A Scatter poll: What’s up with theater?
Yesterday, I had lunch with a prominent local theater director, who shall go nameless because he didn’t actually know he was speaking “for the record.” He gets around a lot, visiting other cities that are engaged with The Theatre, and he was concerned. He wondered just how “theater centric” Portland is these days, because he’d observed audiences that were sparser and less intense than the audiences in Chicago or even the ones that used to fill Portland theaters. I couldn’t even begin to offer a thought about this, but I did find the inherent question interesting. And I’ve decided to turn to you for answers.
So, an open thread of sorts on the state of theater in Portland today. Is it:
1. Thriving, except for the director’s theater
2. Better than ever onstage, but audiences are a problem
3. Too expensive in these hard times
4. Lost its edge onstage, so of course the audience is going to seem dull
5. Just needs better marketing
6. Having a near-death experience
7. Other
If you’ve got a moment, please take this unofficial survey, and of course, add your comments and explanations!
November 6th, 2008 at 8:35 am
There are problems in how the houses themselves are run. Keller, for example. There’s a restaurant in the lobby! So you get to smell food as part of your theater experience. They’ve now started letting you take drinks into your show. They allow entry after the curtain rises; and people get up for bathroom breaks and cell calls during shows - allowed to return to their seats.
The ushers don’t enforce ‘no talking’ leaving patrons attempting to enjoy the show that responsibility. We’ve never been to a production yet the past few seasons where we didn’t have a problem with people talking or actually answering cell phones & texting.
Lack of audience shouldn’t be blamed on the audiences. People love stories and they’ll be driven to go to any theater that tells good ones. But why be bothered with the smell of food, the clacking of ice in plastic cups during a show, late arrival seating, talking, etc.
It’s the house’s responsibility for these things, and many of them just aren’t doing their jobs.
November 6th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
Is theater having a near death experience? That’s what they were saying around the fire after the audience jeered the lumbering mastodon scene during the premiere of the caveman playwright’s original script, “The Day I Killed a Mastodon.” That’s what Sophocles was asking after “Antigone” failed to make box office when it first opened in Athens. (Critics wrote, “He’s no Aeschylus!”).
Is theater in Portland thriving? Yes, if you go by the number of productions offered this fall. The playbill for “Dead Funny” had a center spread listing all the shows in Portland in the month of October – a few dozen if my memory serves me right. No doubt the scale and quality of the offerings run the gamut, but I know that I’ve felt overwhelmed with the sheer quantity of shows competing for my time and attention this fall. I’m not arguing that there is too much theater in Portland, just pointing out that the market is finite. Some companies seem to be doing fine – witness Third Rail, with its bona fide box office hit, “Dead Funny.”
The economy is almost certainly hurting ticket sales. A lot of folks are tightening their belts, even those of us who are still employed, whose stock portfolios are intact (or, more accurately, never existed in the first place), and who aren’t in foreclosure. More than just being cautious in uncertain times, many Americans finally got the message that we (as individuals and as a nation) can no longer live beyond our means. We’re paying attention to the household budget, putting the credit cards on ice, buying cheaper wine, and choosing to go to the theater less often.
Those of us in the performing arts business look for comfort in the story that the Great Depression was the “Golden Age” of the movie industry: Despite hard times, movie attendance soared as people sought solace in darkened movie houses. That may have been true when a movie cost a nickel and popcorn was the same. When a night at the theater sets you back $25-30+ per ticket, plus user fees, ticket surcharges, handling fees, “building use” fees (thanks PCS), and parking, it becomes a luxury. We may still attend the performing arts, but less frequently or making the choice between a play and a dance performance, but not both. And, if we’ve shelled out both scarce time and hard-earned sheckels, the damn show ought to be incredibly good. If audiences seem less “intense” these days, maybe it’s because they are grumbling about the value of what they are seeing.
It’s been my experience and contention that the election has been sucking up a lot of “mind share,” to use a marketing term. I’ll be interested to see how we all decompress after Tuesday’s history election. For months, I’ve been hunkered down in front of the cable news and the Huffington Post. Now that it’s over and we’re breathing again, will we start buying tickets?
Sorry to be brutal, but no performing company has a right to exist. We work in a Darwinian world in which the strong survive and the weak close shop. Good luck if you can’t sell tickets or find donors who are willing to support your artistic vision.
Portland’s artistic lights may be dimmed each time a company folds its tents, but we shall survive. I watched Tygres Heart Shakespeare Company, Portland Repertory Theatre, and the Musical Theatre Company close down in quick succession a decade or so ago. At the time, some cried, “How can we let this happen?” Well, it did happen and was sad (in some cases), but life went on. Portland is full of new theater-goers and theater-makers with no memories or residual affection for those deceased companies. I came to Portland after the Portland Civic Theatre closed, so have no nostalgia for it, and feel no vacuum in its absence. Like theater itself, theater companies are evanescent. Some fade away, while others pop up like mold spores.
The problem is the audience! Maybe true, but so what? If your work is so advanced that the rubes just can’t figure it out, then you need to find a way to bankroll your creative genius besides selling tickets. I’m not arguing that theater companies should pander to the lowest denominator by producing only “accessible” or “popular” plays. Go ahead and be as bold as you can be, but don’t forget to be good and to be relevant. (The advocacy group, Americans for the Arts, has an ad campaign centered on the slogan, “Art. Ask for More.” I’ve often thought it ought to read, “Art. Ask for Better.”)
Whether Portland has a philanthropic culture that is strong enough to match its artistic ambitions is a huge topic on its own — as is any discussion of the efficacy and adequacy of arts marketing. I’ve rambled enough for now, other than to say that we’ll have theater as long as there are storytellers. There may be periods during which the theater available isn’t very good. There will undoubtedly be times when there isn’t enough work for theater artists to make a living. There will be theater companies that won’t survive, and that we’ll miss … until something new replaces them.
November 7th, 2008 at 9:14 am
I’m no expert — this is only a half-informed opinion, at best — but I have to think the answer is a little bit of 1, 2, 3, and 5.
I would think theater that has a considerable edge usually has a hard time building audience, almost by definition, so I tend to rule out 4. There is so much theater going on in town, that you kind of have to rule out 6 as well. Much of it is mediocre at best, but that’s always the case. (See Sturgeon’s Law.) In the past month there have been some terrific shows (Dead Funny, The Receptionist, for example; did you happen to see the email from Hollywood actor Daniel Stern that Matt Haynes circulated on pdxbackstage in the past week, after Stern had visited town scouting film locations and seen at least four local stage productions?).
I have a tendency to wonder at times whether most theater is more fun to do than to see, but I worried about that with chamber and symphonic choirs when I sang in them, too. The effort to put a show together, the exertion of performing, naturally make the participant invest more in it emotionally than the average theatergoer who has so much entertainment delivered straight into his or her living room and is presumably acclimated to receiving the experience passively.
A similar dynamic obtains with book reading. It takes an investment of time and energy that a lot of people don’t want to make, aren’t used to making; thus, though there are more books than ever, and more good writing than ever (I suspect), not that many Americans read all that much (says the actor who typically reads 50-90 books a year).
November 7th, 2008 at 9:20 am
In some ways, Ella’s comment reinforces a part of MTC’s thoughts. If you are paying a large chunk of change ($45 for a spur-of-the-moment decision to got to an ART show on a Friday night, for example), you expect a pretty pristine environment to watch it in, not to mention something pretty great onstage.
I think MTC’s observation that the election effectively colonized vast territories of brain tissue is absolutely true, too. It did for me. It even did on Art Scatter, which is not a political site, but has taken on that coloration as things unfolded. (Not that we NEVER talk about politics…)
The “Darwinian world” — theater companies occupy various niches in the cultural ecology. Sometimes the support for that niche gives out. Sometimes the company itself simply fails for some reason (quality, bad organization, poor leadership). But that doesn’t mean theater itself is endangered — it inhabits more than one niche, after all, and the internal workings of one don’t infect the workings of all.
In defense of my lunch partner: His theater does good work, and sometimes better than that. And maybe his anxiety goes to the “connectedness” of our theater to the national scene, to the viability of new plays that were hits elsewhere in this place. I admit that this doesn’t bother me so much. Our audiences SHOULD be different from those in Chicago, animated by different things, by different expressions. I even think we are a little peculiar, which makes programming for us difficult. It’s asking too much for an artistic director to go six-for-six when choosing a season of plays — it’s impossible to land in the sweet spot of the zeitgeist that percentage of the time. We might admire a production but we won’t necessarily love it.
November 7th, 2008 at 11:55 am
I have to agree with Mighty Toy Cannon. People have been hailing the death of regional theater since it began. And they’ve always been wrong.
A slump in audiences for a show or a season should not be used as an opportunity to blame the audience. It should be used as an opportunity to look at how, as a company, you are resonating with that audience. Are you being an effective communicator? Are you presenting work that responds to things people are grappling with in their lives (or ideas they’d never considered?)
And yes, it is only prudent that as theater companies we should all be working to strategize how we are going to go through this period of belt tightening. But if we do it with intelligence, care (and generosity towards the intelligence of our audience), we should come through the fire leaner, smarter, and more essential to the lives of our patrons. If we are not lifting their burdens, engaging their imaginations, and providing them with a real sense of community, then they will abandon us for the latest box set of Mad Men. And they would be right to do so. An audience member has no intrinsic obligation to love and support our work.
But if we give them work they can’t find elsewhere, and we leave them feeling refreshed and ready for the next day of their lives, then they will carve out space in their lives for us.
November 7th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
Ms. Pancio speaks wisely and well from the belly of the beast… (Of course, I think there must be room for the Mad Men box set, too, maybe the best historical melodrama that American network TV’s ever broadcast, maybe with the exception of “Roots”.)
So, I’m starting to see opinion coalescing around the position that my director is worried unnecessarily!
November 7th, 2008 at 5:30 pm
I chime in only long enough to say that our eloquent and intelligent correspondents leave me nothing to add. If all audiences and all theatermakers were as smart as Art Scatter readers, wouldn’t it just be a wunnerful world?