Tag Archive | Audience
That World Premiere Thing
Last Monday I attended a fascinating presentation by Theatre Development Fund and Theatre Bay Area on their new play study, Triple Play. Click here to watch the livestream of the discussion. The study centered on the motivations and reactions of single-ticket buyers with regard to their new play ticket purchases, and there was a lot […]
On laughter and trust
I had a friend who was a senior theatre arts major last year, the first year that senior theatre arts students were allowed to see the sophomore auditions. She came home that night in a tizzy. “I am NEVER doing a serious monologue again! Not if I have any say about it!” She then proceeded […]
Hello Shylocks
The Venetian Ghetto. Five synagogues: German, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, Levantine (Eastern Mediterranean) and the Scuola Canton, built for the Ashkenazi community (descendants of Eastern European countries). The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare. Five scenes with Shylock the Jew. A recent production of this play, workshopped on the streets of the ghetto established roughly […]
Who You Want Your Audience To Be
I’ve been thinking a lot about “audience” recently. I went to three shows this weekend, two fringe and one mid-size, and saw a huge disparity in who was attending the shows. This wasn’t surprising. It was exactly what you’d expect: majority older white subscribers at the mid-size, majority 20-40-somethings and theatre artists at the fringe, […]
Topdog/Underdog Audience Response
It’s a Wednesday matinee of Topdog/Underdog by Suzan Lori-Parks at the Huntington theatre. A play about two black men in American society, struggling with many systems (societal, economical, fate) that have been rigged against them. The story has Greek elements of fate written into it, what with the characters being named Lincoln and Booth, it is […]
Repeat After Me: Your Audience Is Not Stupid
Dear David J. Castillo, I’ve been thinking a lot about your being an utter waste of space. Now, while I believe that that is true for most people in the world, I think it is especially true because lately, you’ve been acting pretty recklessly. You’d think that after four years of training within a BFA […]
The Curious Incident of the Commodification of the Alternative
While I was in London this past semester, I spent an evening in the West End watching Simon Stephens’ stage adaptation of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. The play centers around Christopher, a young boy on the Autism Spectrum, as he solves the mystery of who killed his neighbor’s dog. Visually […]
The Broken Contract
The lights are bright, the applause is deafening, and as I’m taking a bow, I am finally able to smile naturally as myself and not a character. I rush offstage, hurry into the dressing room and undress and redress as quickly as I can. Because tonight, a rarity has occurred. Tonight, people came to see […]
Marxism with Capitalist Appeal
I love Chekhov. A lot of people love Chekhov. My expression of this affinity adds, I’m aware, absolutely nothing to any conversation whatsoever, especially in a literary sense. And the vast majority of contemporary performance of his work is, unfortunately, both tedious and dull. Yet every once in awhile, a production ignites the motor […]
Responding to a wake up call
Arts Council England just released a statement on Monday Dec 8th about funding cuts for theatres that don’t show attempts to make their work more diverse. The week before also in Britain, Meera Syal a writer and actor interviewed with The Stage Magazine and talked about vast potential for diverse audiences, in particular Asian audiences, […]
Guess Who Really Hates Theatre Audiences?
The theatre is a powerful place to change minds…to those who will listen. This past Saturday I went to see the Huntington Theatre Company’s production of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?”, a well done production that I enjoyed. The production I enjoyed, the experience not so much. Being the end of a popular run, the […]
Recovering from Reality TV
An article on theatremania.com reported the closing of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella on Broadway in early January. The article also highlighted the addition of actress NeNe Leakes to play the role of the Wicked Stepmother for the ending of the show. I understand the article used her previous credential “of The Real Housewives of Atlanta” to offer […]
A Solution (maybe) for Non-Profits: A Sense of Place
A sense of place—this is an idea Carlos Uriona of Double Edge Theatre talked about recently in a Tedx Talk. I think this is particularly important for artists. In his talk, Carlos tells of his journey from Argentina all the way to Ashfield, MA, USA to Double Edge Theatre. Carlos was an artist and theatre […]
Some hypothetical math and a real idea.
Since discussing the state of the theatre with Diane Ragsdale in class, and after reading vstalli’s recent post about needing a new business model for the theatre, I’ve been wondering if my company‘s ticket incentive could fit the bill in some way for other small companies. We give each performer their own discount code (i.e. for […]
The Good, The Bad, and The Interesting
I rarely see theatre that is truly exceptional, either exceptionally bad or exceptionally good. Whatever we want to tell ourselves, most is by definition average. Average doesn’t mean unsatisfying, unstimulating or unintersting, but it’s rare to see a piece like Mies Julie, and even rarer to walk out to discover that the world has changed […]
My Attempt to Fill the Gap
I wrote a blog post at the beginning of the semester about not being apprehensive of creating theatre for a teenage audience. I stand by my ideas and finding myself returning to these thoughts and being able to articulate why I find it so important to make theatre available for emerging adults and artists. Last […]
Responsibility of the Audience
Last weekend I saw a visual and auditory representation of the online drama that encompassed the hacktivist group, Anonymous. The People Movers Dance Company perform what they called “a new ballet set in cyberspace.” The live music was conducted by Lidiya Yankovskaya. The music was composed by Peter Van Zandt Lane and consisted of electronically […]
Changing the “dramaturgy of the land”
“When you’re marching down the levee, something amazing happens: the dramaturgy of the land changes” – Nick Slie (Mondo Bizarro, New Orleans, LA) While the human race is capable of such magnificent acts of creation, we are equally as capable of devastating destruction. In making life more convenient for ourselves, we have begun to systematically […]
Wellman vs. BSO
This past weekend I attended a performance at the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Despite the fact that as a BU student I can get 75 dollar seats to any performance at the BSO for free, it was my first time attending the world renowned orchestra. Though I play no instruments and though I wouldn’t call myself […]
They need it more than we do.
Hey fellow theatre students: Why do we spend so much time and effort into making theatre that nobody will see? At least, nobody other than our classmates, fellow artists, who always see it… How do we engage with new audiences? Ones whose first impulse would not be to spend their Friday night going to the […]
Drama Lit Blog 2.0: BU School of Theatre 