What Does Live Theater Need to Offer?

An old art form at a crossroads.

Last week, the Center Theater Group of Los Angeles suspended its season at the Mark Taper Forum, citing donor fatigue and a fall off in ticket sales as audiences failed to return after the pandemic. The programming suspension affects some new shows and we’re no doubt culturally poorer for this, though the fact must be acknowledged: the audiences weren’t there for high production value enterprises in large venues.

It’s not that people won’t go out. Look at the ticket prices for arena concerts. Nosebleeds to see Depeche Mode at MSG would have cost our family of three more than $1,000 just to get in the door. A colleague with tickets to see Taylor Swift at MetLife felt compelled to sell her tickets on the secondary market when she noticed she could make a 40X return. Sports arenas are also crowded to capacity and ticket prices are up across baseball, football, basketball, hockey, soccer and even e-sports.

The Mark Taper Forum

Broadway theater also seems to be doing fine, but largely by staging productions adapted from bygone film and television, selling audiences on nostalgia for how movies and cartoons made them feel in adolescence.

It’s regional theaters that are suffering, alongside movie theaters (particularly art houses). It seems like during the pandemic mindset, which supported binge watching and the streaming releases of big budget movies, really pushed people towards consuming narrative entertainments at home.

As a playwright, I participated in two virtual productions since 2020 — one with a theater group in London and the next with one in Sydney. These were amazing experiences and it’s a delight to live in a time where you can collaborate with producers around the world to make art, but it’s fundamentally different from in-person collaboration. It’s also very nice to have online performances to share with people, but that’s very different than the decidedly local experience of producing theater for a live audience.

So, why is regional theater important? For that matter, why do art house movie theaters, programmed with a local audience in mind, still matter? One thing I’d suggest is that the country is homogenizing. If we are all shopping at the same chain stores and consuming the same mass produced media, we lose our regional cultural differences. Even local accents are dying as we all take in the same, globally distributed, non-regional diction.

Similarly, seeing a live event with your neighbors is a community-building and affirming activity. Being among others, catching infectious laughter or pathos, makes for a fundamentally different experience than watching these performances alone or at home. Still, “it’s good for you,” is not an argument that’s going to turn out reluctant audiences.

Regional theater producers and, to a lesser extent small movie theater owners, might want to really think about… I hate to say this… their value proposition. What are you offering the audience for the price of their ticket, for parking, for driving, for babysitters, for drinks first and dinner after? Also, are you dealing with modern purchase audiences as they want to be dealt with? I understand that season subscription pass sales are down. That’s because contemporary consumers do not like to lock themselves into commitments. They want to purchase their tickets a la carte. If you are programming a season full of sure audience pleasers, peppered with more experimental work, that’s fine — but instead of selling them all under one price, you’re probably better off selling your tickets for Shakespeare at full price and then throwing in a discount on tickets to the next show.

Costs of producing theatre have indeed skyrocketed, but that can’t be taken out on the audience by reducing the ambition of what plays are produced. Audiences are growing tired of 2-3 person plays that are over in an hour. They wonder why they spent two hours getting there for such meager entertainment.

Now is a good time for programmers to focus on quality — produce plays with literary merit because those are the stories that delight audiences, invite catharsis and create lasting memories that lead to theatre-going habits. Everything else needs to be secondary to quality. Remember that every time you ask the audience to turn up for you, you’re asking for a big commitment of time and money. Hold up your end.

As with the rise of AI into the creative realm and the dearth of readers for serious fiction — complaining won’t solve this. Theatre programmers should really think hard about their audiences and what they can offer for their buck.