bard’s quintessential tragedy explores the horrifying consequences of indecisiveness in the face of epic events.

Okay, maybe you’ve never written anything quite so appalling. I certainly have. There are three kinds of bad behavior happening here, all of which are caused by over-reliance on saucy adjectives to do our descriptive heavy lifting.

1. Limp verbs. By spending our rhetorical energy saying how connivingly manipulative and regally doomed the characters are, we haven’t actually said what they DO. And in order to support that string of fancy descriptors we’ve had to use limp, useless verbs like “is” and “takes” and cliches like “explores.”

Which is a shame, because, when people ask what a play is about, they almost always ask “So, what happens ?” They hardly EVER ask, “So, what kind of people are in this play?”

These lovely vivid adjectives force all the action out of the verbs and into the static picture frame of character description. As my 9th grade english teacher used to say… every adjective is really a verb waiting to be put into action. So Claudius should “connive,” not be “conniving” and by “conniving,” Claudius then “dooms” Gertrude to horrors. Same underlying meaning, only now we see what they DO rather than how the ARE, clarifying the picture while simultaneously driving it forward, into action.

And speaking of 9th grade…

2. Your Audience Do Not Have Post-Grad Degrees. Well, some of them do, I’m guessing. But this pile of semantically impressive adjectives have helped push the “Flesh-Kincaid Reading Level” of this description up to a whopping Grade Level 18 (meaning the person most likely to understand every word of it probably has 18 years of formal schooling… a post-grad degree). As a young marketing director, I once had my own parents (college graduates both) pull me aside and  admit to me that they didn’t really understand about half the copy in my company’s most recent brochure. It was hard to read, they explained …too… “wordy.”

Wonder why performing arts audiences tend to have a disproportionately large percentage of  post-graduate degrees compared to the general public? Maybe it’s because they’re the only ones who can understand our marketing materials. Yes, we all laughed when it was pointed out that George W. Bush’s speeches averaged a 5th grade reading level, but perhaps there’s a happy middle ground?

As writers and marketing folk, we tend to be word people, by definition. And we are extremely well versed in the jargon of our industry… to the point that we often forget that it is jargon. It’s important to keep in mind, however, that much of the potential audience that might LOVE our work are picture people, or action people or feeling people, rather than word people.  And the research suggests that keeping the reading level of your marketing descriptions below the college graduate level makes them more accessible, and therefore more interesting, to the average non- “word-person” reader.

3. You Don’t Get To Decide How Good It is. Your Audience Does. There’s a certain number of adjectives that end up in our descriptive copy because we are afraid the reader won’t get how “GOOD” it is unless we tell them explicitly. So we throw in a string of heart-thumping adjectives… “exhilarating” “dramatic” “intimate” production of the “world’s greatest” play. I like to call these bits the “artistic director appeasement clause.” They often end up in your copy because, after crafting a clear and compelling description of what happens in the show, there will often be someone (frequently a director or artistic director) who will express a worry that the audience won’t know how GOOD it is unless you spell it out for them.

Here’s the problem. In today’s advertising and media soaked culture, your audience is warier than ever of self-congratulatory or self-aggrandizing copy. You call yourself “exhilarating” and they smell a rat. A rat made out of flowery unsubstantiated claims of quality. Ironically, in your attempt to assure them how “good” it will be, you’ve actually made them more skeptical of the potential quality of the work. So unless you can actually quote an independent third party, i.e.  “In a production the World Weekly News calls ‘exhilarating and intriguing’ ABC Theater Company  dives deep beneath surface of…” it will serve you better to focus on making “exhilarating” copy rather than convincing them the show itself is “exhilarating”… just because you say so.

Even better, consider letting go of your reliance on the safe, anonymous 3rd person altogether and appeal directly to your audience in the 2nd person. Don’t tell them the play is exhilarating. Invite them to “come and be exhilarated by one man’s fight against….yada yada.” You get the picture.

Answer the question “what’s in it for me?” by helping them see how attending the performance will make them feel. What they will experience, not only through their eyes, but right there in their chair, down to the tingling tips of their little pinky toes.

I recently saw a campaign for a Queensland Ballet Company whose tagline was, “Need a Lift?”

Accompanying the tagline were startling images of dancers defying gravity with their partners. The image spoke volumes about the technical excellence and boundary-pushing nature of the performance. But the tagline shot straight to the heart of an audience member’s experience- inviting them to come away from an evening of ballet with spirits, mind and heart lifted. Now THAT’s exhilarating.

So am I arguing that you should literally cut every adjective you ever use?

Of course not. The sheer number of adjectives in this post would make me a hypocrite if I were.

But the next time you sit down to describe a show, consider taking your first draft and X-ing out every single adjective you’ve thrown in there. Is the copy that’s left active? Does it help the audience member feel what the experience will be like? Does it’s answer the question “So, What Happens?” Does it compel you to find out more about the show?

Then take a look at the adjectives you’ve discarded. Can some of them work harder for you as verbs or adverbs? Can the nouns you use be more precise, requiring fewer adjectives to make your meaning clear? Can your “qualitative”  adjectives be justified with a quote from a reputable source? And how many of them really add to the fundamental understanding of what happens in the show? How many of them make the show feel “worth seeing?” And how many are just proving the excellent quality of your own liberal arts education?

Make your adjectives EARN their place in  your descriptive copy. The ones that survive will be worth it. The ones that don’t won’t be missed. Trust me.

We all have regrets. We have the shows we almost saw, the times when we didn’t quite make it out the door, didn’t cross town, and then the show we wanted to see existed on Earth no more. It happened without us. We so wanted to go. We were tired, or we were distracted, or the cost was too high, or a combination of all of these, and that was that.  Missed it.

A while ago, in Minneapolis, Prince would regularly do last-minute, low-key shows and donate the proceeds to local charities. A friend was going to one of these and invited me along. 50 dollars. To see Prince play for a few hours—solo, on electric guitar, if I remember right—in a small nightclub, for an audience of a hundred people, a few sets, late into the night. For 50 dollars. For only 50 dollars. Going to a non-profit charity, on top of that. 

I was doing temp work at the time, but of course I could have gone.

In early 2004, a friend invited me to an after-work mixer at HotHouse, a small, dapper not-for-profit nightclub in Chicago, now closed. 10 bucks. A little fundraiser for a guy running for Senate. In retrospect, if the ticket had instead been 100 bucks, would it have been worth it to spend happy hour in a small room with Barack Obama? Take a guess.

When the Guardian, admirably covering online arts articles, reported last week on the online debate about ticket pricing at not-for-profit theaters, it got an essential fact wrong. Chris Wilkinson wrote, and it still appears incorrectly in the online article, that “Arena [Stage] is currently charging a minimum of $95 (approx £60) for tickets to its new season.” 

Does it matter that, in fact, one show in Arena Stage’s season is carrying the $95-$115 ticket price, not the whole season? And that the $95 show is a new play in Arena’s smallest venue, while two other shows—Oklahoma! and Anna Devere Smith’s Let Me Down Easy—are running at the same time, for a substantially lower ticket price? I think it needs to be at the crux of the debate. Not: can Arena “raise” its ticket price to $95? But: can a theater hold an exclusive event in a smaller venue and call it something other than a fundraiser? And if an organization with theaters of several sizes is going to have a potential pre-Broadway tryout, is there wisdom—for artistic reasons—in putting on the show in its smallest space instead of its largest?

The articles I’ve read about Arena and ticket pricing have neglected to talk about the art, the particulars of this show. Every Tongue Confess features Phylicia Rashad, is directed by Kenny Leon, and is being staged in a  theater with only 200 seats.

Stadium concerts have never been my thing.  $100 for Dave Matthews? $250 for the Rolling Stones? Not my thing. $100 for Shrek? Or for a Broadway show?  Pass.

But put, say, Mike Nichols directing Robin Williams, Steve Martin, and Bill Irwin in a 299-seat theater doing Waiting for Godot? An arm and a leg, gladly—because it will happen, and then it will never exist again. Or [insert here the name of your favorite living musician], playing a small room? Sure. Or [insert here Phylicia Rashad, a new gospel-inspired play, and a show that might end up on Broadway, running during the holidays] in an intimate space?  Yeah, especially assuming that the show is appropriate for a small venue.

We’ve certainly had a century of the opposite: from Tennesee Williams to August Wilson, many plays come to life in an intimate venue, but those outsized tenement living rooms and workplaces become exaggerated when adjusted to fill a wide, high, deep LORT mainstage or Broadway stage.

Does the largest space always need to be the highest priced ticket? Instead of the new play in the small space for the low price, can the old play in the big space be more moderately priced, and the new show in the jewel box be the exclusive ticket?

These shows are not designed to be part of a regular diet of $100-a-ticket shows, any more than LVMH expects its consumers to buy its products every week, or a wedding ring is designed to be a regular purchase. Arena is audaciously offering a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and if they can deliver on that, then it’s worth the price.

Who can afford Every Tongue Confess? The question is not who can afford Every Tongue Confess every week, or who can afford a season ticket at $95 per show. It’s not a country club or a university. The question is: who wants to make this show their rare, special occasion?  Is this going to be an “elite” audience, or simply an audience of patrons excited enough to see this show?

What first struck me about Arena’s choices with Every Tongue Confess is that they put their most expensive show in their smallest venue—and that the play is a new play. The most dressed-up audience, the audience that has spent the most and has invested the most monetarily in the evening, the audience in possession of the so-called hottest ticket in town, is the one showing up for a new play in a small space. This is a thoroughly different model than putting the warhorse or star vehicle on the mainstage for a high price, while consigning a new play by a resident writer to the cheapest ticket.

If Steppenwolf were to put John Malkovich in its 100-seat Garage Theater, and charge a high ticket price, would it provide an inclusive experience by providing an exclusive one?  Would it be an effective way to launch, say, a new Randall Colburn or Brett Neveu play into production?

Should a not-for-profit be in the luxury business? Is it justifiable in opera, where ticket prices top $100 because fundamental production requirements haven’t changed in a century? Should a fundraiser be the only excusable exclusive event? Can a special occasion carry the value of a hundred dollars and not be a luxury experience, in the way that a diamond ring or a honeymoon hotel isn’t a luxury? These are questions worth raising—but, first, the occasion, and the facts of the occasion, need to be factored into the equation of the reasoning.

Ah, the way a conversation develops in today’s online media world. To track the current conversation happening within the theater blogosphere about the ethical ramifications of dynamic pricing on the missions and non-profit status of arts organizations, you’d have to start with a #2amt Twitter conversation from over a year ago (now largely lost to the internet thanks to Twitter’s lack of long term storage), then you might check out a series of posts I did in response to that conversation about different pricing strategies on this site.

You’d probably then want to check out a post on Parabasis calling Arena Stage to task for their use of dynamic pricing on a recent show that ended up spiking prices up above $100/ticket. That sparked a fresh #2amt Twitter conversation and this post from Gwydion Suilebahn about discussing prices in a civilized way. Which led to a lengthy (and highly readable) comment stream, which led to another post from Gwydion and then to a fresh post by Isaac Butler at Parabasis responding in kind.

For the purposes of brevity I will assume you’ve been following the conversation to date.
As one of the originators of this whole conversation who was name-checked in Isaac’s post, I started to respond with my two cents in the comments of his post… but evidently I had an unwieldy tin cup on the dresser full of change to contribute,  so here goes:

As Isaac points out, I am indeed the one that argued that an artificially set limit on all ticket prices in the theater industry would have the inevitable consequence of lowering the ability of theaters to provide artists a living wage. I should perhaps have said, all of the professionals who are employed by an arts organization.

And yes, I am a staff member at an organization (Portland Center Stage) that had to lay off its literary department (in addition to dozens of other staff positions from every department in the organization) a while back. Isaac and I both know the members of PCS’ former literary department personally and well, and I have a deep and abiding respect for their past work and endless hope for the success of their future endeavors. I bring this up because Isaac mentions in a couple of different places during his conversation about the ethics of ticket prices that certain large organizations have laid off whole literary departments. It  seems to be a bit of an elephant in the room of this conversation, I’d like to address it briefly.

Isaac, I  would suspect that we would both strongly prefer that the talented, fiercely dedicated staff members you are referring to currently had staff positions at an arts organization that would allow them to use their incredible skill sets towards the good of the larger theater world. You will get no argument from me on that. We would both agree that they should be well paid for that effort, as their skill sets merit a living wage. I can’t speak for every member of my organization, but I suspect that I wouldn’t find too many people who would disagree with that statement.

In fact, I suspect everyone reading this blog could name a dozen incredibly talented, fiercely dedicated, amazing artists and administrators whose livelihoods (and careers) have been threatened or eliminated by theater companies who found themselves having to suddenly shrink their budgets and lay off staff in the face of BOTH shrinking earned and contributed revenue in the last 3 years.

But I don’t understand how artificially limiting ticket prices at my institution (Portland Center Stage) or at any institution, would have protected those jobs, made it easier to create “mission pure” work or made it more likely that we would have received increased contributed income that would have protected those jobs or the high-risk work we would both like to see more large arts organizations undertake.

Trust me, if a magic bullet grant existed that said “keep your ticket prices below X dollar value and we’ll make up the difference in your budget, with some extra to increase the pay of your contract actors and designers,” every arts organization I know of would be doing backflips to try to secure it.

In fact, that’s part of what puzzles me about the implication that non-profit arts organizations should quit trying to increase earned revenue or else give up on claiming non-profit status entirely. You state yourself that the most obvious outcome of giving up non-profit status would be that “theater would largely disappear from many metro areas.”

Of course this is not quite accurate: most metro areas have a thriving sub-culture of fringe companies who make very minimal contributed revenue, whose actors work for free (often as both actor and administrator) and whose sole means of support is via their members’ personal income and a small amount generated through low price ticket sales. This model already exists, and for the artists who are willing to work at that (non-existent) pay scale, it seems to work well.

It would continue to work  well (or, at least as well as it does now) in a world where theater does not qualify as a non-profit… many of them are not large or organized enough to be 501(c)s as it is. These companies would continue to form, create work, grow, merge into other companies, fail and/or carry on, just because their artists would like them to.

But none of these companies are in a position to support people like our mutual friend or to pay actors and designers a wage worthy of the name.

In the hypothetical “stop calling yourself a nonprofit” scenario, the organizations that actually have a high likelihood of failing are the mid-size and larger non-profit organizations who have the means to have on staff literary departments (or staff at all). And yes, if run as a for-profit entity those organizations would either go under or become highly rarified boutique offerings available only to the few who are able and willing to pay the real cost per audience member of a theatrical performance.

Its important to point out here that opposite example is also true: drastically limit the earned revenue potential of arts organizations and force heavier reliance on contributed revenue sources and you would see a similarly dramatic elimination of arts organizations across the country, for the simple reason that the pool of contributed revenue available is finite and currently shrinking.

Neither scenario would restore the positions that we all lament have been lost by the dramatic economic downshifts of the last couple years, and neither scenario would increase artist opportunity or compensation.

So don’t think Isaac is actually arguing for a world in which all arts organizations subsist entirely on contributed income or live or die entirely by the whim of the market.

His point, if I am understanding him correctly, is that increasing reliance on (or employing strategies that allow for a greater possibility of) earned revenue carries the substantial risk that arts organizations will move towards the money and away from their missions.

Honestly this is a concern that every arts organization I know is fighting to address, day by day. How do we stay alive (even if bruised and smaller) so that we can continue to create social good for our communities (and, within that, create opportunities for the artists and staff members we value to make a living where they can do the most social good?) How do we avoid losing sight of our mission in the difficult drive to make ends meet?

And all of us are scared that increased reliance on earned revenue could ultimately hamper our ability to to take the big creative risks that move the art form forward (although most of us hope (and work) towards an increase in total revenue that allows us more cushion to do BOTH- increase artistic risk and minimize financial risk).

Yes, this situation would ABSOLUTELY be eliminated by a sudden increase in foundation, corporate and individual giving to the arts. And I don’t know an arts organization, large or small, who wouldn’t leap at the chance to secure the future of their organizations (and increase the accessibility of their performances) through a dramatic increase in contributed revenue.

That’s not the environment we’re currently in, however. Even internationally, government support for the arts is rapidly going out of favor (even in countries like England and Vietnam with long traditions of nearly full government subsidy of the arts). We must make hay, as someone pointed out in an earlier post “when [and where] the sun is shining.” And this problem is not confined to arts non-profits either. The entire non-profit community is looking for ways to balance the shrinking pool of contributed revenue available to them by finding new and increased earned revenue options that are consistent with their mission. Here’s one example.

So as much as I can agree that it may be an exaggeration to say it’s impossible to pay artists well without healthy earned revenue (because in a hypothetical perfect world contributed income and/or “the right priorities for who to pay” could balance out that shortfall),  I need to point out that even social service non-profits are seeking to balance their contributed revenue with increased earned revenue right now, because they realize that earned revenue allows them greater flexibility and long term stability with which to fulfill their mission. In fact, as the Freedom Trail Executive director points out in the above article, it is entirely possible, and indeed preferable to:

” earn revenue not only to support our educational mission but to fulfill it as well.”

One last point:

It is also a false dichotomy, unsupported by the actual research, that a dynamic pricing (or “right price for the right person at the right time” philosophy) automatically excludes “younger, hipper” audience members or requires an organization to only produce shows that are engineered to maximize that high end price point by targeting older, whiter, more affluent patrons to the exclusion of diverse audiences.

In fact, my own organization’s use of dynamic pricing has coincided with a dramatic increase in the number of under-40 patrons who have become regular attendees and donors. I don’t think the pricing caused that- I think other strategic efforts to communicate with, and be accessible to, a different generation are largely responsible. So I wouldn’t claim a corellation. Dynamic pricing did not equal younger audience.

But dynamic pricing has in no way suppressed the attendance of this new demographic either. The two (high prices and depressed Generation X/Y attendance) are only arguably correlated in situations where, as you point out, people “haven’t even heard of the show until the ticket prices are sky high.”

I can absolutely agree with Isaac that a communication strategy that allows new audiences to only discover the show when “ticket prices are sky high,” is a poor one indeed.

But I completely disagree that younger audiences stay away solely because of high ticket prices. I know too much about what friends and neighbors of my generation spend on nights seeing local music or tickets to Lady Gaga to think that price is the only (or even primary) barrier to younger arts attendance. I would instead say that younger audiences stay away because of poor perceived value- ie, will this performance be worth the money they are asking me to spend on it?

The perceived value of a $100 concert ticket is obvious to a rabid Lady Gaga fan. The perceived value of an unfamiliar theatrical performance, with performers I’ve never heard and a story line that doesn’t sound familiar is much harder for the uninitiated and unconverted potential young arts patron to feel confident in.

And yes, organizations that would like to try dynamic pricing need to work very hard to make sure the value proposition holds as the price increases on a popular show- is this going to be “worth it?”

But then, the point of the dynamic pricing system is that a theater wouldn’t raise the price until demand (created by other communications about the relevance, quality and “worthiness” of the production) had shown that people (of all ages) did find it “worth” what you were charging.

So unless we are trying to say that younger, hipper audiences are by definition financially incapable of paying for an evening’s entertainment (which is statistically untrue- being young does not equal being broke, nor does it equal only being willing to pay $10 for night out), then what we are actually saying is that younger audiences start out less sold on the “value proposition” that theater offers vs. other ways to spend the same amount of money.

And yes, if we want to grow a younger audience, we have a huge responsibility to prove that what we offer is as valuable as the latest rom-com on Netflix or a favorite band (and the accompanying beer tab). And it’s very easy to increase the “perceived value” of our work by lowering the price across the board, essentially lessening how “amazing” our experience has to be in order to be “worth it.”

To me, this tactic feels like side-stepping the question of what the performances we create are “worth” to a given audience member by refusing to even ask the question.

Having said that, there are companies whose work I respect who choose to keep their ticket prices set as low as they possibly think they can afford as part of their organizational philosophy, and that’s certainly a choice they can make. It’s not a choice that has lead, as far as I know, to a dramatic counterbalancing influx of contributed revenue for them. Nor has it lead to better pay for the artists and staff that they employ, as far as I’m aware.

So although I am completely supportive of organizations like this as one part of the overall theatrical ecosystem, I can see no way to be supportive of this as a blanket model constraining all people wishing to produce theater. My colleagues deserve to be paid better than this. And they deserve to be seen by audiences who feel their work was worth more than $10 a ticket (even if $10 is the price point that particular audience member paid that day).

And finally, I have seen no evidence that dynamic pricing has led funders to question the “value proposition” of funding theater… or that an increase in earned revenue streams has caused a decrease in funding for non-profits in general. The decrease in non-profit funding has been caused by the shrinking earned revenue of the funders themselves, due to the economy, and every funder I’ve spoken to understands that.

In fact, granting organizations seem to be more comfortable funding organizations who have proven they have a healthy (and growing) earned revenue balance sheet.

Why? Because granting organizations do not want to be in the position of covering your artists’ paychecks year in and year out. They want to help you get to the starting gate (or in some cases the finish line) on a certain goal or project, and along the way they want assurances that your organization has the resources and wherewithal to continue the good work they helped to start.

And nothing says that an organization is valued by a community like a large and healthy pool of patrons willing to pay (and donate) top dollar to participate in the work that you are creating. What constitutes “top dollar” might be different for each participant, based on their means and preferences. But it’s still a vote of confidence and a key measure that contributors (be they government, foundation, or individual donors) have learned to respect as a measure of the overall health of an organization.

Dynamic pricing is one way to help an organization reach a balanced budget. Cutting administrative and artistic staff is another. Pushing a shrinking donor pool to contribute more is another. Cutting the art you see on stage is another.

I know which choice I feel the most ethically comfortable with. What about you?

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.

At least twice a rehearsal, a potential audience member wanders in and asks what we’re doing. They ask what play this is, if they can watch us rehearse, when we’re performing, whether we need more performers, and if we ever hold open mic nights. These are people from the neighborhood who have never heard of our company. They don’t follow us on Twitter. They’re not our friend on Facebook. We’ve never sent them an e-mail blast or a season mailer; we just made ourselves visible.

Edgewater Artists in Motion space

We’re rehearsing at this venue for the first time: an empty storefront on temporary loan from the owner to a local artist as part of a neighborhood revitalization program run by the Edgewater Chamber of Commerce. The space is used by a half-dozen other groups, including an environmental non-profit, a series of art classes for children, and CAPS (Chicago Alternate Policing Strategy). Colorful flags cover the drooping ceiling, and original artwork hung by the venue’s curator decorates the walls. The space is about the same size and shape as the storefront theater in which we’ll be performing. But there’s one important different: the windows aren’t covered.

Anyone walking by rehearsal sees not just the poster for our show, but also the actors working. Yes, they get to see our art being created. The neighborhood’s other three performance venues are nearly invisible to passers-by: one’s inside a larger building, and the other two have windows swathed in blackout curtains. Well obviously: stage lights don’t mix well with street lights. Still, at those theaters, no one walking by is going to have his eye caught by artists working live.

Rehearsing in this fishbowl has taken some adjusting. I certainly wasn’t prepared the first time someone walked in the door in the middle of a scene and asked loudly what we sold here. (“Uh… Theater?”) Let me break down the experience so far:

Joys

• * In such a high foot traffic area (four doors down from an El stop), we get over a hundred people walking by each hour and seeing us work.
• * Because the venue looks like a store, potential audience members feel comfortable walking in and asking questions. Also, these aren’t your typical theater patrons: not a single 65-year-old white woman has stopped by.
• * According to the Chamber of Commerce, the conspicuous presence of an occupied arts venue brings down crime. In any case, the local beat cop seems to like us.
• * We, the artists, get to talk to people who are interested in our work.

Challenges

• * In such a high foot traffic area (remember the El?), we sometimes have to compete with outside noise. Glass doesn’t stop a lot of sound.
• * There might be an interruption in the work when a visitor walks in. Usually the stage manager or ASM will greet the person and ask him to hang on until the next stopping point, when we have a minute to chat. But sometimes things don’t happen that neatly.
• * The more open atmosphere isn’t particularly conducive to intimate moments: we’re postponing work on the sex scene until we’re in a more private rehearsal venue.

If you’re dreaming of getting more involved in the neighborhood where you make art, could you modify a part of this method to help? How would your rehearsal process change if you rehearsed in a fishbowl? How would your relationship with potential audience members change?