For a few years now I’ve performed guitar and sang in my church band in Brooklyn. This part-time music ministry means I’m now not actually a layman, and have often guiltily puzzled: If I weren’t main the music, how typically would I truly go to church and sit within the pews?
My relationship to the artwork type I cowl typically prompts the same soul looking out. As a critic and reporter, I not solely see rather more theatre than the typical particular person; I’m additionally blessedly insulated from ticket costs by press comps. So whereas I’ve what I feel are knowledgeable impressions and opinions concerning the state-of-the-art type and the business, I do know I’m not consultant of most theatregoers. I as soon as heard a critic describe his job as “skilled viewers member,” however neither he nor I could possibly be mistaken for a typical viewers member.
So, as with my musing about churchgoing, I typically suppose: If it weren’t my job to see theatre and I needed to pay for tickets, which exhibits (and what number of of them) would I truly present up for? I gained’t play favorites right here, however suffice it to say I might be choosier. I would prioritize proximity and first rate parking; I would prize familiarity, not essentially within the sense of looking for out time-tested classics or buzzy revivals however within the sense of loyalty to artists I like and have grown up watching.
The query of which and the way a lot theatre common of us will help with their money and time has grow to be freshly pressing, even hotly contested, previously 12 months, as theatres’ reopening for the reason that Covid lockdown has confronted an ideal storm of diminishing funding, rising supplies and labor prices, and declining attendance within the mixture, regardless of some vivid spots. In making an attempt to get my head round these daunting challenges, notably the final one, my theatregoing thought experiment (which exhibits would I personally pay for?) can solely take me to date.
Fortunately, that’s the place journalism is available in, and never solely by yours really. In this particular difficulty targeted on the viewers, we’ve bought Rosie Brownlow-Calkin’s have a look at the state of subscriptions, Amanda Finn’s examination of evolving viewers norms, Gabriela Furtado Coutinho’s roundtable with entry advocates about how one can make theatre a real house for all, and Cara Pleasure David’s overview of theatres’ well being and the assorted methods to measure it. In a lot the identical approach I contemplate myself conversant with the aesthetics and operations of the theatre within the U.S. over the previous few many years, I might enterprise this journal has monitor document as a commerce publication for and concerning the of us who make theatre. With this difficulty, we’re consciously turning our gaze away from the stage to take inventory of the oldsters who all this theatre is made for. Who’re they and what do they worth? We hope to reply a few of that.
Among the many many portraits of theatre audiences on this difficulty, my favourite is a photograph illustrating Crystal Paul’s account of La Liga Teatro Elástico’s Beast Dance, a puppet theatre piece that was a part of Chicago Worldwide Puppet Theater Competition in January. We see an all-ages crowd in rapt consideration, some standing, many sitting on the ground of the Nationwide Museum of Mexican Artwork, carrying handmade paper headpieces that mirror the flowery wolf-human hybrids of the puppeteer-performers. I don’t find out about you, however for me this picture evokes the form of intimate, blurred-boundary viewers engagement that first launched most of us to the vivifying interplay of reside efficiency—the backyard, to cite Joni Mitchell, which all of us have gotten to get ourselves again to.
Rob Weinert-Kendt (he/him) is editor-in-chief of American Theatre.
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