We've Moved!

Okay, I've moved. In an electronic sense -- Theatre Bay Area has consolidated all of our blogging onto the Chatterbox, which I really recommend you take a look at. So for now and evermore, this blog is retired!

Free is the Way of the Future, says Chris Anderson. How Can Theatre Channel That?

Chris Anderson has just come out with a new book called "Free: The Future of a Radical Price." In the most recent issue of The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell reviews it and reacts to it, using his trademark psychological analysis. Free creates more demand, yes: People respond to Free far more than they do Cheap. Money in the Free world is made on advertising. Anderson credits the new abundance of information for making Free lucrative, and he says that the old economy based on scarcity can no longer function.

Free does create a user base, however. So how can we apply Free to the theatre world?

Advertising is the key business model for Free. But what happens when advertising can't work? Herein lies the conundrum of YouTube, a free service that Gladwell says has made Google absolutely no money: YouTube does not have to make a judgment on content quality because it's all free, but advertisers won't buy space on pages with user-generated, poor-quality content, so YouTube had to purchase the rights to professionally-produced content and thus had to spend lots of money to lose less of it on its free service.

Theatre faces the same dilemma, not because of quality but because of scarcity, again. In theatre, advertising opportunities, one of the only ways to make money on Free, are few and far between. There are programs, which provide a little bit of space. We could try using some product placement. But the reality is, theatre attracts a very set amount of people, a smaller audience than you would find for a brand of food, a billboard on the side of a heavily-trafficked highway, or a movie seen across the country at thousands of theatres seven times daily. Advertising cannot sustain a theatre. Donations and ticket revenue can -- if business is good. We cannot go Free all the time, not with capital costs for productions.

What we do have is Free Night of Theater, and it does bring in a lot of people. Theatre is not a waste of time if no resources are spent to attend it, so FNOT allows people the freedom (pun intended) to be adventurous and go out of their comfort zones. But what with the costs of putting up a show, Free all the time wouldn't make a lot of business sense. FNOT's value to theatres lies in creating an audience base that will come back and will pay for what they once got free. Because the Free Night is a scarcity, people are willing to pay for it if they have a positive experience - or so goes general thought. Theatre follows the old market model, then. We should not sound the death knell for a market based on scarcity yet.

But theatre is also abundant. Theatre Bay Area as an organization shows that, what with our hundreds of member theatre companies. What theatre relies on is the vast differences between different companies and different productions. You can see your theatre in an intimate black box or a large, grand theatre. You can go to a comedy or a drama. You can experience niche theatre or mainstream theatre, avant garde or traditional, with puppets or live people. Whatever you want. So theatre tries to counteract its abundance. Perhaps that's our salvation. It is where the journalistic world is falling -- sure, there are different voices, but objective hard news is pretty much the same all over; hence, there is an abundance that cannot be counteracted with variety.

So the way to use Free for theatre is as a scarcity. It's the logic of Free Night and why Free Night is such a boon for the industry. It appeals to the psychological appeal of Free without costing companies an arm and a leg, and if the theatres put on successful shows, will bring in paying customers. The key is to make sure it stays a scarcity, and to make sure that the customers still see the value of a live performance rather than a taped one on the money-losing Free YouTube. Here is where marketing comes in.

Gladwell writes at the end of his article, "the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws." So Free, Gladwell says, can't be an iron law. Free can't be universal, and this is clearly evident in the theatre industry. Theatre can use Free, but sparingly. But it must be used to expand the audience.

Wanna Job?

Theatre Bay Area's put the word out for a new freelance magazine designer. Check out the listing -- deadline is July 6 (and we're serious about deadlines, being a magazine and all)...

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/med/1241652225.html

Princeton Student's Study Says There's a Gender Bias. But I'm Still Celebrating.

A much-publicized study - Emily Glassberg Sands' Princeton University thesis - confirms that more plays are produced by men than by women, but here's the shocker - it's the fault of female artistic directors.

The New York Times reports that when the blame was laid, an audience member blurted out, "Say that again?" I would wager many of you did the same thing when you first heard the news.

The study says there are fewer female playwrights than male playwrights. This contention is not a new one. I don't think this means much, though. We're in an era in which gender roles are changing. That takes time. Women are slowly coming into their own as playwrights, led by such luminaries as Sarah Ruhl (my personal favorite), Theresa Rebeck, and Wendy Wasserstein. I have a feeling in the near future the number of women playwrights will significantly increase. No data to back that up, of course, but based on who populates the theatre community I've experienced and the college writing classes I have sat in on, we're doing just fine.

More data from the study even encourages me: work by female and male playwrights is produced at the same rate. So once more women are in the field, if all stays constant, we will actually achieve the 50-50 production rate people seem to clamor for.

It is Sands' second study that is the most concerning here: she sent a play with a male name on it to some theatres and with a female name on it to other theatres. The plays "by women" were rated lower than those "by men," despite having the exact same content. And all those doing that rating were women themselves. Sure, you can spin that as a "Mean Girls" phenomenon, which will only perpetuate the backstabbing stereotype that women already endure. It's tough data to refute, but I really want to refute it. Maybe women are sabotaging each other - but what if they're not? If we assume that women are to blame, isn't that continuing to worsen the lot of women in the arts?

Causality cannot be assumed on the basis of one study alone. We should not be making concrete conclusions about anything Sands found until the work is replicated, preferably many times. And I hope that when it is, the results are different. But even if they are not, we cannot go vilifying the women calling the shots in the theater, diminishing their credibility and furthering gender discrimination there. Women must take it upon themselves to improve their fairness - perhaps this can serve as a wake-up call. I applaud Emily Glassberg Sands for engaging in this work and starting a debate. Getting people talking is always a good thing for women struggling to achieve equality.

With the rates of actual production of work by men equal to work by women, however, it appears whatever gender discrimination Sands may have found is not actually having an overall effect on female success in the playwrighting world. Whether this is because men are overcompensating or not, I don't really care. Were I a female playwright, it wouldn't matter to me if the theater producing my work were helmed by a man or by a woman. What would matter is that my work was produced at all. And that is what I choose to focus on.

If women are discriminating against themselves, they better wake up and stop engaging in reverse-discrimination. But I'm not ready to accept that as a conclusion. And if it is true, the solution is simple: Women, wake up and stop it. Here's the bottom line: Women are produced at the same rate men are, and as female playwrights proliferate, so will female-written work. That is cause for celebration.

Arts participation is declining. We all knew that. So now what?

The National Endowment for the Arts recently released results from its 2008 Arts Participation National Survey. Last year marked the 5th time the survey has been administered since 1982. And guess what? It spells doom and gloom.

I'm sure no one out there is really surprised that attendance has declined for all arts forms (except musicals - we still love our easily-digestible escapism) since 2002. What is surprising here is that, not only is the average arts audience now older than the average American adult, but even that older group of 45-to-54-year-olds is not coming out to arts events as much as they used to. Ballet, non-musical plays and museums are targets.

Some things didn't change - arts participation and civic engagement are still intrinsically tied together, and education level remains a solid predictor of arts activity. Exposure to arts education remains critical to continued arts participation. Children are, of course, the future in the arts, as one-third of children in school (ages 5-17) have seen a live performance in the past year outside of their school environment, a statistic comparable to that for college-educated adults. I guess that's encouraging.

The NEA prefaced the report on these findings with a disclaimer about the recession. They think it had a large impact on their findings, to which I can only say, "Yeah, and...?" Of course the economy is impacting arts participation. Live performances cost money, with the exception of Free Night, and people don't really have any money to spare right now.

But what's encouraging about findings from this survey is that it is clear interest in the arts has not really declined. New questions about Internet use reveal that 40% of Internet users listened to, viewed, downloaded or posted artworks or performances in the past year, most of them on a regular basis. The difference is that this remote viewing, via recordings or broadcasts, at least in this economy, is currently enough to satiate public thirst for arts consumption. Live theater is the only event that still has more live participation than remote participation via recordings or broadcasts, and who knows how long that will last?

So what do arts organizations do with that? Does live theater go the way of opera and start doing simulcasts and more PBS specials? (By the way, opera was one of the hardest-hit art forms according to the survey, but I wonder what viewership for the Metropolitan Opera's new simulcasts have done for these numbers.) Do the prophecies about the Internet making human contact and actual emergence from the living room null and void come true, and do they apply to the performing arts, the last bastion of hope for real unmediated experience? Well, I hope not. But maybe this is the only way to keep the arts economically viable, at least until the recession improves. And to me, that's what this survey is suggesting.
Literary reading - what the survey posits is the most affordable form of arts participation - is the only activity that went up since 2002, so clearly money's got something to do with all of this. Maybe Free Night's 5th anniversary this year can make things happen. Maybe Obama's United We Serve initiative, which incorporates volunteerism in the arts, can stimulate interest. Maybe those kiddies going to performances will help more of their parents get out and support the arts. Here's hoping.

Free Night in discussion

Following a great article on Chloe Veltman's blog, Lies Like Truth (hosted on Artsjournal), I've been in a very engaging comment discussion with a couple Theatre Bay Area members and fellow Artsjournal readers about the value of Free Night of Theater as a program, and the survey data that supports our assertions that Free Night has been a success.

I recommend you all take a look and offer your insights, if you've got em. As I say in the commentary, Free Night's a constant work in progress -- so all constructive criticism is welcome.

Among Giants

I suppose the first order of business is to introduce myself. My name is Sabrina, I am an intern at Theatre Bay Area this summer, and I will be blogging to you weekly. I have no marketing credentials to speak of - I'm a rising junior at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern and spent a summer in the marketing department at Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago, but that's about as far as it goes - but I do love theater, and I will be spending the season surrounded by people who understand how to market it. Hopefully this qualifies me for some amateur insights.

What brought me to TBA was a desire to get to know the theater community in San Francisco. Having come from Chicago, where theater is ubiquitous, I felt strangely alienated from theater on my home turf. I had lived my whole life here and had always been involved with and passionate about theater - and yet I was only really familiar with ACT and Berkeley Rep. Even though I heard time and again that I called one of the largest theater communities in the country home, San Francisco seemed to me to have only the giants - and not even as many giants as Chicago.

That's a problem. Coming to TBA, I now know that there are hundreds of theaters spread out around the Bay Area, and many of them produce the quality of work as the aforementioned Tony-winners. So why don't I hear about these other companies?

That's what I'm hoping to find out this summer. I suspect that the marketing failure here is in reaching out to people in a much more sprawling area than metropolitan Chicago. The Bay Area demands we go farther out of our way for exciting theatrical experiences. I never hear about the Marin theater companies, for example. While I'm not sure I would go all the way out there for a play, if people were buzzing about it there's certainly a chance my curiosity would get the best of me. I also suspect the Bay Area may be lacking in mid-size theater companies that have the marketing resources a tiny black box or storefront wouldn't without the big-budget cachet of ACT.

Perhaps these are questions everyone in the arts marketing world already knows the answer to. But if someone like me, highly interested in theater, isn't hearing about all of these other Bay Area companies, something's wrong. I think it's worth wondering what we can do about it.