Love's Labors Lost: So I got all scientifical and found out some stuff

October 31, 2013

So I got all scientifical and found out some stuff

In the vein of there being no problem that the right tool or right mindset can solve, and shamelessly ripping off the Just Ask Them Method of Orlando Jones, I whipped up a survey to see what was going on. I make no promises about this being statistically sound or even the most rigorous method ever. This only reflects the people in my own audience (and maybe the people in their audience).

The findings were pretty interesting, especially when it came to what kept people from seeing more theatre. Here is my extremely unscientific analysis of the findings:

Most people (two-thirds of respondents) see plays once or twice a year, or once every few years.
There's a strong preference for musical theatre (67% of respondents) followed by classics and modern stuff (57% and 50% of respondents, respectively), but there's also a good audience for quirky, off-the-wall stuff (48% of respondents) that doesn't happen all the time.
The biggest hurdle to attendance are price (almost 75%)and transportation (almost 35%). Surprisingly, a good third of people said that having no one to go with (almost 30%) and not knowing what's playing (about one-third of respondents). In addition, lack of access for people with disabilities (wheelchair access, closed captioning for the hearing-impaired, etc.) was also something that impacts some people.
After making it cheaper and bringing it closer, most people (38%) want more help to find out what's on stage.
A huge majority of people (almost two-thirds) are willing to pay around $20 for a ticket. For people with a bigger entertainment budget, that jumps to around $50 (20%). So that means 80% of people are going to shell out for tickets that cost, at most, $50.
A huge chunk of people (60%) are willing to travel up to one hour to see a play.
If money, time, and location were not an issue, most people (70%) would see one or two plays per month or 3 to 5 plays a year. A good fifth of them would even go weekly.
Representation of people of color and LGBTQ people is something that gets brought up when people ask what it would take to get them to see more plays.
People want to see more theatre, but pricing and scheduling often makes that difficult.

When asked about what would get them to see more theatre, a couple of people made a very interesting suggestion: make recordings and/or livestreams of shows available like the MET and MTV Unplugged (remember them?).

This is gravy for a starving artist like me who's practically reattached my umbilical cord to a wifi connection because that's something I said I wanted to do, and more than once at that.

The only barrier, of course, is finding an affordable option (read: has starving artist prices) that also makes it easy for people to attend.

Can someone help me out here?

No comments:

Post a Comment

Words, Words, Words

. . . a lot of it [fostering rather than smothering students' playwriting] has to do with finding a way to construct a dialogue about ongoing work that empowers the writer. A lot of it has to do with making sure there's a diversity of voices around you. A lot of it has to do with thinking of the writing program as a brain trust for writers, not as some infantilization in which the dramaturg gets the power. And basically trying to find a place where everyone's aesthetic in the room grows larger rather than smaller. There are many ways to do that. It's really not a hard thing to do.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

Here is what seems to me an elementary truth that must precede any other: namely, that the theater, an independent and autonomous art, must, in order to revive or simply to live, realize what differentiates it from text, pure speech, literature, and all other fixed and written means.
--Antonin Artaud, letter, 9/15/1931

I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all I need for an act of theatre to be engaged.
--Peter Brook, The Empty Space

My work is characterized by one thing above all --- invention. In theatre we imagine the world, we do not record it, we are not documentary makers. I hold all social realism and journalistic theatre in contempt. It is a sordid habit. And the social realists have the impertinence to pretend they are 'telling the truth…'
--Howard Barker, interview

Women and writers of color are still seen as threats because, in essence, when a woman or writer of color is defining a play world, there's another definition of what our society is, and that's very threatening.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

Through this experience [working on " . . . and last week it was a mountain"] I learned the importance of the life and the dynamics under the words, and began to see the power of working from the silent space within - the emotions, the images, the experience and the feelings - rather than relying on the words.
--Sande Shurin, Transformational Acting: A Step Beyond

How does it happen that . . . the Occidental theater does not see theater under any other aspect than as a theater of dialogue?
--Antonin Artaud, Theater and Its Double

All conventions are imaginable, but they depend on the absence of rigid forms.
--Peter Brook, The Open Door

I never 'say' anything in my work. I invent a world. Let others decide what is being 'said'. Nor do I claim to tell the truth or enlighten people. We are suffocated by writers who want to enlighten us with their truths. For me, the theatre is beautiful because it is a secret, and secrets seduce us, we all want to share secrets. That is also its politics, if it has any politics at all. And modern democracies hate secrets, they want everything transparent. Obviously the critics collaborate in this desire to expose everything to the light of day, they are the police force, after all.
--Howard Barker, interview

I think that form is content . . . I've always been more interested . . . in the formal devices and the structure rather than in the subject matter . . . I really am a follower of Viktor Shklovsky, who said that in some ways the subject matter doesn't even matter. It's whether or not we see the subject matter anew that matters.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

I am well aware that the language of gestures and postures, dance and music, is less capable of analyzing a character, revealing a man's thoughts, or elucidating states of consciousness clearly and precisely, than is verbal language, but who ever said the theater was created to analyze a character, to resolve conflicts of love and duty, to wrestle with all the problems of a typical and psychological nature that monopolize our contemporary stage?
--Antonin Artaud, Theater and Its Double

The mediocre artist prefers not to take risks, which is why he is conventional.
--Peter Brook, The Open Door

"Transcendence became my life theme. I wanted to be lifted beyond everyday circumstances and everyday reality."
--Sande Shurin, Transformational Acting: A Step Beyond

I actually think of writing for the stage as not writing . . . It's about structuring, about gaps between the language that are really filled in by the collaborators and the process. It's all about indirection rather than a direct statement . . . It's like a three-dimensional chess game in a way. If I say this, will the director go in this direction? If I say this, will the actor respond? And one of the delights of the process is actually not having your intention fulfilled, but finding out at times that other people's interpretation or intention is actually more interesting than you originally thought of.
--Paula Vogel, interview with Ann Linden in The Playwright's Muse

The person who has an idea of what this language is will be able to understand us. We write only for him. --Antonin Artaud, letter, 9/28/1932