"It's the community, stupid."

(NOTE: This is in response to a post on the Theatre Bay Area Facebook page titled "Theatre, Community and Mission." Also, very glad TBA posted this and is actively working to engage its members on this subject.)

Ever hear that phrase, "It's about the work"? I certainly have. In classes mostly but also frequently in a professional context. "It's about the work." It bugs me just to type it. Because it's wrong. Theater is not about the work, inherently. It's about the community.

In fact, creating community is the number one function a theater should fulfill. That's how it started after all, right? All those crazy Greeks getting together for a festival of wine and fake weiners and plays and parties and it was all to foster community, more or less. Audiences got to blow off steam, artists got to perform their work and local businesses benefited from a high volume of drunks making impulse buys trafficking by their merchant stands.

Really, it hasn't changed much at all. I'll use PianoFight and the theater we manage with Combined Artform, Off-Market, as an example. We've engaged audiences with innovative and relatively unique show formats like ShortLived (an audience-judged playwriting competition), the FORKING! series by Daniel Heath (fully scripted plays in which the audience votes on how the plot will proceed) and Throw Rotten Veggies at the Actors Nights (pretty self explanatory). By handing over a certain level of control of the content we produce, audiences unwittingly invest in work to come - everyone who voted for the winning play in ShortLived won't come to see the full-length by that writer, but everyone who voted for that piece is definitely more likely to see it than if it were a random full-length by someone they'd never heard of. We also told everyone it was fine to bring their own beer into a show and people generally like that casualness, and of course, the beer.

PianoFight and Off-Market have managed to engage artists by keeping a low access point to having work produced. For example, renting out Studio 250 at Off-Market is only $250 for a Friday or Saturday night (contact Dan Williams, our Executive Director, at dan@pianofight.com for rental inquires), and Off-Market frequently runs co-productions with artists or companies to lower the cost on their end ("Eat, Pray, Laugh!" - "I Heart Hamas" - "City Solo"). With shows like ShortLived, PianoFight has allowed anyone and everyone to submit scripts which are all read by a 6 person directing team. We've focused entirely on new work by locals and by the good fortune of managing a venue, have had the opportunity to produce TONS of those local artists: all the ShortLived playwrights (112 and counting just for that show); the rotating City Solo performers; comics and musicians in Monday Night ForePlays; groups in from LA and New York and Ireland and Denver; bands from late night rock shows etc. By providing local artists an accessible platform on which they can display their work, they also unwittingly invest in the company/space because if the company disappears, so does that opportunity to perform. Also, we put a few cases of Bud in the backstage fridge which we think actors enjoy.

And that last segment of the community, the physical neighborhood, which i really didn't understand until operating a venue. When you've got a large group of young artists who all spend an inordinate amount of time in a given location for rehearsals and performances etc, they tend to need to do things like eat burritos, drink coffee and blow off steam. What this leads to are things like helping turn a local and, as of three years ago a relatively sleepy dive bar, the Tempest, into a little hot spot; getting "fiscally sponsored" by Sonoma Liquors on 6th street (they cut us a deal on beer cause we buy so much and occasionally give us fitted Giants caps for no apparent reason); buying sodas and waters from Boing's market down the street and getting change for our concessions till from him even when we don't actually buy anything; eating Chicos/Tulan/Cancun/Miss Saigon/Mo's/Latte-Express-7-Flavors-Coffee-Vietnamese-Sandwiches all the freaking time; masturbating at that adult video store - ... er, NOT masturbating at that adult video store ... But also recommending all those businesses to the audience we have built over the years and seeing that audience take us up on our recommendation.

What I've learned is that the trick in all of it is engaging each segment of the community on a meaningful level. That's why the phrase, "It's about the work," is misguided. You can't just develop the art in a vacuum. It must relate to the audience who will see it and the neighborhood from which it comes. Those crazy Greeks weren't writing about the heroic stands of the Persian army under Darius because it would never fly. They wrote plays which mattered to Greeks, with Greek heroes, in a Greek context. So regarding the question, "What is theater's role in community?" The answer is simple. Theater's role in the community is to help create it.

"50 Years Hungry" by D. Heath

I caught Daniel Heath's Fifty Years Hungry as a staged reading part of The Best of Playground festival earlier this year.

The Aurora Theater in Berkeley also staged a reading of the play just last week I think and by all accounts it went off great.

Fifty Years Hungry is Heath's first full length drama, commissioned by Playground in 2009, and he wrote it just after completing his first full length comedic show, FORKING! which PianoFight premiered in SF for a month and moved to Theater Asylum in Hollywood with the help of Combined Artform.

The two plays could not be more different. It's staggering. FORKING! is a hooping and hollering audience driven riot while Fifty Years Hungry is a razor sharp deconstruction of family and funerals full of dark wit. What's truly amazing is how good both of these shows are, and Heath's apparent ability to write high caliber work for whatever audience will be seeing it.

I hope the Aurora picks it up, cause Hungry is perfect for that community (feel free to email the Aurora at general@auroratheatre.org and lustily voice your need to see Fifty Years Hungry fully produced on their stage). And if they foolishly pass on the script, there are always a few stages at Off-Market.

Speaking of, if you'd like to catch another of Daniel's fully scripted plays in which the audience decides the ending, A Merry FORKING Christmas, premieres at Off-Market on December 15th, and runs like crazy through the holidays (more info coming soon).

Matthew Quinn's Cost Break Down of "Free Night"

After a lively debate on the blogotubes over the last few weeks, hopping around multiple blogs, lots of individual posts, and even more comments, we offered Combined Artform's Matthew Quinn some space to give his unvarnished thoughts on Theatre Bay Area's "Free Night," in order to condense a thread from four different sites and sum up the numbers - he graciously accepted. Below is a quick summary of the conversation to date followed by Quinn's post.

SUMMARY:

May 17: Radiostar interviews PianoFight on current state of theater, discuss Theatre Bay Area's "Free Night of Theater" program

June 9: Theatre Bay Area (TBA) releases a study titled "Assessing the Intrinsic Impact of the Bay Area Free Night of Theater Program"

June 16: Arts Journal posts results from an NEA funded survey which cites double digit declines in theatrical audiences since 1982

June 18: Head theater critic for SF Weekly Chloe Veltman invites TBA's marketing director Clay Lord to post his thoughts on the study in a post titled "Great Study. But What's It For?" - Dan Wilson (of Radiostar), Sam Shaw (of Crisis Hopkins), Matthew Quinn (of Combined Artform) and Carl Benson (of PianoFight) respond with questions about specific numbers

June 23: TBA posts second study of "Free Night" with hard data on ticket requests, actual attendees, and follow up purchases prompting PF's Benson to make case against "Free Night" in post "The Real Problem with TBA's 'Free Night of Theater'"

June 26: TBA's Clay Lord responds on TBA blog Chatterbox in post titled "Theatre, Relevance and Hush Puppies" and Matthew Quinn presses for more numbers

July 2: Matthew Quinn breaks down cost of "Free Night" versus return in sum-up of conversation on the PianoFight blog (below)

COMBINED ARTFORM'S MATTHEW QUINN BREAKS DOWN NUMBERS ON "FREE NIGHT"

Clay,

Thank you so much for this information it helps to give me a better picture of the value of "Free Night of Theatre." And thanks to PianoFight for letting this go up as a post and not just a comment, and outlining the thread of conversation.

So summing up the numbers, the actual value of this project is much higher.

$182,000 - Printed value of tickets

$200,000 - Original PR Services

$50,000 - Additional PR services

$20,000 - TBA Services

$40,000 -Survey

$492,000 - Total Resources used for FNOT

-So almost a half a million dollars worth of resources are used for FNOT and for that you get 3,581 people to attend a show, at a resource cost of $137 per person.

-Of those people, 74% were first timers seeing the company putting on a show or 2,650 people, to get this market it cost $186 per person of the resources.

-And for the ever so hard to get, new people to the theater, 18% or 645 people for $765 per person.

So looking at this I think one needs to ask, is FNOT really working?

Is this an appropriate use of these resources?

Could something more effective be done instead?

I'm sure there are many positive elements of this project, but is it providing you with the right type of awareness, people, and information at a cost that makes sense?

Are theaters in the community (large, small, members of TSC) fully aware of the cost and reward of this project? Half a million seems like a lot for a one day event.

And to the second point, of course it would be great to have a survey to confirm those hunches we have on audience decisions, to get more insight into an audiences actions and how to get new people to our shows.

My question: "Are these even the right people to be surveyed?"

And are the above questions even the ones we should be asking? It's a bit disconcerting that money is being spent for data that isn't considered useful, yet, just wait and see.

And while I understand grant money takes a while to come down the pipe, and you're reacting to plans from years ago, is it prudent to go ahead with a 4-5 city expansion using additional resources for a program that isn't utilizing those resources and providing information that is not yet useful?

I'm sure some people are happy with the results of the program. Any new people are great people to have, especially if, as you point out, there are not many (if any) out of pocket expenses. My concern is that no one appears to be questioning if there is a better use of these amazing resources, on a model that can bring in more people without saying theater has to be free in order for them to see it.

Does the community really see this as a benefit and effective use of resources?

Just because you can do this, should you?

We could still get 6 million marketing impressions with the same publicity, just a different program.

And what do companies feel about $40,000 being spent on a possibly useless survey when perhaps it could be used for other more relevant purposes?

I would really like to hear other companies' thoughts on this.

In closing, I did get a chance to read the posting on the Mark-Up and perhaps I'll get some time read that book, it sounds very interesting. I also added a comment about some thoughts I had on Free and Theater and while it's not an answer, I do try to come up with some different uses of "Free." And I'm sure the community could come up with a better program then FNOT to get audiences to the theatre, your thoughts?

Thanks again for your time and commitment to this conversation, it is appreciated.


Matthew Quinn

Combined Artform

UPDATE - JULY 4 (by PianoFight): As the conversation in comments has veered slightly away from TBA's "Free Night" and into the realm of the art itself, we thought it prudent to post a few more links which deal with this specifically, and which helped spur a lot of this type of conversation.

October 7, 2008: Brendan Kiley of Seattle's The Stranger newspaper posts article titled "Ten Things Theaters Need to Do Right Now to Save Themselves"

April 13, 2009: Kiley posts on The Stranger's blog a lengthy email from PianoFight's Rob Ready, interspersed with Kiley's commentary, disccussing Kiley's ideas and how successful PianoFight's application of those ideas has been in a post titled "Small, Successful Theater Companies in Other Cities: PianoFight from San Francisco"