When I was first starting out (and frankly, still kind of now) I was begging for any kind of practical advice I could get from further-along artists that would help me to reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable goals of having a life as an artist and having a life as a normal person – yknow with housing and kids and dentristry and all that.

"Discounts, Comps, Pray, Close." That's the typical four-week run for a small theater in NYC.

Week 1 is previews. Pretty much nobody comes. Maybe there's a discount, but few people take advantage of it because maybe they don't know about it, or the artistic team is feeling gun-shy and is soft-pedaling  previews. But mostly the audience feels like they have FOUR LUXURIOUS WEEKS to come see the show. So the house runs at half-capacity even with discounting.

Week 2 is opening. Since press will be coming, the theater shoves the house full of comp tickets for friends. The houses are full, but the theater isn't making any money because of the comps.

Week 3 is the beginning of the actual run. There's a still period between opening and review publications, during which the houses go disappointingly back down to half. And the theater prays for a good review.

In Week 4 a few things might happen:
A) The reviews are raves and the theater is chock-full for a week, with fully-priced tickets. Maybe an extension is possible, but usually not, given the theater's schedule and budget.
B) The reviews are middling. The e-blast goes through some grammatical acrobatics to judiciously pluck out an innocuous-seeming pull quote, and the houses go back to half.
C) The reviews are terrible and the theater goes back to offering comps. But everyone knows what comps in Week 4 means, and the houses are barren.

You've probably seen this model in action, but I mention all this in order to establish a basis of understanding when I posit the following:
1) This is not an efficient use of resources;
2) Comps may not be doing what we think they're doing;
3) We're giving too much power to reviewers; and
4) We have to do more to make each play feel like an EVENT.

I'm totally sympathetic to the plight of the small theater. There's very little budget and it's already HARD AS HELL to get people to come and see shows. But I wonder if maybe the established methodology sets us up for failure. In Week 4, even under the best of circumstances, demand vastly exceeds supply. For every other week, we act as though supply exceeds demand as if it's a foregone conclusion. But if it's a foregone conclusion then why did we mount the show in the first place?

How do theaters without subscribers front-load the audience in the first couple weeks so that word of mouth can accomplish the rest? Soho Rep is actually pretty terrific at doing that. Between 99-cent Sundays (which sell out immediately), early and sustained discounting, and several advanced featurettes on upcoming plays, they're really good at making it feel like you have to see their next play - like somehow this play you've never even heard of is already in high demand. Then if the play is a hit, they extend and extend and charge an arm and a leg for it. In other words, they make the play feel like an event, then capitalize on the successes rather than cutting off the play before it's even had its full time in the sun.

How can we deploy discounts in a more targeted way? Theaters are quick to cut off the discount codes, but I don't think we're good at getting granular about the data. Yes, we use the web to track the reach of our discount codes, but by going granular what I mean is that we ought to be looking at how much total income is possible, how much total seating is possible, and how we can pair discounting and seating such that we make as much money as possible while keeping the audiences as full as possible, on a consistent basis. Like isn't it better to make $30 from 50 people, rather than $50 from 5 people? For some reason, we'd rather let our theaters stay empty just to chase the possibility of some full-priced sales or walkups, rather than jamming the house full of group sales and discount-hunters.

Do other industries have ticketing models that we can co-opt? What about airline sales, which use discounts that incentivize either booking early or booking at the last minute in order to reach capacity? Also, seat prices rise as the plane fills up - if we did that in the theater, wouldn't it normalize house sizes? Or what about the recent move towards dynamic pricing in sports ticketing? What about trying to capture different audiences using different advertising tactics, as opposed to a one-size-fits-all approach?


And comps. Are they really helping us as much as we think they are? First of all, what are the ethics of giving out comps to a select group of our friends, when we claim that our goal is to get people into the theater who never see shows? Why do we feel it necessary to create a Potempkin village of ravenous fans while the critics are watching, even though the critics might STILL PAN THE PLAY? If we let our friends in for free, aren't we in essence underselling their interest when they might have been willing to see the show anyhow (perhaps not at cost, but probably at a cost higher than $0)? And when we offer comps in Week 4, essentially we're conceding that, "The press says this play sucks, so now I believe that it sucks, and therefore the value is $0." Nobody's going to buy tickets to a show that you've given up on.

How do we deploy the limited advertising reach that we have available to us so that it's more effective? We say, "the NYT holds too much power over theater," but in weeks 2 and 3 all we're doing is wringing our hands and catering to reviewers. I absolutely believe that the NYT is providing vital coverage of what we do, but their coverage shouldn't be leading the art. But when all of our marketing devolves into nothing more than a review-response tactic, that's essentially what we're letting them do. We concede that the value they place on our art is the actual value.

I don't have the answers to this. These are hard problems and I want to acknowledge that it is HARD HARD HARD being a small company and getting people to care about shows. Which is why it's time to analyze whether this model of "Discount, Comp, Pray, Close" can be reconfigured, so that what little resources we have available can be spent more efficiently.

But most importantly, I think we're using comps and reviews as a crutch. We're marketing shows from a place of paucity and apology. We have to value the work, even if it means discounting ticket prices to fill up the houses, and even if reviewers disagree with our passion. Because if we can't stay passionate about our own work, nobody else will.

PS about Comps: As a conscientious consumer, I try not to use comps. Yes, that's a financially ridiculous statement (especially given my finances), and yes it's important to see as many shows as possible in order to know what's out there. But please know that paying to see a play is a political act: you are voting for the work with your dollars. It's hard to pay for a show when you can get it for free, but adventurous, diverse, and socially progressive work is exceedingly rare. We have to place a value on work we believe in, tempting as it may be to see it for free.

I keep seeing these plays that get heralded as “a fiercely provocative, insightful mediation on race.” But invariably I come away from those plays feeling disappointed and somewhat appalled. The thing is, I’d love to see a fiercely provocative, insightful mediation on race. It’s just that I haven’t seen many.

Everyone’s aesthetics are different, and what seems hollow to me just might be revelatory to others. So I think it’s worthwhile to go ahead and define what – in my book – would constitute insightfulness, in the hopes of pushing the dialogue forward a little. I don’t mean to sh*t on any one play in particular. Rather, just like how one critic felt compelled to draw attention to the trope of the “manic pixie dream girl” in film, I feel compelled to point out certain tropes and patterns that are being repeated in race plays. Because I think we’re settling for too little complexity, and we keep telling the same old story.

Here are my thoughts on that, in four parts.

1) The plays we herald as “a fiercely provocative, insightful mediation on race” tend to keep coming from one race. Let me be clear on what exactly I'm saying: I’m not saying that white people shouldn’t talk about race. They should absolutely talk about race and have important insights to offer. Also, I’m not saying that other races don’t talk about race. It's just that those plays don't as often end up in the zeitgeist. Inevitably, the most prominent, talked-about, celebrated race plays are most often plays by white dudes. But if we hope to glean further insights on race, we ought to be hearing and championing more than just one perspective. Artists are going to create the art they're most passionate about. But we as audience members (and producers and critics) need to be far more omnivorous in what we want to consume.

2) A play in which male protagonists devolve into racial epithets is not provocative or insightful.  It’s sensationalist, but not insightful. Too often with race plays the critics and audience conflate a strong emotional response with insight. These racial epithet scenes are essentially a melodramatic, hollow depiction of race in extremis designed to elicit a gut response from the audience. But in my heart of hearts I just don’t believe that at base we’re all a bunch of incorrigible bigots who would happily scream racial epithets at each other were it not for the polite veneer of society. The trope of  “everyone is a deep-down racist” is hundreds of years old. Seeing it onstage again and again only reinforces our sense of “the other,” deepening our animosities and suspicions. Sure, it’s titillating and dramatic, but what’s going to move the dialogue FORWARD?

3) Most onstage depictions of race politics in America are far too simplistic. Invariably these plays consider black-white relations only. Which is fine – that’s a powerful subject with deep historical resonance. But if our entire canon of “fiercely provocative, insightful mediations on race” consists entirely of black-white relations, where do Asians and Latinos fit into that picture? What about immigrants, and the effects of immigrant populations? What about the after-effects of colonialism? Most importantly, where does biracial/multiracial identity fit into that picture? Biracials are the fastest-growing ethnic group in America, but you rarely ever see it depicted onstage, because we like to categorize people as one-race-only. In other words, when it comes to depicting race, we’re thinking too binary, too black-and-white.

4) This is true for all plays, but for race plays in particular, I think we need to consider VERY CAREFULLY: what is the meta-narrative that is being presented in this play? Ultimately at root, thematically, does this play further our understanding of race, or does it play into our already-held assumptions? These heralded plays have a whole lot of craft: good characters, strong emotions, plot twists, etc. But that craft distracts us from a dangerous meta-narrative that’s providing very little in the way of real insights. From an analytical perspective, by and large you’ll find that a whole lot of race plays are essentially telling the exact same story, which is this:

"I don’t mean to be racist. But sometimes I say stuff that you think is racist. But hey: you’re a little racist too. So let’s just call it square. Are we square??"

Our race relations are far too complex and the pains too deep to just wash over everything, call it post-racial, and essentially say, again and again, “Hey this political correctness stuff is a burden: can’t we all just move past that?” It's the same dangerous argument that we place onto women in regards to our gender politics. “We did all that women’s lib stuff! These culture wars are exhausting! So let’s just call it square. Are we square??”

No, we’re not square. And it's not going to be square, ever. And the worst thing we can do given the still-persistent racial (and gender and sexual) inequities in this country is keep presenting narratives that essentially gloss over the problem. The worst thing we can do is champion a set of plays that provide only the narrowest of perspectives.

We settle for too little when it comes to a race play. We see a big fight with a lot of dirty words and we gasp and we call it insightful. But what would actually provide insight, what would actually be provocative would be hearing perspectives and stories we haven’t heard before, so that we can adapt our ideas about race, so that we actually learn something. We move on from racial tensions not by pretending we're past them, or by pretending that race doesn't exist, or by relying on stale old tropes. We move on by addressing race in a thoughtful, considered, proactive, nuanced way. Pluralistically.

A lot of people in the theater talk about mentoring. “Who have some of your mentors been?” “When I was coming up, I had a great mentor.” “We need to mentor the next generation of artists.”

Great mentors are the stuff of legend. “Joe Papp taught me how to produce.” “Lloyd Richards taught me how to develop a play.” “Paula Vogel taught me to write.” “Liz LeCompte taught me directing.”

And I get it. Artists are craftspeople, and we don’t learn our craft in a vacuum.

But here’s where I question the limitations of mentorship:
1) It seems like more mentors talk about the importance of mentoring than “mentees” want to be mentored.
2) There’s a push towards more formalized mentorship opportunities within institutions, and it’s hard for me to see the value of these kinds of programmatic grant-funded educational forms of mentorship, especially given the proliferation of MFA programs, internships, fellowships, and apprenticeships that are steadily forming a wedge between training and honest-to-goodness art-making.

It seems to me that what working artists need most right now is not mentoring but modeling. What are novel, viable models for play production? What models for play development are actually effective? Who has the model for making a play premiere feel like as much of an event as a film premiere?

More importantly, what do other industries offer us in the way of models we can co-opt for the theater? How can Louis CK’s self-produced comedy tour be applied to theatrical ticketing? How did YouTube and Neflix get so effective at distributing content? How do sports teams galvanize such civic pride?

Mentorship is inwardly-focused. It is by nature an approach to craft and problem-solving that look inward to personal history and personal inclinations to find solutions for moving forward. The mentorship mentality is in some ways an extension of the same kind of inward focus that guides many institutions today: staff retreats, core values seminars, trust-building exercises. These kinds of activities seek to answer inward questions: What do we value? What do we do best? What’s our company’s aesthetic?

Whereas modeling is outwardly-focused. It asks: How do other people handle this problem? What’s working and not working in the theater, and how do we fix it? How do we build structures that are useful to artists, how do we engage with the community and with technology, and how can our buildings augment the work instead of putting us under? These kinds of questions are hard to answer from a mentorship standpoint.

Plus, as we all know, no two artists’ paths are the same. The young artist can ask, “What did you do to get where you are today?” and invariably the veteran’s answer will be some crazy non-replicable cocktail of grit and timing and circumstance. The young artist can ask, “What would you do in my situation?” but invariably that situation will be a nightmarish highly personal jumble of fate and commerce and artistry that the veteran will have never encountered.

But modeling is another story. Models can be replicated, iterated upon, and refined. Everyone keeps talks about 13P not because those writers are all such great mentors (although they are such great mentors!) but because 13P offered up a startling new model.

These concepts aren’t mutually exclusive. And again, mentorship is a beautiful thing. It’s just that I think we’re now over-focused on mentoring to the exclusion of modeling. When a bunch of people get in the room together, our first inclination is to swap experiences rather than swapping best practices. Which is a problem, because in some ways mentorship takes care of itself from generation to generation, whereas the basic not-for-profit production model has remained largely unchanged for about 50 years despite rapid, sometimes catastrophic changes in similar industries (such as the music industry, or the film industry, or the symphony, or the ballet).

Ultimately, the biggest limitation on mentorship is that we’re all in a leaky boat. The mentee asks, “Hey, how’d you get out of this leaky boat?” and the mentor says, “Oh, well I bailed, and I scooped, and I patched, and I bailed.” And maybe that story is somewhat encouraging, somewhat inspiring. But at the end of the day the both of them are still in a boat that has leaks in it.

Modeling builds us new boats.

Ok, wrapping up this particular thread with the most batshit idea.

What would it look like if the very biggest off-Broadway and regional theaters tripled their artistic output, producing 18 plays a year instead of just 6?

At first glance the very notion sounds like complete madness. But the existing model is also madness. A typical off-Broadway theater produces 4-6 plays a year, yet they have a staff of dozens and own multiple theater spaces, some of which go dark for months (or are used sporadically as rentals). That's like owning an AMC multiplex (with lots of small theaters) but programming like the Zigfeld (one big screen, one movie at a time).

To borrow a bit from financial jargon, when you produce just a few plays a year (largely catered to a subscription audience) it's impossible to diversify your holdings, and your potential returns on investment are limited. But by vastly increasing the volume of plays produced, you increase the efficiency with which your spaces are being used and take advantage of the economy of scale that comes with being a big theater (where it's possible to produce more units at lower cost-per-unit than competitors). Most importantly, by diversifying your holdings (i.e. using that increased volume to widen the aesthetics/narratives being presented) you increase the chances of attracting new audiences and of finding a runaway hit, which you can then run and run (or transfer) in order to help finance the rest of the operation.

The Signature is in some ways already doing this. Jim Houghton recently spoke to the Juilliard writers about opening a new theater complex during a recession, and moving out of the old single-space venue to a three-space venue, where he then went on to triple his production volume. At first the idea seemed nuts, but as he told us - quoting very roughly here - "I don't have to fill 1,000 seats a night. Well I do, but not off of one play. I have to fill 1,000 seats across three different plays." So what would seem like a ludicrous dangerous increase in activity actually mitigates risk. The $25 ticketing program also bears mentioning here. By subsidizing the cost of tickets, The Signature is able to sell out their shows every night (with less reliance on a subscription audience), with an attendant increase in revenues coming from audiences. The opposing (nightmare) scenario would be having a six-play season and running a flop, then playing to empty houses in weeks 3-6 of the run once the subscribers have all blown through.

I get that the notion of vastly expanding productions is financially scary, but it is actionable. In order to make this more financially feasible, I'd propose a few things:
1) Lower production values, particularly set budgets, and try to run plays in rep on a rep set when possible. I can't tell you how many times I've seen a minutely-detailed New York Loft set that's just going to be thrown away in a month. As an audience member, I have to say the fantastical realism of those kinds of sets doesn't mean a thing to me if the plays sucks. And if you're going to produce plays set in that setting year in and year out, stop throwing the set away - run them in rep.
2) You may say "producing 18 plays a season will create subscriber fatigue," and you're right. But there has to be an alternative to the subscription package model. I as a consumer will never buy a season subscription to any theater, and I LOVE theater. Admittedly one of the biggest advantages of a subscription model is solving cash flow problems. (The big injection of subscriber money at the top of the season helps finance fixed costs until show money and grants start trickling in.) So if we're going to start migrating away from the subscription model, maybe the next capital campaign can be an actual pool of capital campaign - a "cash flow fund" - an initial cash injection (meant to be replenished by the theater each year) that helps stabilize annual revenue irregularities and get us away from subscriber addiction.
3) Note that the whole point of expanding programming is widening the aesthetic diversity of the offerings being presented, to attract new audience members. This won't work if you just do 3x the same thing you already do.

Two last thoughts about why such a ridiculous notion is important. 

First thought: I remember being an intern at Playwrights Horizons 10-12 years ago and they'd gush about discovering or being a longtime home to such pillars of the theater as Wendy Wasserstein, Chris Durang, Richard Nelson, James Lapine, Alfred Uhry, etc etc. Looking over their production history, in the early days they produced like  20-23 plays a year. Granted this was out of tiny spaces and I'm sure the production values were abysmal. But I contend that we wouldn't have those stars of the theater today were it not for the volume of work being done back then. The explosion of the American theater in the 70s and 80s came from explosive volume and content. But you can't seed the next generation of great theater-makers at a rate of 6 plays a year. Especially if only 1-2 of those plays are going to largely unknown writers (while the rest go to doing the necessary and important work of sustaining the writers that have previously been fostered there). If the theater is not a fecund ecosystem for young writers to thrive and grow, those writers will go elsewhere, and their audience will follow them. (I also don't at all subscribe to the notion that young people don't go to the theater. There are plenty of off-off-Broadway theaters that are consistently PACKED with young people, because those theaters are PROGRAMMING things that young people WANT TO WATCH.)

Second thought: I wish I had the exact quote, but in college I remember reading an address by Zelda Fichandler in which she said something to the effect of - again VERY ROUGHLY quoting here - "A budget is a beautiful thing. It shows us where our priorities lie." (If someone finds the quote for me I'll update the post.) The idea of sinking tons of money into tripling production volume in what you might argue is already an over-saturated market (at least for our present audience) seems ludicrous. But where are our priorities NOW?  Based on the budgets, right now our priorities are skewed towards new buildings and renovations, admin staffs (without parallel financial certainty for artists), and high production values (but not necessarily jaw-dropping content).

The art has to come first. Our work starts with the play. So consider producing more plays.

Moving on towards the more batshit now, here's something actionable for regional theaters to consider.

When an emerging writer has a breakout hit, a couple things tend to happen: 
1) nothing
2) that breakout play gets done EVERYWHERE all across the country
3) the writer gets quickly scooped up by Hollywood, never to write another play ever again
4) theaters go into the writer's back catalogue and do every play they've ever written before then, thus ensuring the writer's continued output and longevity in the theater.

#1 is the expected outcome. #4 is the ideal outcome. #3 is a big pervasive problem. But - unexpectedly so - #2 is actually a big problem too.

If you're a theater that feels particularly moved by a writer's breakout hit, and that play has already been done several times, don't just re-mount the same play. Consider asking the writer what they're working on, and make plans to do a world premiere of their next play. Or perhaps more importantly, go through their back catalogue and consider world premiering one of their overlooked plays. More often than not, my experience has been that a writer's breakout hit is definitely NOT their one and only "great play." It's just the one play that finally broke through after years and years of writing. What's most useful to a writer - what begets even more great work - is seeing a variety of their work done, not just seeing the same play done over and over again.

I'm thinking particularly of writers like Kris Diaz (for The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Diety) or Rey Pamatmat (for Edith Can Shoot Things and Hit Them). Both are hugely talented writers, but after riding a huge wave of excitement over their breakout hit (and perhaps even garnering a number of commissions in the process), they're essentially back where they started: scraping by financially, searching for homes for their other work, and wondering whether they'll be able to come up with another breakout.

You want to keep fueling writers like these - writers with exciting and unheard voices who have finally broken into the national conversation. Unfortunately, second productions (or especially commissions) just aren't enough to keep them sustained and engaged. After production #4 or so, they really aren't learning anything new or deepening their craft.


I get why it might seem risky not to go with the proven hit, but I think there's huge potential for audience excitement here. You'll already be able to capitalize on the buzz of bringing in "today's hottest young playwright." But instead of just rehashing something that's already succeeded elsewhere, you'll be giving your audience the chance to be the very first people on Earth to see something new from that writer. When I was in Atlanta for the Kendeda production of Bike America Susan Booth at the Alliance was particularly good at getting the audience to shift their perspective on how they took in a new play. It wasn't a bid to "support a new writer's voice," which has the whiff of paternalism on it. It was about embracing the adventure of going into a play and having no idea what's going to happen next.

This strategy also brings huge potential for the theater to create a more substantive relationship with the playwright. Writers are hungry to forge new relationships with theaters nationally, and by actively collaborating on something untested, you'll become that writer's home base instead of just a stop on the circuit.

As more and more of my peers start to burn out on theater (or get poached by Hollywood), I get hugely sad by all the great talent we're letting slip through our fingers after so much training and initial investment. But what I'm starting to recognize is that this flight from the theater is not just financial (even as the money thing is a deep-seeded and REAL and intractable problem). More than anything, the burnout comes from being unable to find theaters that are interested in a sincere engagement - in following a writer wherever their impulses take them. If the search for plays were less mercantile and more based on "what's going to fuel you to write the next play, and the next play, and the next one," more playwrights would stay in the field despite all the financial hardships. But that engagement comes at a high price: not just remounts. Not just go-nowhere-commissions. Full productions of something new, something that launches them into bold new creative territory.

Which is risky, yes. But the potential rewards are great.