A Few Pro/Am Questions

Hello all! Looking forward to seeing you in a couple of days.

As a continuation of Ilana's and my conversation about the Professional vs. Pro-Am debate-- which I tend to boil down to a Professionals vs. Locals debate for a variety of reasons, though I think that dichotomy is changing too-- I have some statements to throw around in advance of our discussion on Saturday. Rather than framing them all as questions, I would wrap this whole post in a blanket of Do You Agree with This Statement or Not, and Why? What's Been Your Experience?

Note: The statements below do not actually reflect my beliefs about regional theatre, or the beliefs of anyone else involved with the blog. They're just meant as a series of potentially inflammatory jumping-off points which have been bandied about. The following statements assume we are in a city which is probably not New York or Los Angeles, and that we're talking about an older model, cliched regional theatre, pre-recession.

Do You Agree with This Statement or Not, and Why? What's Been Your Experience?

-- Locals are amateurs or could be called pro-ams, whereas professionals are from out-of-town.
-- This discussion isn't even relevant anymore because there are no such things as lines between amateur, pro-am, and professional theatre, and the recession is proving that.
-- Theatres want to hire the best/most appropriate person for the job, and if that person lives elsewhere, the theatre will use its available funding to facilitate bringing in the best person for the job; if the theatre has the money, they'll hire the best person from far away. If not, they'll hire the best person from close by.
-- The locals here in [insert city name here] must not be very good because they're still local and haven't moved to New York or LA. If they were serious about working in the theatre, they would have moved to a larger city than this by now.
-- The locals must not be very good if they have to hold down an additional job outside of the theatre to get by and therefore can't make daytime rehearsals.
-- To do a good job and earn a living doing theatre, one needs graduate-level training from a good school that, more often than not, is not located in the city in which professionals wind up doing their work, therefore of course the "professionals" come from somewhere else. (ie went to grad school in New Haven, work in Dallas, went to grad school in New York, work in Chicago, etc.)
-- Professional and graduate school training is ruining the American regional theatre model by churning out fleets of mercenary "professionals" who don't care about the cities in which they're living, but only the theatre in which they're working.
-- How are you supposed to "earn a living" doing theatre if you don't live in a theatre hub like New York? So people who live in New York are automatically outsiders to whatever "local" community they "invade" when they want to work professionally, outside of New York?
-- Regional theatre audiences expect the artistic variety that only a steady stream of newcomers and out-of-towners can provide, rather than the same old local stock.
-- It is cheaper to bring in actors and artists from out-of-town than to keep dozens of people on payroll and with benefits for a season. To fill the variety of roles and positions one needs for a successful theatre season, we would have to keep hundreds of people on retainer to make good shows and who has the money for that?
-- Since regional theatres were intended to be an alternative to Broadway, audiences expect their regional theatres to serve as a window to what's going on in larger, more artistically advanced cities, rather than just reflect local fare.
-- Theatres can't lure audiences in without the appeal of "big-city" names or an imported staff of artists.
-- Smaller mom-and-pop operations eventually implode without the administrative professionalization that staffers specializing in those particular areas bring. (Art people can't do money, money people can't do art.)
-- Local designers won't know what to do with a larger regional theatre design budget even if we did want to hire them because they're used to smaller budgets and they won't know how to fill the space.
-- As Americans, we will always have a "grass is greener" attitude when it comes to art and privilege the unfamiliar (from elsewhere) over the familiar (local).
-- Larger theatres will automatically have less personal connection with their audiences because of their sheer size and need to fill the theatre with more people. In other words, a theatre which seats 600 nightly will naturally have less connection to its audiences than a theatre which seats 20 nightly.
-- Professionals don't care about their work in the way that amateurs do because amateurs are doing theatre out of love, whereas the professionals are doing theatre for money.

Bring your coffee on Saturday morning!

When Audiences Become Creditors -- Part 2

Following on this earlier post, I am re-visiting this issue of audiences who have paid for subscriptions or single tickets, only to have the producing entity go out of business.

Today's Boston Globe addresses a complaint from a subscriber to North Shore Music Theatre (R.I.P.) who was solicited for early subscription renewal. This gentleman is probably out of luck in terms of getting his money back (I'd be pissed too, by the way), but some theatres in the Boston region are helping soften the blow a bit for NSMT audiences. These two articles address moves by other arts orgs who are setting up programs to honor NSMT tickets at other theatres -- a smart move. It placates angry theatre consumers, and has the potential to keep these folks from swearing off the theatre entirely as an enterprise upon which to spend entertainment dollars. It also introduces new audiences to companies they might not otherwise patronize. That's good for both the audience member and the producer. Lemonade of out of lemons.

But it brings me back to Robert Reich's argument about how we can't go back to the way things were before. I guess I'm hung up a little on this with regards to the subscription model because if I were an average consumer, the last thing I'd so these days is buy a subscription to a theatre. (And I LOVE the theatre. I want my local companies to succeed.) But I give them several hundred dollars for me and my sweetheart to attend a season of plays, and how do I know they'll stick around as a company that long? Things might look good from the outside, but what if the joint is rotten at the core? It's this niggling worry that season-renewal brochures hope to dispel, with all the glossy pictures and wonderful descriptions. But since I know that no season brochure wants me to think about the possibility of the theatre going dark unexpectedly, I also know that brochure is not a medium I can trust when it comes to disclosing the fiscal/artistic health of an institution. No wonder nobody's buying. It's a crisis of confidence.

I don't think the subscription model is dead by any means, but I think it needs to be re-thought with an eye towards where we all might be headed, not what things looked like 10 years ago.

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Arts Journalism?

There's news out of USC that in October, the Annenberg School for Communication will host a National Summit on Arts Journalism:

"Every week we're hearing about new projects aimed at reinventing arts coverage. Journalists, arts organizations and media entrepreneurs are trying to create interesting new models of arts journalism. Experimentation is the order of the day. We want to gather up some of the best of these projects, see what looks promising, and bring them to a wider audience."

We all know that the decline in arts journalism isn't just harmful to the arts journalists -- it's a problem for the arts in general.

The interesting part about the Annenberg School's announcement is that they not only are planning to talk about new paradigms for arts journalism in this age of ever-shrinking traditional print media, they are putting their money where their collective mouths are. In their online call for projects, the Summit asks for applicants to submit innovative and "sustainable new models that have the potential to support arts journalism" (emphasis mine). Finalists will have their way paid to the conference and will deliver a presentation on their idea. The conference will be webcast so the ideas can reach the largest possible audience, and from the ideas presented, winners will be chosen and awarded cash prizes.

(Check out the projects as they're submitted for consideration, here.)

Not only is USC looking to foster and reward innovative new models, they seem to be building a new model of their own. I like the effort to leverage the professional and cultural might of the Annenberg School -- in collaboration with a list of heavy-hitting foundations -- to actually DO SOMETHING, rather than just sit around and talk about it.

Time For A Big Re-Think?

Robert (former Sec'y of Labor) Reich has a post up at Salon which is enough to give any thinking person pause.

There's a lot of talk about Economic Recovery out there. This talk often assumes that "recovery" means a return to some version of what we had before everything went spinning down the drain. Reich offers a contrary opinion:

This economy can't get back on track because the track we were on for years -- featuring flat or declining median wages, mounting consumer debt, and widening insecurity, not to mention increasing carbon in the atmosphere -- simply cannot be sustained. [...] X marks a brand new track -- a new economy. What will it look like? Nobody knows. All we know is the current economy can't "recover" because it can't go back to where it was before the crash. So instead of asking when the recovery will start, we should be asking when and how the new economy will begin.

His point is one worth thinking about re: the arts. If we're all waiting around, treading water until the economy gets back on track and people start buying subscriptions and making donations at the capacity they did before, we are going to be sorely disappointed. I have to say I'm with Reich on this one: there is no going back.

One example: for years we've watched theatre subscription numbers in the regionals shift and drop, and administrators everywhere have worked to think up new and exciting marketing copy and flexible programming packages to give the audiences what they want and get those numbers back to where they were before. We continue to recalculate, recalibrate, and try again, our eyes on what seems to be a largely unattainable goal.

Perhaps something more radical is in order. A re-think. A big bag of new ideas. Maybe a whole new goal?

Case Study: New Rep (Boston)

I've been interested in the email notices coming out of New Repertory Theatre in Boston of late. Kate Warner (previously of Dad's Garage in Atlanta) is the newly installed Artistic Director, and the tenor of the communication coming from the theatre is already different. I'll paste excerpts from some of these announcements below, but the thing that interests me most about them is that New Rep is very clearly focusing its story on the theatre's deep ties to the community of artists, audiences, and businesses in the area. In a moment of transition for the leadership of the theatre, the unified message emerging from the organization is one of carefully nuanced balance between the community of artists and audiences that existed before Warner's arrival, and the new artistic programming she brings to the table.

The following announcements particularly piqued my interest because they seem to best embody this position.

In the first example, New Rep sent out an email announcing (selected) casting and directors for shows in the 2009-10 season. To those outside of Boston, the names probably won't mean much, but for Boston audiences and the Boston theatre community, the message comes through loud a clear. The shows that Warner isn't directing herself have been assigned to a collection of established and emerging Boston directors, all with longtime ties to the community (many came through local training programs). The casting announcements highlight longtime community favorites as well as newcomers -- a savvy move that symbolically mirrors Warner's own efforts to blend old and new in the season selection. That is, you may not have heard of these newcomer actors (or, by extension, some of these playwrights), but you can see we care about the established favorites, so you know you can trust us.

In the second example, New Rep attempts to harness the power of word-of-mouth and social networking all at once with an incentive program that rewards subscribers who get their friends to subscribe, or who leverage personal connections in the local business community to sell ad space in the program. While it does have a whiff of the Amway about it, we all know that happy, excited subscribers often buy tickets for friends, or get friends to buy their own tickets. I don't know how many new subscriptions (or ads) this program will pull in, but it seems like it's totally worth a shot for New Rep.

In the last example, New Rep is looking to recruit a corps of citizen-reviewers for its 2009-10 season. This is bold and very smart. As Boston's print-based critical discourse withers and dies (I can't even count the number of critics who have lost their jobs at area papers in the last two years), something needs to fill the void. In asking audiences to serve as reviewers -- and promising to keep the reviews on the blog, unedited, regardless of what the reviewer has to say about the production -- New Rep is rooting the conversation about the art in the community that sees the art. (This makes me think of a recent post from The Artful Manager about the professional/amateur divide on the internet with regards to the arts)

All three of these announcements point to something that seems very of-the-moment: a desire to be incredibly locally relevant, to be plugged into the local cultural and civic ecology. The local-food movement has its mirror in the local-theatre movement. Of course, the New Rep season hasn't yet even begun, so it'll be a waiting game to see how this all pans out for them.

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EXAMPLE #1

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CASTING ANNOUNCEMENTS 2009-10 Season

Mister Roberts: a drama by Thomas Heggen and Joshua Logan

directed by Kate Warner

starring newcomer Thomas Piper as Mister Roberts, New Rep favorite Paul D. Farwell as the Captain, and introducing Jonathan Popp as Pulver

Speed-the-Plow: a drama by David Mamet

directed by Robert Walsh

starring Robert Pemberton as Bobby Gould, New Rep favorite Aimee Doherty as Karen (last seen as Sally Bowles in Cabaret), and introducing Gabriel Kuttner as Charlie Fox

Indulgences: a farcical comedy by Chris Craddock

directed by Kate Warner starring Boston favorite Neil A. Casey as Man 2 (last seen as Einstein in Picasso at the Lapin Agile) , New Rep On Tour actor Edward Hoopman as Malcolm (last seen as title role in Hamlet) and introducing Joel Colodner as Man 1

Opus: a New England Premiere by Michael Hollinger

directed by Jim Petosa

Hot Mikado: book and lyrics by David H. Bell / musical concepts and arrangments by Robert Bowman

directed by Kate Warner / musical direction by Todd C. Gordon / choreography by Kelli Edwards

2.5 Minute Ride: a one woman show by Lisa Kron

directed by M. Bevin O'Gara

starring local favorite Adrienne Krstansky

boom: a New England Premiere by Peter Sinn Nachtrieb

directed by Bridget Kathleen O'Leary

Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol: adapted for the stage and originally directed by Rick Lombardo

directed by Steven Barkhimer

returning for the 5th year: Paul D. Farwell as Scrooge

The Santaland Diaries: by David Sedaris / adapted by Joe Mantello

directed by Christopher Webb

returning after last year's sold out run: Kraig Swartz as Crumpet

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EXAMPLE #2

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Here are two exciting ways that you could earn a FREE subscription!

1) Get TWO friends to subscribe to New Rep for the first time, and we will refund you the cost of one subscription! Ask the Box Office about our "Bring-a-Friend Subscription Rebate" by calling 617-923-8487 or e-mailing tickets@newrep.org.

2) Get a local business to take a quarter page ad in our programs for the 2009-2010 Season, and we'll refund you the cost of one subscription.

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EXAMPLE #3

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New Rep wants YOU, our beloved audience members, to share your thoughts on our productions with the world by writing reviews of our 2009-2010 Season shows. All reviews written by New Rep Reviewers will be posted (unedited) on NewRep's blog, Backstage @ New Rep.

HOW

As a New Rep Reviewer, you must agree to complete 4 easy steps:

1) Attend the Opening Night performances for all 9 New Rep shows

2) Post your review on New Rep's blog within 24 hours of the Opening Night Performance. Instructions will be provided to all New Rep Reviewers.

3) Limit your review to 200-300 words.

4) Write your review based on your response to New Rep's production and not that of other reviewers and/or theatergoers.

TICKETS

New Rep Reviewers (Subscribers): your subscription will be transferred to Opening Night and you will be given two extra tickets to bring friends.

New Rep Reviewers (Non-Subscribers): you will be given two free tickets to attend Opening Night performances.

HOW TO BE CONSIDERED:

1) Submit a 200-300 word review of a play that you have seen at any theater in the Greater Boston Area this past season (2008-2009).

2) Include your name, address, telephone number, and e-mail address on the top of your review.

Professional Vs. Pro-Am?

Isaac Butler of Parabasis has an excellent and thought-provoking post up about the divide between the professional and the amateur in the theatre. I think there's a lot to consider here when it comes to questions about how theatres large and small, professional and (as Butler terms it) "pro-am," are dealing with issues of funding, community support, and programming.

This connects back for me to what Jack Reuler talked about here, what Mike Daisey talks about here, and what corwinchristie (Technology & The Arts blog) and John Fogle (North Shore Art Throb) talk about here.

It seems that there are questions to be addressed about how theatres (large and small) farm out the available jobs, whether those are artistic jobs (actors, directors, designers, script readers, etc), or administrative/operational jobs (telemarketing, ushers, carpenters, etc). There are questions, too, about how value is placed on art and artists -- and how sometimes that "value" is determined by those who have little or no stake in the community in which the artist lives and creates.

Perhaps the issue comes down to price versus cost -- that is, dollar amounts versus the actual costs (things beyond dollar amounts) of the decisions that are made -- and how common it is for concerns about price to eclipse those about cost when in the midst of crisis. (And once again, Michael Kaiser's work comes to mind).

I don't know what I think about all this yet, but it's definitely worth contemplation. I'm going to let Allison jump in here and add some thoughts...