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.
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
No comments:
Post a Comment