Sunday Long Read: Why Aren't You Coming to the Theater?
The answers may surprise you! (they won't, but I do have some ideas about how to address them!)
Welcome back to another installment of Someone Should Write a Play About This! This week I’m reporting the results of an impromptu Instagram Q+A about what theaters can do to make it more attractive/interesting/affordable for people to come to the theater! If you or someone you know is a theatre-maker (creative AND admin included!!), I humbly ask you to share today’s post with them. The “results” of the “poll” in this post are from a vanishingly small Instagram audience. I would love to see other theaters ask their audiences the same questions in the name of intel-collection, so please please share far and wide!
First thing’s first: Who Is This For?
I have to begin my saying that sometimes I’m going to use the collective first-person pronoun, “we”, when I discuss the findings of this social media poll. Although it’s only me in the original video, it was of course the brainchild of not just me, but me and my colleague [whose name I don’t have permission to put here so lemme get back with that].
In the case of the Big Question, “Why aren’t people coming to the theater?”, we first had to zero in on who are we even talking to?
Who are the people who aren’t coming to the theater? To our minds they could fall into two groups:
People who like the theater, may even be theatre artists, but are either not motivated enough or actively discouraged from committing to going to see live theatre.
People who don’t care about live theater at all.
We have a colleague who often draws a comparison with NASCAR. It goes like this:
NASCAR is exhilarating! People love it! It’s a multi-million-dollar industry! You go commune with other NASCAR-lovers and you feel the emotional ups and downs and you know the drivers and you have favorites and it feels so good to belong to this social group that not everybody understands. You should totally go to a NASCAR race. You might love it. It might become a habitual part of your social life. And to make sure your first time is risk-free, we’ll even give you a free ticket!
Would you go?
I can only speak for me, so: hell no. I have no interest in NASCAR to begin with, to say nothing of the prejudices and stereotypes I already hold about people who do enjoy and attend NASCAR.
Such is the case with Group 2: this group isn’t interested in the theater to begin with, to say nothing of the prejudices and stereotypes they already hold about people who do enjoy and attend the theater. To get this group interested in attending live theater, we would have to sell the concept of theater to them. Now we don’t know about you, but we certainly didn’t get into theater because someone explained it to us.
But what about this:
I, Chaz, am someone who is curious about women’s soccer. I like to watch it when it’s on a TV at a bar. I like the players. I like the merch. I’m also someone who went to a lot of college basketball and minor league baseball games with my dad as a kid. Although I’m not an athlete, I appreciate sporting events. I’m inclined to go to them, but it’s not a habitual part of my social life.
But if the Philadelphia Lone Star Women’s team reached out and was like, “We will give you a free ticket to the best seat in the stadium, a cheap team t-shirt so you fit in, and a free beer"…I’d be there so fast I’d be a dust outline of where I was standing moments ago. Why? Because in this scenario, I’m already interested before all the add-ons, and I recognize that the add-ons are designed to make me feel like I belong. I’m not going to get babied or talked down to, I’m not going to be singled out as a first-timer. Instead, I’m going to be given the tools and opportunities to feel like this is for me.
So the Big Question is more specific, and thus more useful: Why are people who are inclined to go to live theater not going to live theater?
There were three Big Answers:
1. I’m Tired.
This is the reigning champ of Reasons I Am Choosing to Not Go to Live Theater. Of course it is! We are all exhausted! It’s been a long three years of being constantly stressed out about every single thing in the world while also having to hold down jobs and take care of ourselves and sometimes others!
At the end of a long day, who among us doesn’t want to go home, order in, and watch Netflix/scroll through social media to unwind?
But what about at the end of a regular day? Not a long day, just a regular one. A day when you got to work on time, completed your work tasks in a satisfying way, had a lunch that didn’t come out of a vending machine. A day when there wasn’t a lot of personal drama or to-do-list items simmering on the backburner of your brain. A day when you got enough sleep the night before. Even when the stars are all aligned…would you go to the theater?
Maybe. But you know what you’d have to do first? Go home.
O, Home! O, Muse! Our safest of spaces! Our most comfy and personal! Home! Where our pets live and do a little dance of joy when we walk through the door! Where the food has already been paid for! Where the couch sings its siren song, contoured exactly to the shape of our weary bodies!
We asked a follow-up question: If shows started a little earlier than the traditional 8:00p (say…6:30p or 7:00p), thus eliminating the step of going home before the show, would you be more inclined to attend right after work?
“Yes!” sang the answers of a [I can’t stress this enough: tiny] Instagram poll.
Inertia is defined as “a property of matter by which it continues in its existing state of rest or uniform motion in a straight line, unless that state is changed by an external force.” If we apply this to our human habits and energy levels, we are foiling ourselves by letting people go home before the show. They get home, they sit down, and boom: the decision to not get back up and out is basically made. But if we kept that “I’m out of my house and doing things” momentum going? Hmm….
Now here’s an extrapolation/marriage of this idea and my soccer example from above:
Another exhausting thing about going to the theater is worrying if you’re going to make it there on time. Again: what if we eliminated this taxing step? What if, instead of having to go to a restaurant and worry about the food coming out quickly, eating it quickly, and then having to get to the theater all sweaty and out of breath…you could…not do any of that?
What if you could BYOFood to the theater and eat at little tables in the lobby, where there is also a concessions stand that sells drinks and dessert?
Imagine! You get off of work at 5:00ish, get chicken and rice from a halal cart (or order Sweetgreen for pickup, or Five Guys on the way, or even better: you meal-prepped and don’t have to spend any more money), meet your friends at the theater by 5:30, eat together, get a drink and a thing of jelly beans, and by the time the house opens at 6:15, you’re not only fed, watered, and not sweaty—you walk into the theater with the sweet, sweet knowledge that this is the last thing you have to do today.
2. It’s Not Worth $35+.
Let’s first focus on the “it” and not the dollar amount. What is “it”?
“It” is the risk of seeing a play that (as one voter put it) “holds you hostage for 3.5 hours”.
“It” is also having to sit next to another person. COVID or no, we would all rather not have to jostle with a stranger over who gets to use an armrest, no?
“It” is also everything we discovered above: the commute, the sisyphean task of battling your own inertia, the general stress of getting somewhere on time.
When I write it out like that, I can’t help but agree: it’s not worth giving away $35+ to know in advance that I’m going to be even mildly inconvenienced. That’s just the truth.
So we asked another follow-up question:
Would you rather pay $35+ and we just have to work harder to make sure you know you’re going to like what you’re going to see enough that you’re willing to be mildly inconvenienced,
OR
Would you rather we lowered the cost of the ticket slightly and you just have to accept you’re going to be mildly inconvenienced?
The answer: lower the cost of the ticket.
Now look, theater is expensive. Practitioners like us know that “lowering the cost of the ticket” is so much easier said than done, but nevertheless it’s great data. It means that there must be a range of acceptability where the risk is worth it!
Somewhere in that range lies a magic number (or a few numbers) where people are willing to buy a ticket, full stop. Whether they follow through and attend the show is up to them, but they’ll buy a ticket, and that’s the important thing.
Like…if I spend $17 on an impulse purchase and then never use the thing or the service I spent those $17 on…I’m not really sweating it. Even $20—while not ideal—is a loss I’m willing to take.
And if I do use the thing or service I spent $17-$20 on? It feels like a steal.
This begs a much broader, more in-depth financial analysis, but as said above: this is great data for us to have.
3. Theater Is Only For Theater People.
This sucks to hear, plain and simple. It sucks because who can deny it?
And this sentiment didn’t just show up as a matter of programming. It also appeared as a matter of behavior.
There is certain etiquette expected at the theater—but that etiquette is never fully explained to anyone. You either know it or you don’t, and if you don’t you have to learn it…or else.
Theater also has [rightfully] earned a reputation as being elite and like…intellectually inaccessible. You can’t just not like a play because you didn’t like it. For whatever reason that’s no an acceptable answer.
We theatre makers are always looking for some deeeeeeper reeeeeeason for why a play doesn’t reeeeeesonate with audiences, when the fact of the matter is that sometime people can’t explain why they don’t like something. But since that’s not a “good enough reason”, we’re very likely to write off this reaction as “well it wasn’t for them, then”.
…but aren’t we kind of in this business to make art for…the audience?
…and if we want newer, broader audiences…shouldn’t we…listen to them?
When we write people off because their analysis of a play wasn’t well-argued or nuanced enough, we’re effectively closing the door on an entire swath of people who may be inclined to return if we would only listen to them.
Theater for theater people assumes that the people in the audience have the same industry and cultural knowledge as we do, which means that if you don’t get all the references…you’re lost.
I, Chaz, think “theater” (particularly theater of new plays) has taken on a weird competitive edge: who can be the most up-to-date, boundary-pushing, meta, and “thought-provoking”. But isn’t it possible that people just want to be entertained? Or feel…dare I say it…happy and good when they come to the theater?
Perhaps theater has become strictly for theater people because we’re using it more as a means of cultural education instead of balancing our work between education and appeal.
When we—the theatre makers of the world—are programming our seasons, we should not only consider our missions, but also what might be a fun time for people. If it’s true that word of mouth is our best form of advertisement, we gotta give people something to talk about—or even better: something to gush about.
Alright. Long read. And I hope it’s given us all something to ponder.
For any theatre makers out there who want to continue this discussion, please please please get in touch by responding directly to this post, either in email or by leaving a comment.
Knowledge is power, so the more we know about what keeps people away from our work, the more of a chance there is that we can do something about it.