Connecting to the Root

Growing the Patron Base

However you size up the state of contemporary theatre, one thing is painfully clear. The money base is too small. Theatre companies squabble over what they see as a tiny bit of cheese. They are often necessarily stingy and closed-hearted about their resources and support bases.

There is a long-term, fully satisfying escape form this finger-puzzle: grow the patron base. Convince potential viewers to step inside theatre doors. Easy as pie. Half the work is already done. The theatre doors are wide open. That last bit is facetious and yet oddly true.

The task looks uncomfortably formidable. How to get more people into the theatres. Give tickets away free? But that cheapens the work. And half the people you give free tickets to don’t show. How good can it be if it’s free?

Theatres often feel trapped by circumstance, caught between the rock of art and the hard place of public taste. It may seem to some that things have always been this way. It turns out this is not so.

Over the past hundred and fifty years, theatre has been turned inside-out and back again. Once the main source of popular entertainments with brilliant spectacle and sentiment, it lost momentum, heart and its hold on the public imagination to the electronic onslaught. Folks wondered if it had a future.

Theatre turned to patronage. It took the path of painting and portraiture. Outdone by new gadgets in its primary purposes, it settled into a well-heeled niche reserved for the cultured, the refined and the wealthy.

As in any patronage system, there was an urgent survival need amongst practitioners of the art to establish that talent was a very limited commodity which only some few possessed in full measure. Those few deserved full patronage. The rest did not. And thus was the genre of “Community Theatre” born. That last part is facetious and yet oddly true.

Common wisdom defines “Community Theatre” as a pejorative term meaning, “expect to run out in two hours mourning the loss of 15  bucks and 120 minutes”. It’s a picnic softball game:  bearable to be in, okay to see if your kid’s in it but otherwise murder to watch without a beer or something stronger in your veins.  

There is no purpose in arguing that this conclusion is not rampant amongst those in theatre. I hear it chronically on my reviewing rounds. There is an almost obligatory apology for not being professional as well as a reluctant and painful acceptance of the empty houses. It’s only community theatre. You can’t expect people to want to see it.  

Community theatre folks didn’t invent this attitude, nor do they wear it happily. I’m certain they heard many people mouth it, some quite acidly, before ever thinking to it pick it up and use it on themselves.

My problem is, I’ve seen them on stage. This creates a pungent, cognitive dissonance—somewhat like standing inside the cone of a bell as it is struck—when the reality I encounter on community stages collides with the evaluation of Community Theatre given me by popular wisdom. This is supposed to suck. People say it sucks. People act like it sucks. It doesn’t suck. My brain hurts.

If I had the power to make a single law for community theatre it would be: you may no longer look down upon yourselves. Community theatre people caught in self-denigration will recite all the Shakespearean prologues backwards from memory. You may still not think well of yourself as a theatre artist, but you will definitely have something to be proud of. Played right, you’ll also have a happy bevy of bar bets. This last bit is facetious and yet also oddly. . .

Having reviewed professional performances which made me wish for a smaller bladder and community performances which did not, I cannot accept the term “community theatre” as a reliable measure of quality. Community theatre is not bad theatre. It is, simply, theatre rooted in a community.

The term “professional theatre” is more predictably a measure of union status. In a recent production which mixed Equity and non-Equity players, it was the Equity lead who destroyed the punch and pace of the performance. The community performers were spot on.

Professional is no guarantee of quality. Community is no guarantee of shoddiness. The extent to which these unforgiving judgments are  embraced by the public heart is the measure of theatre’s challenge. And its own hearts, as well as those of its neighbors, comprise the public heart.

The first place to flush out the old code is at home. Remember the law of Terry, for it is a Stern pronouncement: no one may denigrate himself as an artist. Everyone on any level of theatre deserves her talent acknowledged. And for every talent which exists on the planet there is at least one situation under which it can and will blossom into full, astonishing beauty. Talent must find its place. And so what?

So what if we feel great about ourselves, understand the full worth of our product and acknowledge the depth of all our talents? So we feel wonderful, the walls between professional and amateur are shattered and the seats are still empty. Exactly how does pride serve to fill them? How does it grow the patron base?

I’m glad you asked!

Changing the home team perception of community theatre work is the first part of changing the entire public perception of it. That’s where theatre has to go. If there is serious intent to grow the patron base, unless the theatre community wants to start having theatre babies at an alarming rate, the only place more patrons can come from is the great pool of people who now never consider crossing the threshold of a theatre. Welcome to the hoi polloi.

Current theatre wisdom mistrusts the hoi polloi. They’re the ones who abandoned theatre for flash gadgets to begin with. Theatre can survive without them. Theatre has courted real money.

But, in the process, theatre has made its standards so precious as to exclude a great deal of its best talent. Practitioners promoted a big lie with great energy so that a fortunate few could get through a rough time. This was a brilliant adaptation back then. Now it wears like a choker on a happy, bouncy puppy.

There is an opportunity at present. The electronic visual pop is 1) old hat and 2) a great deal more expensive than it used to be. Folks in community theatre can now offer an evening’s entertainment for less than a movie ticket with popcorn. Theatre gets a second wind. There is the opportunity now to grow the patron base as it hasn’t been grown in over a century.

The job is simple: embrace the hoi polloi. And, oh yes, we are the hoi polloi. We have found the patron base and he is us. She is the people in our neighborhood. They’re the people that we meet as we’re walking down the street, yes the people . . .The people theatre has been frantically separating itself from for more than fifty years. So how does it close the gap it’s worked so hard to create?

Let’s remember the origins of the art is in temples, not royal courts. How about thinking of theatre as the people’s art it is?  It’s job now, as it was at the start, is to instruct and delight. Whatever else happens in a play, the audience should walk out with at least a slightly different perspective than it held going in. And it should be uplifted and delighted in the process.

An argument I hear all the time: instructing and delighting the people in our own communities means reaching them where they are. That’s pedagogy 101. Go from the known to the unknown. That means stooping to the lowest common denominator in the production of art. That’s not acceptable.

Nor should it be. There are theatres which will and should continue to perform art for art’s sake. But community theatres can and should perform art for community’s sake. Raising the consciousness and refining the tastes of community audiences pays great returns in more patrons for both community and pure art theatres. And community houses, once full, will be able to stay full even as programmed offerings become edgier.    

First, community theatre should embrace its communities. It ought to take the art to where they are and entertain them as they wish to be entertained (“they” includes us). It should say to its communities, “we are you.”  

It has to believe that it deserves audiences. Without that belief, there won’t be any. But perhaps more importantly, it should know that the audiences of its community need and deserve its work. Maintaining the disconnect and allowing the present culture gap to continue impoverishes everyone. And there’s no one in a better position to address and fix this imbalance culture-wide than the people of Community Theatre.

Having laid that heavy burden upon your broad, artistic shoulders, I will tell you where to start: whenever you’re in public, always make sure to remember to pretend that being in community theatre is as much fun as it actually is. That last bit is not facetious and nothing I have ever written has been truer.