No, really, we must start thinking about diversity!

I feel like I've been going on forever about how white populations are precipitously heading toward the minority in the Bay Area, since I saw this presentation from the San Francisco Foundation that said, well, that white populations would in fact be the minority in all five Bay Area counties SFF serves by 2050. In fact, there will be no majority population much more quickly than that, and certain counties like Contra Costa and Alameda will reach a Hispanic majority within the next 20 years.

And now here's this New York Times story by Sam Roberts that essentially outlines the same projections for the entire country, per the U.S. Census Bureau. Depending on whether immigration continues at the same level as it has been or continues at a slower pace (those are really the two options), whites will be in the minority nationally between 2040 and 2050.

Why is this important? It is faulty logic to think that an arts infrastructure that creates work for and relies primarily on the attendance of white audiences will be able to sustain itself when projections are showing 20-30 percent drops in white population in the next 40 years. And right now, no one seems to care. Recently, we did a study of how our 100 Free Night of Theater companies are approaching non-white audiences. Here are some bullet points from the study, which is still being processed:

• 39% of companies claimed no African-American or Asian-American audience share. Almost half (44%) claimed no Hispanic audience share. For comparison, the SFF study puts the current ethnic distributions for those three communities as 8% African-American, 23% Asian-American, and 22% Hispanic in the 5 Bay Area counties.


• Of those that claimed some non-white audience share, the average claim was 7% for African-American and Hispanic, and 12% for Asian-American.


• 85% of companies were producing shows that they self-reported as not particularly resonating with non-white audiences of any ethnicity.


• 88% of companies were planning no particular outreach to non-white populations.

I find these numbers incredibly frustrating. I know it's hard, and I know there's a lot of nuance in the conversation. And I know it's such a hard conversation to have with companies, especially because there are few stories of organizations who have (1) had the impetus to become more inclusive and (2) succeeded. But this isn't a thought exercise anymore.

Mission Paradox, in a post spawned from discussions on Arena Stage's diversity conference (read more at their New Play Development Program blog), argues that companies all fall into one of the following groups, and then suggests a path forward:

1. The Sincere Effort Group - They have the support, the money and the time. At most these groups will need help and guidance on the strategy side of the ledger. They want to diversify, but they may not be sure how, or confident in their ability to do so. This group deserves all the help, encouragement and guidance they can get.

2. The Scared - These people have some sort of fear barrier stopping them from diversifying. Fear of losing audience. Fear of losing money. Whatever. This group should be supported and encouraged . . . to a point. Some organizations spend their entire life cycle scared, that's just how it goes.

3. The "Other Priority" Group - These organizations have decided, for whatever reasons, that other initiatives are more important then a diversity effort. I think we, as an industry, should respect the decision this group makes. Maybe it's a bad decision. Hell, it is probably a bad decision. But groups have the right to make bad decisions.

4. The "No Desire" Group - This group has no desire to diversify. Who really cares why they feel that way? The only thing that matters is that they made that choice.
Again, that's a perfectly acceptable decision to make.

I think our job as a field is to look at each organization and figure out which "diversity category" they fit in.

Then we deal with them accordingly.

Our job is not to move people from one category to another. That's a choice only they can make. Embrace the ones that want change. Support the ones that need help. Wish the rest of them the best of luck and send them on their merry way.

It's a hard line, but honestly if we're talking about a crisis of relevance (and when aren't we talking about a crisis of relevance?) then diversity has to be part of the conversation.

What group do you belong to?

Building Cultural Participation From Sea to Shining Sea

Over the past two days, I’ve had the incredible good fortune to be part of a small group invited to convene as part of the Project Audience program in Chicago. (To my Chicago friends and family, I’m sorry I didn’t see you – we were sequestered and didn’t breathe outside air for the entire time. Sorry….) Project Audience, funded by the Mellon Foundation, has been going on for just over a year now, with virtual monthly convenings for the last six or so months. I was one of 28 participants in that community to be invited to attend this in-person convening, and I’ve got to say I feel truly fortunate to have been chosen (especially having now come out the other end of it with positive action in sight).

This program is a unique collaboration between the Mellon Foundation’s arts program and another funded program there called Research in Information Technology. This is the first collaboration of those two programs since RIT was founded in 2000. Project Audience’s goal is to facilitate a community of practice (that is to say, a community of action, not philosophizing) to tackle the continuous and problematic lag between the audience development needs of the arts community and our late-adopter stance on new technologies. The participants span the globe, from New Zealand to England, with many of the arts services organizations and certain consultants, individual organizations and other interested parties in the US also in the mix. The goal is to, through this community of practice, develop a community-source (i.e., open source) tool or tools with an eye toward revolutionizing the way we as arts and culture organizations develop and maintain our audiences. And incidentally, the goal is to only do it once, nationally, collectively--a substantial shift from the current de facto model in which organizations in different communities huddle in their garages with their heads down creating new solutions without checking about to see if others are also working on that problem.

There’s some irony in the fact that convening a national group to tackle a complex problem once instead of many separate times is so revolutionary, but there you go.

It turns out that these RIT processes actually encompass three distinct phases, each of which is contingent on successfully finishing the prior one (and submitting a new grant application demonstrating your success). This convening culminated phase 1 of the project, which essentially is the phase during which the needs/goals/fears of the community at large are hashed out and the very slight skeleton of a next step is collaboratively created. It’s been a daunting, at times frustrating, but ultimately rewarding time.

Having come to Chicago with a limited and hazy understanding of this project (a haziness that it turns out was shared by many of the others there at the beginning), I had doubts about the ability of organizations from Theatre Bay Area to Culturebot.org to CTG to Seattle Opera to the St. Louis Regional Arts Commission etc. to come to a consensus on anything of such scope, especially given that we arrived to what was essentially a blank canvas knowing neither the scope, nor the intended targets, nor the timeline. Over the last two days, much of that has crystallized, and that which hasn’t has been consciously shelved until later.

As an introduction to the convening, Diane Ragsdale of the Mellon Foundation admonished us to think beyond selling tickets and look at using art to create long-term, sustainable connections and conversations between people and people, people and art, people and institutions, and institutions and institutions. Through Project Audience, which currently has over 180 members providing their voices through the online forums, discussion strings and conference calls, we will actually develop (not just talk about developing) new cutting-edge technologies (still undefined) to break down the barriers between ticket streams, customer relations, community building, conversation and arts making. It will be available at a low cost and will be owned by the community, and it will be open to augmentation by anyone who has the expertise and inclination to try.

Project Audience is meant to raise the bar--increasing audience involvement, attendance and ownership of art and culture on a community by community basis. The involvement of Mellon, particularly through the RIT program, is exciting because, thus far, in the nine years the program has existed, it has shepherded 50 projects to fruition, and all are still functional (two-thirds independently, having finished their funding cycle with the foundation). All this to say, and rather excitingly, that this will happen. Anyone is eligible to participate in the forums and public interactions of Project Audience, though that schedule is now up in the air as we transition into Phase 2: the development of a community design process and workshop to actually tackle the logistics of this project’s creation. At each transition (from Phase 1 to 2 to 3), the leadership on the project changes, so Alliance for Audience and ArtsFund, which shepherded Phase 1, are stepping aside and a nine-member volunteer committee (of which I am one) is currently figuring out how to assign organizations to take their place. We will, in the next week or so, be creating materials to select a steering committee which will submit the grant to fund Phase 2 and will oversee its successful completion during 2010.

To learn more about Project Audience, I encourage you to visit www.projectaudience.org. I’ll be writing more about the learnings from this past convening in the next few weeks, and in the meantime you can register to take part in our Tangler online discussions. There are many voices on the conversation already, but the goal of this project is to be pan-arts, pan-geographic, pan-size, pan-budget model, pan-experience in scope, so everyone is invited to take part. This new technology, after all, in whatever form it finally takes, will be created for, and rely on the buy-in from, large swaths of the arts industry. I’m proud to have been involved, and hope (and expect) that Theatre Bay area’s participation will continue.

Thinking Outside the Jewel Box

On my bus ride this morning, I came across a talk by Natasha Tsakos, a performer from Miami who has created a one-woman multimedia show called Upwake. Upwake is an hour-long story of Zero, a modern day businessman going to work with his life in a briefcase, stuck between reality and fantasy. It’s told using one performer, four projectors and a constant array of video, audio, lights and images created by 19 collaborators, all working together to address that one theme, amplified all over the place: connection between reality (stage, performer, audience) and fantasy (in the form of multimedia). Decidedly not a new theme, especially here, where we have some of the most exciting multi-arts work being done of anywhere in the country. What was interesting, though (and the piece looks interesting, too) was that this talk allowed Tsakos to engage in the theory and goal of the work in a deep way, putting into words some of the more abstract concepts that I think float around our heads as theatre practitioners a lot, but which are sometimes less than coherent. The talk became a discussion of the intersection between what she terms “science” (I’d more accurately term it “technology”) and “art,” and the ability of this intersection, in the proper hands, to bridge the gap between theatre and new audiences.

In Natasha’s words, “It is as much about bringing new disciplines inside this box as it is about taking theatre out of its box.”

More below the video.




I think this resonates in multiple ways and directions as we continue as a field to grapple with an ever-shrinking traditional audience base. We must start looking outside the jewel box of theatre for not only new technologies (although those, too), but also new experiences, new stories and new ways to tell those stories. The truth is, the demographics of humanity are changing, more quickly here than almost anywhere else in the country. As a field (and understanding it is a field-wide issue and cannot be the single duty of a few nontraditional theatregoer-focused organizations), we must look outside the box and draw in (and on) new parts of the world. In a way, theatre has always been about reflection – reflecting our society, or our hope, or perhaps simply the experiences of the people who come through the doors. As Tsakos says, the reflection is changing, and it is happening whether we as organizations, individuals or the field are on board or not:

“There is a revolution. It’s a human and technological revolution. It’s motion and emotion. It’s information. It’s visual, it’s musical, it’s sensorial. It’s conceptual, it’s universal and it’s beyond words and numbers. It’s happening…There is a revolution in the way that we think, the way that we share, and in the way that we express our stories. Our evolution. This is a time of communication, connection and creative collaboration.”

As companies and individuals, much of your days (probably) are spent looking at today, tomorrow, next month, one year out. You rightly strategize about sustaining your current base, reviving flagging donations from various sources, keeping steady audiences, a stable reputation, etc. It seems to me that part of our role at Theatre Bay Area is to ask you as individual artists and companies to take a moment to look more broadly and more long-term, at the long-term viability of the field as a whole. Field-wide trends are just that, field-wide, and field-wide changes happen over five-, ten-, twenty-year spans, across as many companies as are there to be part of the trend. If the core of Theatre Bay Area’s mission is to unite, strengthen and promote the theatre community, then we must continuously ask ourselves how the world is changing over the mid- to long-term, while also of course providing services to help companies and individuals sustain and thrive today. Tsakos’ larger message, that remaining static as a field (in our form, our content, our way of presenting ourselves) is not really an option, must set in motion all sorts of conversation.

Social Networking as art? Or the rantings of a 40something and technology...

A NYT article published 8/16/09 details the Twitter success story of Broadway's Next to Normal. Apparently this past spring the show's creator, Brian Yorkey, began sending single tweets that were more than just marketing quips or lines from the show. He adapted the script for a Twitter audience, sending character lines that were intended to happen when that character wasn't speaking on stage. By the Sunday morning of the Tony Awards in June, when the tweets stopped, a complete shadow script was in existence.

It's apparently hard to gauge the success of this technique as a marketing tool. Did the surge in sales happen because of the tweets or because of the show's 11 Tony nominations (and eventual multiple wins)? Who's to say. But it certainly speaks to the creativity possible in the world of social networking. I will let you read the specifics of the article yourself: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/17/technology/internet/17normal.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

Play special attention to the link for the compiled text at http://www.nexttonormal.com/twitterperformance.pdf.

I, for one, historically have doubted the "power" of social networking for the arts. It's not ignorance that says that. I have certainly heard people's marketing successes. But I guess I have always been underwhelmed by what the various sites really offer when push comes to shove. This is probably a reflection more of the fact that I am not necessarily the traditional web 2.0 audience. As least my perception of what that means. And my degree of frustration with the various mechanisms ranges from mild annoyance to rage. I have tried for weeks to figure out how to subscribe to some of my favorite blogs. I have yet to succeed on most of them. More often than not, as a general non-particpant in the blogging world, it mostly seems like an excuse for people to be snarky. And my Facebook inbox is so flooded with invites for shows and events it has reached the level of white noise (and no, that isn't an invitation to un-friend me. I love hearing about everyting, really). None of this stops me from having a FB page and sending out invites for my own theatre company. And yes I have dipped my toe in the world of Twitter (the only tweet I have ever sent was some interesting stats on tweeting (Sysomos report on Twitter. 85% of users post less than once/day , 21% never do, 5% account for 75% of activity).

I guess I have always wondered: How long would it take for someone to take this social networking thing to the next level? Admittedly as you can gather from the ramblings above, I am not the most plugged-in person in the world, but my Mom still calls me from Ohio when her VCR blinks, so compared to some I'm a guru. So maybe this Next to Normal thing isn't entirely new. But it's certainly new for a Broadway show and it does get the brain jumping about the possibilities. Can social networking "create" art as well as market it? I certainly don't know the answer, but I hope we take advantage of the possibilities available on the mechanisms available to us before the next thing comes along and we have to start all over again.

And thanks, Susan (Theatre Bay Area membership associate and fellow N2N fan) for letting me know about the article!

Smackdown: Audiences Vs. Donors! (Maybe)

A report out a couple days ago from Barclay’s Bank, reported on in the Daily Telegraph and brought to my attention by You’ve Cott Mail (click on “You’ve Cott Mail” in the left menu) presents an interesting picture of what’s happening with high-end individual donors across fields. And as they say, there’s good news and there’s bad news. Click here to download the whole White Paper (PDF).

Essentially, Barclay’s surveyed 500 wealthy donors and found that 75 percent of them have not reduced their charitable giving in the past 18 months--and that more than 25 percent have actually increased their charitable giving during that time. Per the Daily Telegraph:

“Now that governments are overburdened with debt, the rich felt it more important than ever that wealthy individuals did their bit for charity, the report said. When asked where they would make cuts if the downturn continued, respondents said they would be more likely to stint on luxury goods, holidays and eating out than curb their donations to charity.”

Good news, right? Well, maybe.

The bad news is that Barclay’s also reports that “traditional recipients of charitable donations”--the arts and religious organizations--are falling out of favor with these same donors in favor of more concrete causes like health care, children and environmental causes. In the words of the report, “This trend [will] accelerate over the next decade if the causes in question [Hey that’s us!] [fail] to engage in a meaningful way with the next generation of givers.”

Suddenly, the question of relevance is no longer an esoteric debate (if it ever was)--but now it has to be argued from both the audience development side and the donor cultivation side. Recently, this blog has had items (and very insightful comments) about what relevance actually means, specifically centered around the ability to develop new audiences. That discussion has primarily been fueled by representatives from smaller, more innovative companies who are reacting against exactly the comforting long-term sameness that I would argue most major donors (yes, a grand generalization) are drawn to. And many of their arguments, I think, are going to be hard to scale up to the larger companies, many of whom, as it happens, are the cultivators of more major donors. This is not to say that the “next generation of givers” that Barclay’s references will also be drawn to the traditions that are wrapped up in theatre, but I do think news like this begs the question: How do we both engage new audiences (new segments, people who are not looking for your same old presentational theatre experience) while also revitalizing the high-end donor base that (at least in large and some midsize companies) is supposedly the steadiest source of income over the long term?

Trends during this downturn locally (via the Pulse survey and anecdote) seem to indicate that loyal donors are indeed staying loyal, at least at a higher rate than foundations, corporations and non-donor attendees. I hope that continues. But that gets me to a quandary (which I realize is at least partially based in a stereotype of who those backbone donors are and what they enjoy): how can we innovate our way as a field into the hearts and minds of a new audience (more diverse, plucked from more distractions, used to on-demand everything and less appreciative of presentational cultural modes) while also continuing to court those staider, more traditional and, yes, more loyal would-be donors? Especially when competing (a sad word in this context) with things like poverty, heart disease, cancer, global warming, AIDS, etc.?

On Theatre Etiquette

The LA Stage Blog posted a link to a fascinating little article in the London Times online edition called The 15 Golden Rules of Theatre Etiquette. It's neat, but it left me with a bit of an odd taste in my mouth, given how gung-ho I am on trying to bend our rules to incorporate new audiences into the fold.

As some of you may have read, I’ve been engaged in a pretty active conversation with some of our smaller companies about changes in theatre etiquette--and, really, changes in expectations about theatre etiquette. Of course there’s a fine line to walk, but one thing that has come up which I think deserves some merit is that, by sticking with all of these rules over time, we’re actually hurting ourselves by not adjusting to changes in audience demographics, attitudes, etc.

For example, this one from the Golden Rules:
“If the child you’re bringing is chatty, gag it. If it’s fidgety, handcuff and shackle it. And if you’re altruistic enough to bring a school party to a Shakespeare matinée, threaten potential wrongdoers with tickets to the next revival of Timon of Athens, to be followed by a ten-page essay on the ethics of Apemantus.”

Rebecca Novick wrote recently on the Chatterbox about taking her daughter to a National Dance Week performance--her first live performance ever. All the kid wanted to do was get up and dance (it was a dance performance), and Rebecca was told that she had to get the kid to calm down, quiet down, and sit still--or she had to leave. The girl, unfortunately but not surprisingly, lost interest as soon as she wasn’t able to engage the way she as a child would.

I totally get that there need to be levels of propriety. But I think we as a community really need to start thinking more outside that box, allowing for new ways to experience/interpret/participate in live theatre, or we’re going to get left in the dust….

Theatre, Relevance and Hush Puppies

The back-and-forth between PianoFight head Carl Benson and me continues, having migrated from Chloe Veltman’s lies like truth over to the PianoFight blog. And now it’s getting interesting--we’ve essentially set aside Free Night of Theater (which was how the whole thing started: I think Free Night works, Carl doesn’t, and never the twain shall meet) and have moved onto ground where we more or less agree about the problem, if not the solution.

Our discussion now (as you’ll see, if you take a look at the initial post at PianoFight and then the subsequent comments) centers around what is driving down theatre attendance--essentially, what is precluding people from considering theatre to be a good way to spend their free time. In my mind, the issue is actually a series of smaller issues on a continuum, namely:

- People don’t get exposed to theatre in formative years
- They develop methods of interacting with other media (TV, music, even visual arts, to some degree), but don’t learn the (rather complex, if you think about it) mores of being a (even passively) participatory audience member at a theatre event
- When presented with an option to attend a show, they not only feel disconnected from the need for live performance, they feel at least somewhat worried/nervous about fitting in and/or acting correctly
- This feeling, coupled with the cost of attendance and what the WolfBrown intrinsic impact study is showing to be a significant lack of social networks interested in attending live performance, keeps people out of our doors--even though there’s a good chance they’d both fit in fine and enjoy the performance once they were there
- Rinse and repeat.

“This is absurd,” you might say. “Who doesn’t know how to behave in a theatre? It’s just like watching a movie.”

But it’s not, not really. People don’t dress up (not even a little) for a movie. They don’t mill in the lobby beforehand. They don’t pay an average ticket price of $35 for a ticket (which raises expectations of what’s going to be offered). There are no people that breathe on stage, and say the words, and change things up and forget lines and sweat and spit and move about. Movies are voyeurism at much more of a remove than anything theatre has to offer.

I remember seeing a production of Edward Albee’s The Play About the Baby at the Studio Theatre in Washington, DC (photo of that production at left) when I was in college. It was a school assignment, and I was there with the 15 or so students from my class and my hippie-dippie teacher. This is a space with maybe 100 seats, surrounding a thrust, and here suddenly are these two nubile, prancing, very naked 20-somethings with all the bits and pieces out on display--and here’s a man nursing on a girl’s bare breast, and yes, here’s some witty Albee-esque repartee, but who can remember that.

Of course, it’s not just nudity. Helen Mirren in The Queen was great, fantastic, all the accolades you can think of--but look at the words they’re using for her current turn as Phedre at the National in London. I can just imagine the energy, the crisp static energy that must be running through the theatre there--it’s something that is absolutely irreplicable anywhere except live on stage. And I would bet for someone who didn’t have much experience, it would be both electrifying and off-putting all at once.

More mundane differences--there’s no intermission in a movie (unless it’s Gone With the Wind, and jeez-oh was I glad about that). What’s the appropriate thing to do there? Do you sit? Do you go out and mill? Are you allowed to talk about what you’ve seen--should you judge it in progress, or are you expected to wait? When can you clap mid-show? What level of verbal reaction is appropriate, and when do you need to muffle? What if you really like something, but you’re the only one who gives it a standing ovation at the end? Is everyone just sitting there judging you? And why, oh why is everyone sitting around me so damn old? And after, what if you hated it, and everyone else is ecstatic? What if, as I’ve heard more than once, you “just didn’t get it?” Do you talk about it with your friend, or do you keep it quietly to yourself?

What is the acceptable reaction/interaction/action after, for example, seeing a man die on stage in At Home at the Zoo? What is the acceptable reaction to watching a dying woman give up and walk into the light in Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer-winning Wit?

Carl, in his latest comment, makes a great statement, with which I agree, but to which I must add a caveat. First the statement: “Theatre has got to take at least some of the blame for this drop in attendance, awareness and relevance. If we do not collectively take a long, hard look at our art and our business, Free Night of Theater won’t save us, it’ll just prolong the death spiral.”

I think there are theatres that are already working to address these issues--theatres, actually, like PianoFight, where, in Carl’s words, the audiences are “loud, raucous, and quite frequently (though not always) inebriated.” Not that drinking’s the way out of this particular hole, necessarily, but the sentiment is there: break all the boundaries, examine everything, and see what’s left. This, however, is the realm, mostly, of small companies, who are flexible and nimble enough to sample the latest Hot New Thing. Sure, ACT can allow drinks in the theatre, but it traffics in opulence and, somewhat, in familiarity. If you take the dress-up out of the affair, it loses something irretrievable and essentially valuable to that particular type of theatre. And even Berkeley Rep, the new-play-presenting brother company across the Bay, may do new organic work drawn from the community. They may even commission the stage version of American Idiot, complete with punk-rock craziness and the director that brought Duncan Sheik to a stage near you. But I promise you it’ll be a different (not quantifiably better or worse, necessarily, but different) experience from the inebriated experiences of PianoFight.

A study by Theatre Development Fund in New York (runner of the TKTS booth, but also a substantial research engine for arts nonprofits) recently noted that while theatre attendance is on the decline, overall audiences are actually more likely than ever to pay the exorbitant price of a Broadway ticket--once or twice a year. It’s a special event, often done at the same time every year, wrapped in amidst splurges like a nice dinner and a dress-up date. It is theatre as an event, and I think that’s fabulous. The downside, however, is that theatre as an event is special in the same way that the hush puppies I experience when I visit my parents in North Carolina are special: delicious, decadent and available for a very limited time. If I had hush puppies every day, well…you get the idea.

Where Carl wants to get to, I think, and it’s a noble place to be searching for, is a place where some portion of the theatregoing audience is going for a more, dare I say, minor experience--a little after-work way to blow off steam, less a full entrée, more an amuse bouche. There are only so many momentous events one needs in a day, a week, a year. Carl talks about how Shakespearean plays were originally done before rowdy restless groundlings.

I should also say, unequivocally, that I don’t think theatre is in a death spiral. I just think it’s changing. The rumblings in the rising generation of leaders are all about relevance, pertinence, theatre for the people. The Neo-futurists, the Civilians, the Rude Mechanicals, the (now separated) Tectonic Theatre Project (and here in SF, individuals and groups like David Szlasa, Banana Bag and Bodice, foolsFury)--we’ve had companies playing with form, function and relevance for years. And now the presenters are starting to follow--gay nights, young nights, pre-talks, post-talks, in-show texting, drinking, audience-driven narrative, Twitter plays…phew. Theatre’s not going to die, it’s just not going to be how it was. And that’s okay.

Drinking the Night Away - A Cautionary Tale

So, I'm sitting in the Geary last night, watching the first half of At Home at the Zoo, and I keep getting these random whiffs of scotch in my nose. Very confusing--I wondered if someone around me was simply at the performance so much against their will that they had to get drunk first, or what. But it turns out the explanation was much more mundane: there was guy with a full-on two inches of scotch in a glass two seats down, sipping it nice as you please.

It made me wonder, in this era of trying to break down barriers to attendance (things like allowing people to bring drinks into the theatre) how do we identify and deal with the unintended consequences? Not that the guy was belligerent or unpleasant in any way--not even that he spilled or broke his glass or whatever. Simply that snorting scotch in the theatre wasn't something I'd envisioned with my Albee, and it took me just slightly out of the experience every time I caught the smell. As a marketer, this unintended consequence gave me pause--I'm a big proponent of things like drinks in the theatre, texting during shows--anything that is, generally speaking, a relatively minor change to theatre etiquette--but how fascinating when a "minor change" so directly and unexpectedly affects others.