The Artistic Opportunity of Membership

Artistic Director is a weird position. When folks from the outside the industry ask what that means I usually haul out the standard answer, “I pick the season.”  Of course, that’s a ridiculous answer, since I don’t pick seasons; I pick plays, I pick artists. In any event, it’s doubly ridiculous because they look enlightened for a moment, then you can always see them think, “how long can that take?” And the real answer is, not very long. Because I think it’s the smallest part of the job, even if it’s the most visible.

But my actual job as artistic director? I create community. A community of artists gather to create a story to tell a group of watchers. That group in the theater builds another community during the event, and that spills outward and mixes with (and sometimes changes) our larger cultural community. My job is to foster and nurture that process from the page outward.

Our community story here at Theater Wit is even more complex, because 80% of the work in our building is generated by other companies, each with their own communities of artists and audience mixing under one roof. This interaction has been part of our intent for the building since its conception. There are real reasons I don’t have a  main stage with another studio space ghettoized on the side. Theater Wit wants to build a city-wide egalitarian community of artists and a central gathering place for those audience members interested in their work and theatrical work in general.

And that is why I am so excited about the community opportunities offered by our new membership program. In a nutshell, it works like this:

• You buy a membership for a flat monthly fee, about the price of a full price ticket.
• With your membership, you can attend any production at Theater Wit, presented by any company, at any time as many times as you wish.
• The monthly fee auto-renews on your credit card.
• After three months, you can cancel anytime.
• Twice a year you can bring a friend for free.

And that’s the entire program. It’s a really simple, basic story but I think has the potential to be a powerful community building force.

In the theater, we are always bemoaning the difficulty of attracting new audiences. New audience is essential to our art form, not just from a financial perspective, but new audiences directly foster experimentation and growth in the art. How many times have we heard theaters say “our subscribers would never go for that”? A constantly developing audience base is a challenge to every artist involved in the project, a constantly shifting bar that forces you to always be reaching and changing your work. The moment you think you know what your audience wants is the moment you stop giving it.

But, to get a new ticket buyer into our shows we need to a) explain to you the story of the play, b) provide context in the form of reviews or recommendations as to the quality and type of the work, c) make a personal connection to your life, d) teach you where the theater is, e) assure you that the “difficulty” of getting to the theater will be worth the effort, and f) ask you to risk $25-$45 dollars based on all the above. And we need to do all this in the context of a print ad, a tweet, perhaps a postcard, or we have to marshall six different communications to hit that prospective audience member to tell all those facets of the story before we close in 2-6 weeks.

Seriously, it’s a miracle anyone makes in the fucking door. And all this has to happen BEFORE we get to present work to the public. Then, you decide if that work is speaking to them and maybe start building that tenuous connection with our theatre that will turn you into dedicated audience. And if your experience isn’t fantastic, each time? Add (g) make you forget the last experience to our impossible new audience development list.

And everyone agrees that our new generation of audience is making decisions based on the individual show even more than institutional reputation. So we need to do the impossible over and over again. This leads to safe programming and marketing driving programming that says “here’s what we can sell” rather than “here’s what we can create”. And that just betrays the artists and audience ever more.

So let’s change the entire process. Let’s alter the entire relationship between the artists and the audience. We should use Theater Wit’s unique situation to try and build community for EVERYONE, every company, every artist and every audience member.

Transform the audience by changing the question

First, imagine the question for each audience member isn’t “Is this play worth it?” but “What should I see next?” As a member, the first show you see is basically prepaid for with your ticket price.  The second show is free. And so forth.

Experimentation therefore becomes an extremely low-risk venture for our audience. There is a real tyranny of choice in Chicago theater. Hundreds of companies. Think about that for a moment.  Hundreds. How do you try and evaluate if a particular company, much less a particular show will be worth the cost? You can’t; it’s impossible. Sure, you could spend an hour googling about, researching a show, the company history, the artists’ histories. And then another hour doing the next listing, etc. After you’ve spend 40 hours researching the “best” thing to do Saturday night, it’s Monday and you’ve been fired.

Choice is in some ways the enemy of experimentation. If you can find the “perfect” show for them (or believe you can), you feel more personal responsibility to find that specific experience and so make safer choices for yourself. When is the last time you said “Why not?” and went to see a show you knew nothing about beyond a short plot description? You don’t, because you’re making a $80-$120 gamble with your evening (assuming you aren’t going alone).  What if that evening was $0? Would it change your entertainment calculus?

Imagine the new question: “What can I see tonight?” You’ve got a membership, you go to the site and look at the three to six shows being presented. You only need to ask “do I want to experience this?” because the additional cost is only in time, not in money. That’s a powerful change.

We can reject the model of selling tickets in favor of offering you an opportunity to come to the theater.

Build connections between audience members and theaters while avoiding cannibalizing that relationship

We can act as a matchmaker between you, our audience and the theaters in our space (including ourselves). The entire point of the membership program is to encourage you to find new experiences. We try when possible to present multiple works by a company in our space over a year, giving multiple chances for the audience to connect with the work a particular theater does.

It was also very important to make sure memberships didn’t ruin opportunities for theaters to build separate subscription relationships. I’m not a subscription fan, but I recognize that they are an essential part of a number of institutions. A membership is more expensive than a subscription. Of course, you get more opportunities to see theater with a membership and there’s no upfront cost, but subscription pricing is a better choice for some people and we don’t want to undermine that. We can’t cannibalize our hosted theater’s revenue models. In fact, we should…

Increase revenue for every theater and their artists in our space

We pay a flat fee, roughly equivalent to other discount outlets, to the theater for each membership ticket. It is consequently very easy for us to lose money on a membership but I think this model is the only ethical way we can do it. Memberships have to work in all directions within the community. We can’t shortsell the artists in order to serve the larger community goals. And its all opportunity driven.  A membership doesn’t guarantee you a ticket to every show; it just allows you to reserve available stock.

Theater Wit is uniquely suited to do this work, because of our placement in Chicago which is unquestionably one of the world’s centers for theater. Our multiple venue, curated model for companies allows us to present astonishing work by Chicago’s best storefronts. Because I just identify the company and not the individual projects, Theater Wit can act in an editorial way, presenting the best storefront companies while still providing artistic autonomy for shows and not poisoning the well, so to speak, with our own expectations and whatever expectations we think our audience is bringing to the table.

I don’t know what we’ll learn from the membership program. I don’t know if we’ll lose thousands of dollars. I don’t know if this will change how audiences gather in our space in any way, or if it will strengthen our community.

I do know that we have a unique opportunity to create a new community.  And hey, that’s supposed to be my job.

See you at the theater!

Jeremy Wechsler
Artistic Director,
Theater Wit
  smart.art
http://www.theaterwit.org
@jwechsler

CT(a)C 2011 after the dust settles

The Chicago Theater (anti-) Conference just drew to a close a day ago, and like many of the participants, I’ve been reviewing the weekend. While the theme this year was structured around sharing secrets of excellence, i.e. what do the member theaters do that has worked wonders for them, this idea actually pulled out another common thread:

Lazy thinking kills more art than economics, funders, and bad business practices combined.

(Although the first certainly causes the last)

Last year, I spoke with Paul Botts, who used to act as the Managing Director for a theatre, and then moved into the role of funder for the Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation. He’s since moved on, so this example won’t, thankfully, be sycophantic. He spoke for about five minutes on his deep distrust for “common wisdom,” and called for actual data to inform theaters’ business and artistic practices.  At the close of CT(a)C 2010, Roche Schulfer from the Goodman talked about the youth of the regional theatre movement, and how pulling lessons from the last forty years could be a trap. While certainly theaters have hit upon some winning strategies, they aren’t written in stone. And there’s ample evidence that those lessons and tactics were very temporal and local. Figuring out how to be an artist/run a theater NOW is a totally different kettle of fish.

From my geek computer background, I think of forty years in technology.  Forty years ago, we had no home computers. My dad had a digital calculator the size of a brick. There was no internet, no social media, no computer animation, no mobile phones, etc. For fuck’s sake, there weren’t even fax machines. And you can see the corpses of technology companies over the last 40 years who failed to reinvent themselves. Any company who built a business model on what went before instead of what’s next was dead in a matter of months.  It’s so well known that we don’t even think about it anymore. When’s the last time you went to renew your mobile phone and asked for last year’s model? Sent a physical newsletter to someone? Clipped something from the paper to send to a friend? (Or for many, picked up a newspaper at all?)

But here we theaters are, acting like fax machine manufacturers expecting Pulitzer awards for innovation. Don Hall’s presentation on alternative spaces had good and bad points, but one of his key arguments, that theaters spend money on theater venues without thinking about it was incontestable. Lazy thinking. Don suggested that theaters needed to think about the work they were doing and ask themselves the question, “Does this work need to be in a theater space to fulfill its mission?” (Well, something like that. He probably swore more). Over the next six hours, I heard a quick description of “subscriber numbers” from three theaters. And I’m discussing small theaters.  If these groups had more than six subscribers, I will have an aneurism in utter shock. One of these groups is happy if they had six AUDIENCE members some evenings.  Why are they talking about subscribers? Because they think they need to. Lazy thinking.

Deb Clapp from the League of Chicago Theaters talked over lunch about the small companies that give a staff list of folks like “Marketing Director” and “Grant Manager.”  “What does your Marketing Director do?” she might ask, and the theatre would say “Well… they’re pretty busy with a day job at the moment, so they haven’t really been around.” To which the reasonable (but never asked question) is “So why do you have a marketing director?”  Not “why do you have a lame marketing director that can’t spend any time on your theater” but “why do you have a marketing director at all?”

Because that’s what theaters have. We can see it at the larger regional houses. And so people follow the model blindly. Because it’s there. Lazy thinking.

Katy Klassman discussed pricing practices from the perspective of luxury retailers. And made some key points that I’ve long believed.

• No discounts
• Simple pricing
• Limited sale channels

I’m on board. For our own productions, we never offer discounts except occasionally to test new response channels (and the need for that in online has mostly disappeared). We present two prices for single ticket buyers, General Admission and Student rates.  And over experimentation for the last five years, I believe that, for us, discounts and special ticket promotions make no difference in our market at all.  But we also have a lot of data from other companies who rent from us, and many of them do an astonishing range of promotional deals.  One theater had over 35 different promotional codes.  2 for 1s, $2 off, $10 off, $5 of on Thursdays only, $10 industry day of, 20% off second tickets, etc. They do this every show. Number of tickets redeemed with special offer code for their entire run? 27. Out of over 1700 tickets sold. What is the cost in lost messaging opportunity for those 27 tickets? And would those people come anyway?

Or consider the theater that sold group on tickets to a show that then got rave reviews and began selling out? Total dollars for that company lost? $10,800. And that’s not an exaggeration. Their run at Theater Wit was sold out. We turned hundreds of people away.  Maybe those folks got to see the show anyway, maybe not.

And all these pricing strategies come with “common knowledge” stories:

• Audiences are scared away from theaters because of high prices, so reducing the price increases the likelihood of attracting new audience.
• Groupon introduces a wide range of people to your work, so an initial 75% discount to bring those people in pays off in the long run.
• Students don’t have any money for theater, so having a student rate increases the chance of bringing them in.

Now, these may be true. They may not be but the point is that we have no idea. It’s extremely difficult to tell and so we accept the story.  And I have student tickets, so I am by no means immune. Lazy thinking.

So I was feeling pretty smug but then another theater [UPDATE: It’s Filament Theatre] spoke up and explained how they sold their tickets by direct subsidy.  You didn’t buy a ticket, you bought “one light rental, one week” for $18 or “one costume, $26” or “1/10 of our insurance, $66” or “one night rental of the theatre, $125”  The tickets were all the same, but the opportunity for engagement with the audience was enormous.  And folks cheerfully bought their tickets based on their means and their emotional investment in the show went up. I don’t know if the show was a success financially, but the ticket experiment was a success. Their sales went up and it flies in the face of not only the conventional theater wisdom, but in the face of the conventional retailer wisdom that Katy had just explored. Not lazy. Inspiring. “And maybe,” I thought again, “I’m also not as clever as I might think I am”

And the question of lazy thinking really struck home for me on the artistic side during a session with Julian Rickert, co-artistic director of one step at a time like this, an Australian company that is creating works based on one-to-one interaction with individual audience members. Julian talked about how the company ended up with their unique take on the theatrical experience, and it was, more than anything, a constant series of questions. Julian came to the theater late, from a position of cheerfully admitted ignorance and has evolved though a lot of trial and error, a vivid and unique experience for his audience. And there is a host of things his experience requires that go directly against everything we know.

• They sell fifteen tickets a day.
• The press doesn’t describe their work, because foreknowledge of the experience prevents the experience from happening.
• They never perform in theaters
• They receive no arts subsidies from the government (which is apparently what is what everyone does down under)

and so forth.  An amazing 90 minutes for me. Why? Because one step at a time like this is working without a long term plan, without a business model as their guide, without an established artistic model and they are constantly having to reinvent themselves and find out something new. No net. Not lazy thinking.

And this idea kept coming up at CT(a)C for me.  How the enemy of theater is not recession, or audience disinterest, or the internet, or cable, or reliance on grants, or high real estate and utility costs, or aging audience, or falling subscribers, or commercialism, or disinterested boards, or American culture, or resources, or time, or anything. Our enemy is laziness and complacency. Our enemy is ever believing we know “how things are” and wrapping ourselves into that.

I am not advocating specifically from a break from all forms and existing models. I’m not saying we all need to flee the theaters, take to the streets, kidnap citizens and perform plays in their homes, taking our payment in canned goods and cocaine. I’m saying that we must always question what we know. About our place, our art, our business. “What do I know” vs “What do I believe is true” vs “What does everyone know”

I turned 42 the day after the conference. Big meaning of life year for the science fiction geek such as myself. And I want to make a call for enlightened ignorance. Not anti-intellectualism, but a suspension of our belief that we can ever know “how things are”. We are doing things at Theater Wit that haven’t been tried. About which I know nothing. In a situation where we have no guide or indication of what will come.

• We are going to run aggressive experiments in marketing our work and the work of others this year. We may lose thousands and thousands of dollars.  I don’t know where that money is coming from, but I think the questions need to be asked.
• We are going to do an experiment in building a theater comprised of our work and the work of a dozen other theaters. And we are going to try to do this without diluting audience engagement with ourselves or any of the visiting theaters in our space. We have no idea how this is possible, but I have been assured it is NOT possible.
• We are going to dramatically expand and deepen our connection with our audience. We’ll be using food, liquor, computers, people, telephones, parties, and music to do this. We will not be using money to do this.  I believe that latter may be impossible, but we are going to try.
• We are going to try and make a theater experience that lasts for days for our patrons for our shows. This, surely, can’t be done.
• We are going to increase the amount we pay both staff and artists.  I’m told there’s going to be another recession, but I don’t know how there can be a second recession before the first one is over.  In any case, I’m told this is impractical.

On the other hand,

• We built a building as a nearly unknown theatre only five years old. If I’d known we needed institutional support to do it, it wouldn’t be done.
• We have a staff of two people to operate the building. We have one part-time employee and everyone else is unpaid. If I’d known that this was impossible at our size, we’d have nothing.
• We created a conference that the entire community can attend for $45 for the weekend, including five meals and three parties. My conference consultancy friend told me two years ago that the entry point should be $350. Take that, knowledge expert!

I don’t know what’s possible. Hopefully CT(a)C has connected me to some enlightened ignorance that I can use.

So, that’s my takeaway.  But I am thinking about one other moment in the conference.  During a press panel, Chris Jones from the Chicago Tribune said something like “Theater is unquestionably Chicago’s art form. It’s what we are known for. Not our visual arts, or even our music.  People know and take pride in Chicago’s performance scene across the city. We are first and foremost a theater town both to our residents and the world.”

And once again, my perspective shifted.  Lazy thinking.