Locked in a Room with Crazy People
Posted on | March 17, 2010 | 7 Comments
"So what did you think of the show?!!"
LukeJB, over at his blog, leaps into the fray of the ongoing, perennial discussion of why, exactly, theatre regularly gets pasted in the Art Medium Wars. In responding to Eric Zeigenhagen (whose point I will further distill into “People either like theatre or they don’t”), Luke says
I think the difference is simpler: you can lump netflixing & nose-bleeding (going to a giant concert) together on one side, and theatre-going on the other. The former has much less potential for disaster than the latter. If you rent a bad movie, you can turn it off. If you go see Springsteen, he’s going to play “Born To Run”. But what happens if you get roped into a dreadful musical aimed at nostalgic baby-boomers or an over-serious Chekhov “reinterpretation”? It’s a painful experience. It’s painful for the same reason theatre can be transcendent: it’s immediate, it’s inescapable, it’s brutal.
What he’s hitting on here are the values and the fears of a group of people (and a large one at that). This is standard marketing practice, and it’s what anyone starting up a business does: ask what the value proposition is of the product to her potential customers.* More on this in a second.
The group we’re talking about here is the “unwashed mashes” (I assume and hope that’s not a typo, because it’s hilarious): the mythical ‘Average Joe.’ Luke makes this observation:
In some ways, there is too much theatre out there. Certainly, too much bad theatre. The ratio of bad plays to good plays is depressingly high. So odds are, when a friend asks you to see a show, it kind of sucks. You never go back. Can I blame you? Americans dread bad experiences more than we value good ones. So most people would rather see a movie that gets mediocre ratings than a play that gets decent ones. Less risk.
So let me sum up: People aren’t opposed to intimate, immediate experiences by nature, they are opposed to being bored. They value (and vote for, via their dollars and time) experiences where they a) have a reasonable expectation of what they are going to get (Springsteen will appear, he will play “Born to Run”) or b) where they can quickly opt out (This ‘V’ show sucks, I am going to stop watching it and do something else.) In storefront theatre, we actively work against those desires and create what are called barriers to entry: no one has ever heard of us; we hate doing straight-up, ‘recognizable’ plays; we make people come to us in cramped, sometimes uncomfortable or dirty spaces; we hold them hostage in a room and put tremendous social pressure on them to be as excited as we are about what’s happening.
Luke goes on to make a point about how we should be harder on each other about the art we make, as that will lead to better quality, which will lead to more people coming out to see shows (since there is less risk.) I love the sentiment – he puts the focus on what we can do to change the problems – but I think it’s a tough sell: ‘tell your friends their show sucks today, and in 15 years we’ll have more people coming to theatre.’ Meanwhile, I’m 45, not doing theatre and have no friends to boot.
A nearer-term solution would be (and here it is again): talk to your audience. Actually, no: listen to your audience. I hate seeing a bad show as much or more than the next person – but you know what makes me run away and never come back? The sense that I’m the only one who knows it’s bad.
psychosis: any of several serious mental illnesses characterized by defects in judgment and other cognitive processes and by loss of contact with reality.
Most of us know that a variety of factors – time, money, energy, money, people, money and money - inhibit our ability to fully realize our artistic vision. And we all know the pain of being in a show that’s less than what it could’ve or should’ve been. You think it’s not obvious to the audience? It is. And we only make it worse when we ignore their uncomfortable shifting and force them to say things like, “You looked like you were having a lot of fun out there.”
Let me be clear: I’m not advocating public finger-pointing and throwing our colleagues under a bus whenever our friends don’t like a show. What I’m asking us to do is to screw our courage to the sticking place and admit that not everything we do is perfect and to allow our audiences into the conversation. Make it okay for people to say, “Man, I really didn’t like it,” and, perhaps, acknowledge (without apologizing) that all art is, essentially, experimentation. And you get a lot of negative results before you make a breakthrough. Because otherwise, they’re going to feel like they’re locked in a room with a crazy person, and the crazy person is you. And I can guarantee you the problem isn’t just going to stop there: that tension and anxiety is going to come out somewhere – they’ll vent to a friend, a room full of co-workers, or god-forbid Yelp or Facebook about this awful, embarrassing experience they had with these crazies. Let them vent to you, let them see that you aren’t, in fact, crazy – and you will probably mitigate that fall out. You might even turn somebody around.
Think of it this way: your job as someone trying to build a community around a work or a series of work is to create a connection. We all hope that what happens in the theatre does that – but if it doesn’t, you can make it happen in the lobby. These conversations might be hard – we have to develop thicker skin and recognize that the work, not our feelings of self worth, are the things at issue. But you’re going to learn something: that person who hates your show might reveal something simple that you can fix – they were turned off the moment they couldn’t find info on your website, the chairs were uncomfortable, the person at the box office was rude. Or they might reveal they don’t like the type of work you do, at which point you can let them go their merry way (or even recommend some other shows they might like).
And it works the other way: you will find people who love what they just experienced. Share that experience with them and they’ll become an advocate. Find out what they liked and it gives you clues as to how you can draw in more people like them (ask them how they found out about the show and you have the beginnings of a marketing strategy!)
I suppose most of my recent screeds can be grouped under the heading, “it’s the audience, stupid.” We envy the success of movies, tv, and major for-profit and regional theatres – but we hate their art half the time. The thing we’re ignoring is, their motives are audience-centric: either to make money or to pursue a broad mandate to ‘bring theatre to the community,’ all those folks are interested in making art that their potential audience wants to see. But in Chicago, especially, we’re artist-centric: in general, we’re building companies and producing shows in our own image, and hoping that people will be into what we’re doing. I applaud that – hell, I participate in that – but I know that it’s a miss-and-miss-and-miss-and-sorta-hit proposition unless I’m prepared to be a little proactive. Everyone I care about in the world has built their lives around this proposition – that if they build it, others will come – and I’m happy to support them. In fact, I spend most of my time trying to figure out how to make it work. But to expect that everyone will be just as excited as we are and get angry when they aren’t – that’s just, well … crazy.
*She would also ask, “What is the demand for this product in the market I’m moving into and how will I separate myself from competitors?” Whenever I get to this point in a conversation, I always want to haul out the value triangle and really unpack the concept of differentiation and customer-centrism – but let’s leave that there for now.
This post was brought to you in part by Australian reader Marcus Westbury, who bought me a gigantic can of Fosters for my extra-long last post. Thanks Marcus!
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7 Responses to “Locked in a Room with Crazy People”
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March 17th, 2010 @ 3:49 pm
I wish there were a way for an audience to fill out a form, either in the theater or online afterwards, anonymously if they so chose, to give feedback. I think anonymity usually breeds honesty when it comes to criticizing the hard work of others.
March 17th, 2010 @ 3:55 pm
Aside from that, I admire Oobleck’s example: get tons of outside eyes in on the process. While you can still do something about it.
Sometimes people don’t say much about what they’ve seen onstage because it’s too late to change it.
I hear people make excuse after excuse for bad reviews/responses. I’m sure I’ve done it myself at times, sure. Sometimes I disagree with the reviews (of my work or of others), but a lot of times I learn more from the failures. I try to really hear a negative response, because resisting it will get you nowhere. It’s like we used to say:
Shut up. Take the note.
March 19th, 2010 @ 3:11 am
[...] Dan Granata on running the asylum. This post continues a conversation that began here at the 2am site with Eric Ziegenhagen’s post on where people are when they’re not at the theatre. Dan Granata makes his way through the crazy people in the room and listens to the audience. [...]
March 19th, 2010 @ 12:15 pm
Great post. I quibble with your definition of “barriers to entry,” because in the classical strategic framework, barriers to entry keep out your competitors, not your customers. Also, it isn’t just Americans who dread bad experiences more than we value good ones. All humans do this. It’s called myopic loss aversion, and is very well documented in psychological and behavioral economics research. But these don’t change your point at all.
I would add this: price IS a major factor. Deciding to consume Netflix and/or Tivo and/or cable is riskless, not just in terms of time, but because you already paid for it. At the point of decision, it is free to watch. Springsteen is not a good comparison here, because paying to see Springsteen is a very rare event. We need people to see a lot more plays than they see arena rock concerts. The price point that theater is really competing with, in my opinion, is the $8-11 full price movie ticket. People risk money on bad movies because they’re only $10, and even predictably bad movies offer something that enough people enjoy, like T&A or pratfalls or what-have-you. But $20 or more? Problematic.
Of course, even storefront theater, where practitioners get paid not-quite-peanuts, needs to charge almost that much just to survive, and more than that to grow. I don’t believe theaters should live entirely on grants and donations just to make the ticket price less risky for consumers.
Ultimately, I think this supports your point that theater needs greater quality control, and a greater focus on what the audience thinks. There are artistic reasons to care about the audience, too, but that’s another discussion.
March 19th, 2010 @ 11:32 pm
Not Fosters! Sheesh, if i’d known you were going to spend it on Fosters i’d have had second thoughts. Strangely, you can barely buy Fosters down here.
But seriously, it was a post worthy of a beer.
marcus.
March 20th, 2010 @ 8:23 am
Aaron – yeah, I futzed with the definition of “barriers to entry” there (my former employer was the business school at Northwestern: they’d be so ashamed!) but its such a great concept (something keeping people from walking in your door”) that I couldn’t resist! And I agree that its not just us Americans – Luke said that in his post, I was quoting – but thanks for bringing in the right terminology! Didn’t myopic loss aversion come into a RadioLab episode? I should check that out.
I guess my point wasn’t so much that we need quality control – I think that was more Luke’s point than mine – but more reminder that theatre, perhaps more than any other art, is about the people in the room, and the conversation between them. I think a lot of hand-wringing (and finger-pointing) happens among theatre folks as to “why people don’t come to our shows.” It’s probably most absurd when the people we want to know about are right there. So my point is, basically: you want to know why people aren’t coming or coming back? Ask them. You’ll get some answers – and you might even get them to come back just by asking.
As to your further points about ticket prices (unit price? shall we go all in on the b-school speak? lets!) – did you see my last post? Some thoughts of my own on the very things you bring up!
March 20th, 2010 @ 8:24 am
I was afraid you’d say that! I need to discover a better Australian beer!
Thanks very much, again!