Just Quit Now

I'm going to be blunt on this: Theatre People Have a Problem!

Here are the Options: Market or Quit.

Community and academic theatre practitioners need to realize that their only hope to save their time, money, and sanity is to quit doing theatre. If we want to do art, it’s not working, so unless we can fix that, just quit now. I seriously doubt we can fix it, though, because we’ve ruined theatre. We’ve killed it. We ought to be ashamed of ourselves at what we’ve let theatre become: a cheesy, wussy, childish, hard-to-understand bore. We need to quit. We need to give up right now. Resign. We all need to retire, apologize to the world for killing one of its art forms, and go do something else with our lives.

Or we could fix it. Our responsibility as artists to the audience is to deliver to them something they did not expect when they came to the theatre and to give them an experience like no other artistic experience they have ever had in their lifetime. In order to do that, we have to get them to come to the theatre. If we can’t do that, we should just quit now because it won’t improve if we keep doing what we're doing. The primary reason we should quit is that we are losing our audiences, and the way to fix that problem is something we can sum up in one word: Marketing.

In The Empty Space, Peter Brook wrote: “All through the world theatre audiences are dwindling. There are occasional new movements, good new writers and so on, but as a whole, the theatre not only fails to elevate or instruct, it hardly even entertains” (10), and that was in 1968. If it was that bad forty years ago, we’re in big trouble today because we haven’t improved. The theatre’s effect on the audience isn’t enough of an effect. You’d think your best chance at reaching your audience would be to choose the best possible approach for what you are trying to say to the audience. You’d think wrong, of course. Audiences don’t like art. They like Golden Age musicals, staged Disney films, dinner theatre murder mysteries, and anything cutesy, “family-friendly” (meaning childish), tourist-friendly, or Shakespeare (just because it’s Shakespeare). They don’t go to see anything you produce if it doesn’t fit the description of something they’ve seen a thousand times before. Even then, though, not enough people are going to the theatre. The only way you’re going to make money is if you stop doing art. Go do something else. Go back to college and earn another degree. Quit being an artist and go be a cog in a corporate machine.

Or—and this is the solution—we can create our own little machines. We’re losing our audiences because we’re not paying enough attention to marketing our products. We’re producing plays for the wrong demographic, but we can counter it. Your average person might not want intellectual stimulation, but some people do. If we’re in an area full of people who like Golden Age musicals, they’re not going to appreciate something unlike a Golden Age musical. If the people in your community all work at emotionally taxing jobs from nine to five and go to the theatre at seven-thirty (I've yet to meet an Idaho theatre that starts at 8:40), they’re going to want a show that takes their mind off of theirs and others’ problems. Some young people might believe going to the theatre isn’t fun or a cool thing to do with their friends. How do we all solve that? We make the plays important. We advertise the plays like this: “You’ll be smart and cultured for seeing it, you’ll have a great time and forget your problems (maybe), and everyone else is going to it.” That way it appeals to the interests of more than one group within a larger group; in example, the intellectuals, those seeking entertainment, and those who want to feel like they’re part of the “in crowd.”

The next problem we have, though, is that we feel we can’t afford to advertise. We feel like we can’t take money from our budget and put it toward anything other than the spectacle. We’re wrong, of course, because that money would pay off in ticket sales. There are people in music and film that the general public idolizes, but there do not seem to be as many of these idols in the theatre. This is mostly because the film and music idols have better marketing. If we had proficient marketing, we would have actors the community looked forward to seeing, and we would have notorious directors whose work audiences liked to see. If we had radio and television interviews with theatre professionals, radio and television commercials for plays, reviews in newspapers, and other ads in addition to the posters and flyers we post in one or two windows rather than all over town, our theatre would seem important and worth attending. We don’t access every aspect of publicity we can. We don’t want to advertise. That means we don’t care about our work. If we don’t care about our work, let’s just quit now.

We have three choices: Market better, keep pretending theatre is still alive until we realize we’ve killed it and have to quit, or quit now. The second option is where we are. If we continue with it, we’ll keep losing our audiences until we have no one for whom to create our works. If we don’t take the first option immediately and set aside some of our budget for better marketing, then we might as well take the third option and quit immediately and save ourselves time, effort, stress, and money.

Have a nice day.

Work Cited: Brook, Peter. The Empty Space. New York: Macmillan, 1968.

You do not need a place like this to produce a play. Peter Brook wrote that theatre is NOT red curtains, chorus lines, aisles, fold-up seats, etc. All that is needed for an act of theatre to take place is an empty space, a performer, and a spectator. The sooner we get out of the rut we're in, the better.