A couple of weeks ago Julie Burt Nichols of the Bailiwick in Chicago popped up on Twitter and asked for pros and cons of social media in theatre marketing… I got volunteered.

My answers weren’t needed for the eventual post due to my non-Chicagoanity but spurred by Dave Charest’s repurposing of his answers I’d like to share mine as well.

What role is social media playing in regional theater?

It is playing a very small role thus far. Like any good business Regionals are waiting for smaller, nimbler companies to create best practices and proofs of concepts around social media that ensure some stability before they risk time or treasure on it. 

Is social media a valuable use of resources in this sector, considering the time and effort it takes to build these kinds of relationships with patrons/artists? 

The time and effort is comparable to a large traditional print/mail campaign. It feels more time intensive because it is every day, but re-aggregated I think you would find that social media consumes about the same or less time than a week of folding and peel and stick. The benefit of crafting a long term narrative for your theatre? Of creating a narrative around your stable of performers (which you should have or be building) and of creating a Voice for your theatre is quite literally priceless. The ability to have instant access to anyone who has mentioned your show or theatre or is on your email rolls? It changes your customer service role from reactive/negative to proactive/positive. Your customer service staff (whichever other roles they fill) can reach our and make contact with people who are happy with the shows/theatre/staff not simply be confronted with unhappy patrons. 

Is it too easy? What are the dangers of using social media for this purpose?

Is social media too easy? The access is easy. The dangers come in message creep and in simply hiring the wrong person. A professional social media campaign requires the same writing skill as any other and planning like any other with additional gaps filled in with personal reaching out. Using SM software in the vein of Hootsuite you pre-write your campaign and time-release it.  If you simply put a junior intern on Twitter and tell them to talk? The informality will turn off most of your older base and the lack of information won’t draw folks to you. Much is made of the informality of the networks, but the non-stars drawing traffic are those that are either dispensing real knowledge or those engaging in real conversation – in shorter words: authenticity. If your feed or representative is inauthentic you will lose all the time you have put into it. 

Does it have a valuable return in relationship to the demographic it reaches?

Proven authenticity is valuable to all demographics, an extended voice/narrative is valuable to all demographics. Getting out of your building and extending beyond the people who’ve opted in to the folks who are interested in your form but never touched your space? Or who are interested in a topic related to the show or season? It may not pay off with the folks you already have – they respond to whatever you were already doing – but it is a fantastic way to reach out to folks where they already are.

What are the pros and cons of social media in the regional theater market?

Pros? Narrative – I think that going forward Regionals are going to need more than "We’re Good" to carry on, they need a personality around the space, the staff and the talent – they need a narrative for who they were, who they are, and who they’re going to be. In the past you let critics and arts columnists do that for you… now you don’t have to.

The cons? You can’t get away with anything. At all. Ever. That has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not  you (or the theatre) are participating in SM that’s part of the ubiquity of information… but it is a con.

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I have never been able to see those stupid magic eye images…

Y’know these things:

Never. Not once. Not then. Not now.

“Oh but Travis that’s nothing, that’s a parlor trick, it doesn’t mean anything.” Which is of course indisputably true. But back in their day they were everywhere. Those slots in malls that are selling Twilight posters right now? Or Avatar keychains or Inception dreamcatchers… they were selling Magic Eye posters, keychains, tissue boxes, books, calendars, mouse pads, oven mitts I mean they really were omnipresent.

Maybe you don’t know how foolish being beaten by an illusion you fundamentally understand is. I’m a pretty smart fella and this stupid optical illusion defeated me. I hated it. HATED IT. When you’re smart and snarky (before snarky was even a word) and 18 and you hate something, even something stupid and inanimate, you mock the hell out of it.

This is art.

A more versed human than I would look at this and be able to tell you influences on the painter, and skill level, and objective quality. They could give you facts and context. I can tell you that I like the colours and I like the texture in the spring green spackle.

Most audiences won’t even give you that. They don’t want to appear ignorant.

People have been trained (and are being trained better every day) that if you aren’t an expert in a field that you need to shut up or you’re going to be smacked down by someone else who either is an expert or is loud enough to cloud the issue until you run away. Artists and near-artist experts work so hard to prove how smart they are that they have brow beaten audiences into critical passivity.

Audiences dislike anything that they feel like they may not “get”, and they refuse to believe that they did in fact get it, or how little it matters that they “get it right”. People hate feeling stupid.

So instead of deriding their taste when they go see something that won’t insult them why don’t we meet them halfway? Save your dramaturgy for folks who will appreciate it (email me!) and give a scene after the show. Don’t continue hogging the spotlight, draw out of the audience that remains in your lobby what they saw, what they liked or didn’t. Help them feel comfortable talking about it. We complain vigilantly about the about the dreaded “how did you learn all those lines?” but we hesitate to help give our audiences any more critical vocabulary than they came in with. Be teachers. I understand that you’re tired. But this is a job, not Pretty Polly’s Tea Party.

The North American population has been mainlining short and medium form storytelling since they were infants. They know a ton about it, they just don’t think that they do. Show them that they don’t need magic eyes to see your art and you’re halfway to making a fan out of them. 

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Now granted I heard that from a frame salesperson, but it sounds good right? She was responding to my incredulity at what was easily a 6 inch thick frame around a 4 inch picture. Her longer explanation was that any given wall is a blank space and a frame gives the art context in the space.

I buy that.
<sidebar> I will also buy that I really hate gaudy faux gilt frames around pastoral landscapes </sidebar>

Jonathan Mandell (@NewYorkTheater) over at the Faster Times, in the wake of the American Theatre Critics Association wingding last week, drew up a broad post discussing the state of criticism in America. It was a really fun post that ranged far and wide, from the necessity of criticism, to the death of critics, to John Simon averring that bloggers are vermin (I am) and Stephen Hendel admitting publically that he doesn’t read George Hunka or Lucas Krech.

I have no use for the argument about whether blogging is valid. Publishing is publishing. If you haven’t found something to read that makes your pink parts tingle that doesn’t invalidate the medium. Neither do I care to (further) discuss the “death” of anything like criticism, as that conversation is expressly about the ability of Professional Whatever to make as much money as they feel like they should be making, not about the thing itself.

What I DO have use for is what I want criticism to do.

Not reviewing. Lord we have a lot of reviewers. We have citizen reviewers and professional reviewers and pro-am reviewers and the irascible Don Hall reviewer and friends and family and cast and crew and the butcher, the baker, and candlestick maker.

Criticism.

In a time of centralized (truly Mass) media the upper echelons of each field could be recognized and the average person would know at the very least who the Biggest and Brightest in each small niche were. It wasn’t a broad knowledge or anything like even a basic working knowledge of a niche, but you could play word association games – Theatre? Arthur Miller! Poetry? Robert Frost!

In a time of fractured media and self selection of sources it’s more difficult to assume any knowledge whatsoever of a niche.

There’s no context whatsoever for what we’re doing. We talk about microlabels inside our niche “indie” theatre versus “pro-am” or whatever… do a man-on-the-street and ask who the biggest star on Broadway is. Who has the number 1 album on Billboard?

People like knowing what they’re talking about. People like knowing that what they’re seeing is the best, the first, the something-th. They have no way of knowing unless someone knowledgeable steps in provides that knowledge for them. If they walk into the small and oddly shaped Hyde Park Theatre and see Annie Baker’s Circle Mirror Transformation this week they don’t know (without someone telling them) that they’re seeing a Obie-winning play directed by an in-town Hall of Famer with a cast that has a few closets full of awards and nominations. Despite the irregularities of the space, the informality of the evening and the affordability of the ticket,  you should have high expectations for both the show and the performers. This isn’t a Waiting for Guffman extravaganza written by a bored 5th grader.

I want for the critics of the now, print or on-line, paid adequately or not, to be those context providers. Every town has a narrative. Every town likely has multiple narratives on multiple levels, but let’s stick for the moment stick to the singular. If our critics in each town look to that narrative to inform the coverage and the features we continually build hooks into creating broader interest in what we do. Who is the bad boy of Minneapolis theatre? Who is the rising star of Seattle?

It seems a little trite. But I believe firmly in selling our people and if we only ever talk about plays as product? Wow are we missing the boat. I know allotted column inches are shrinking, I know budgets are shrinking, I know that many critics are working multiple jobs and don’t have time for features.

So my call to action is this:
Critics give your audience context for each show you talk about. A an extra online paragraph. Feature the author, or a performer, or the venue – how does this production fit into the town? Or the season? Robert Faires did this really well with his “The Classics Comeback” piece in the Chronicle.

YOU. You have a blog. Tell us about folks you love in your town. Stop whining about how no one is doing something and be the person who does it. Be an advocate! Out Adam Szymkowicz Adam Syzmkowicz! It isn’t our job to research the best and brightest in your town, it’s your job to tell us.

Frame the picture for us, so that when we come to see your art we have context.

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Cambiare’s next production (exact dates pending) is In Pursuit of Childhood. It’s already in it’s 3rd incarnation (as proposed it was called Lunchroom Gods and featured yet MORE mythology!) and beginning the plunge from mine and Will’s brains through the filter of a cast and into reality.

Will and I brainstorm pretty fluidly at this stage. We take an idea, walk it to a conclusion, ask it a few questions, and move on. Sort of the way all the cautious (i.e. smart) kids took to a Choose Your Own Adventure with a finger marking each outcome so as to avoid dying or becoming an ant.

A lot of the specifics of the piece will depend on the cast and the improvisations they create, but as a starting place we plan on assigning each of the cast members a characteristic to build their character from. Something stock to give a foundation the (approximate) sixth graders we’re looking for local superstars to build. A sort of kiddie commedia.

Bandying around the sorts of characteristics it would be fun to see folks try on leads for the more introspective participants (yeah alright both of us) to think about where we would have fit in the group. What would my “stock characteristic” have been?

How about small? Very small.

Yes that’s actual sixth grade graduation.

I hadn’t yet discovered cynicism, had only the rudimentary control of sarcasm that all sixth graders have, I wasn’t the class clown, Peter Ivas was. I was smart, but wasn’t the smartest kid in the class, one of the girls was (my money is on Jodie Shafer, but any of Jodie, Nevart, or Megan could have been number one). I was still very unsure of myself only having spent 3.5 years with my family. So I hadn’t become the arrogant know-it-all of high school that fed into the arrogant know-it-all insufferable loudmouth of adulthood.

So I guess I’m going to have to stick with quietish nerd. It’s not where I ended up, but it is where I was…

How about you? What Stock Kids Movie Type were you?

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I am something of an Austin theatre scene booster. I haven’t been at all shy about that. I am rightfully proud of the raw amount of theatre (and art in general) that goes on in a town that has a population only about 30% of Brooklyn’s’. One of my criticisms of the scene is the lack of a regional theatre to anchor the identity of the region and serve as an importer/exporter to the nexus of American theatre. There is justreally no place to grow to.

Of course that’s also a strength in what is a D-I-Y town, do your thing and make it on your own.

It also means that there isn’t a Big Boy in town to root against. There isn’t a Giant in town that is sucking the air out of the room for the indies. There are two larger theatres that pay better, but they’re really just older successful versions of what everyone in town is doing. One a little less adventurous and one a bit more, but how do you root against the theater that sits in the big boy seat and has as it’s “In Trouble Need to Make Money” season:

Rent
Hairspray
The Break-Up Notebook
Fiction written and directed by Steven Dietz
The Book of Grace written and directed by Suzan-Lori Parks
August: Osage County
and the yearly Santaland Diaries

Yeah. That’s a tough life. Absolutely there are commercial choices, but they have salaries to pay. And there are commercial choices and there are COMMERCIAL choices.

Way to go Zach! thank you for challenging yourselves every year.

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It’s been 6 months already so the theatre blogs and the #2amt (2am Theatre) kids on Twitter are bashing around labeling of theatre again. It’s one of rashes that theatre bloggers seem to have that flare up pretty consistently. I’ve talked about this before here and there are links over at 2amtheatre.com and at The Next Stage and more if you search the #2amt tag on Twitter. It makes Don Hall’s head pound just to listen to us talk about it, which is it’s own reward but not why we do it.

Why do we do it?

Why do we talk about getting more people in to see our work, their work, anyone’s work? Even in those icky business clichés that drive all the true artists/punks to want to slit their digital writs?

Because we love this.
We love this out of all proportion.
We love this more than we really should.
At some point in our lives live performance hooked into us and never let go.

And we spend our free time creating it, talking about it, talking about talking about it, writing about talking about it, hanging out with other people who create it, write about it , talk about it, write about people talking about creating it…

My wife has two degrees in this and she would really like me to go back to being hooked on baseball sometimes.

And most people just don’t seem to care. They care more about jai alai than live theatre. This field has become a cliché on both ends of the spectrum (the garish Broadway musical and the warehouse performance artists) and those of us in between just can’t get people in the doors.

And we know that it’s because someone somewhere lost them, and that if we can get them in the door one more time we can keep them. That they will be as hooked on this as we are. But we messed up somewhere and lost them to something someone told them was newer and better. Frankly, we suck at language for a largely text based art form. Republicans never would have let this happen to their art form.

Even old and musty doesn’t need to be a terrible thing. The masks and Red Curtain can still be wonderful, and theatre in general is just as vital as it’s ever been. But we talk about it like half-drunk epileptic docents, and THAT is what this discussion is about.

We don’t have the words for what we do that make it easy for anyone else to understand why we love it, and the time for that ineffability being enough is long since passed.

Records, vinyl records, are an outdated medium that has no technical advantages over the technologies that followed it, it lacks portability, it lacks purity, and it lacks permanence.

And for a whole bunch of folks it is the only way to Really Listen to music because those imperfections lend a certain warmth of tone that perfect FLAC files and $20 ear buds just don’t capture.

But theatre makers manage to make analog sound like a thesis instead of a privilege and I’m going to keep mucking around in the language bin until I get the words right for what it is that I do.

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There is a guideline/rule/rubric/something I heard this one time about never responding to your critics. Or maybe it was never respond to your critics publically or some such…

I’m mostly well behaved about such things.

But I want to point anyone who knows the formentors of rebellion who sic their fans and subscribers on someone who doesn’t like a show to what a grown up response looks like.

Mr. Don Hall and his 5-Ring WNEP production The (edward) Hopper Project have gone before the review stand and while you might assume that you can guess Mr. Hall’s stance, would it really be Don Hall if you could?

No it would not.

So if you would please take a look at Mr. Hall’s dialogue with the critics after each review, rather what I would like to believe the bar would be like after the show.

And if you know someone at the Huntington feel free to point them there as well.

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I’m not through Part One yet, but I really need to jot thoughts as I go or I’m just going to lose it all.

1. AD’s honestly believe that there are no good plays anymore. Because of course Really Good Play means Tartuffe.It is really not clear to ADs at major shops who have been running Shakespeare, Moliere, Shakespeare, Chekov, O’Neill for a decade that reading a new unproduced play isn’t going to have the same effect on them, not because it isn’t good, but because:

   A.) You’ve only been working with Hall of Fame scripts distilled by 500 years of production winnowing the field

   B.) You’re older, more experienced, more broadly read and you’re not going to be as easily impressed as you were when you were 22.

   Baseball metaphor: hitters will always tell you that Old Ace Pitcher was the fastest ever, much faster than Young Flamethrower. Because of course he was 19 and seeing Big League fastballs for the first time out of the hand of Old Ace Pitcher and seeing Young Flamethrower’s work after 20 years of seeing Big League fastballs.

   To paraphrase Bill James: The real level of the Really Good Play is not Hamlet or a Doll’s House and never has been.

2. The book’s opening paragraph’s outline the Utopia found by Chekhov, Brecht, O’Neil, Churchill, August Wilson, Odets and Shakespeare, and Moliere – all writers for the ages who were lovingly tended by theatre’s eager to receive their work…
   Except of course that they were writing members of a group, not Monks on a retreat who returned from the mountain tops wreathed in glory to deliver the Next Work.No one is arguing that groups that develop a work begun by a singular voice can’t work… they’re arguing that they’re broke. Well, not arguing – stating.  What they are also stating is that major nonprofits aren’t doing that. I think that’s a pretty unassailable position.
3. Everyone wants a comfortable job at a comfortable salary at a nurturing artistic home. And a unicorn. Too bad.That aside, the burrowing of our writers from high school to undergrad to grad to laboratory to internship to retreat to incubator is naturally going to lead to disconnected abstract plays. They are disconnected from reality, living inside a bubble of craft, only talking to other theatremakers and primarily only other writers. To be crass? Inbreeding leads to retardation.(Preemptive rebuttal: the fact the YOU Intrepid Wordsmith haven’t Done That doesn’t invalidate my premise… you are not the entire world snowflake)

   Live life in this world and you’ll be able to write about it.
   My favorite current example of the real world leading to good craft is smaller by Malachy Walsh. His experiences inform the subject and round the characters but never supersede his craft in the creation.

More as I wade through the heartache.

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I wrote a glorious, witty, self-serving piece about the need for big tent tolerance in both religion and theatre.

Oh my god it was bad. As Treplev says in the the Nina Variations (by Steven Dietz – buy now), “Nothing makes an audience run from the room faster then the phrase, ‘I had a dream…’, except perhaps for this phrase, ‘When I was a young boy…’”

You need my personal history like you need a panel of rabies shots.

The summary line of that post was: Some people like musicals, light comedy, Sarah Kane, Shakespeare, and improv. Stop complaining that X Style/Production is Killing theatre.

It’s not.
You just think it’s stupid.
They mean different things.

Let’s push things forward…

That all rattling in my head: religion, and theatre, and the resilience of both remind me of when I was a young boy…

All right I wasn’t, I was like 25 but whatever.

I had one of those Discussions. The kind of Discussion that for me only happens on the Beach or at Diners (or in this case both) about Humankind’s desperate need to define and label and create boundaries for themselves. I belong to this fraction of this fraction of this fraction of the group of people who live in this city/state/country and this is what that Means. We create as small a niche for ourselves in this limitless universe as we can to keep ourselves sane.

Then from the beginning of time we created stories to explain why we were in those niches. Oh we love stories.

And religion gave birth to theatre, and campfires gave way to the public square (of whatever size) to the airwaves but the stories and our need for them never change.

It occurs to me that the reliance of religion on narrative is exactly why there is no significant Right Wing Theatre. Religion fills the narrative needs of bulk of American Conservatives. In many instances with higher budgets and better production values than Off-Wherever Indie theatre.

And for those who aren’t looking for personal but rather group narrative we have the political and athletics realms.

Theatre isn’t going to ever die.
SYSTEMS die. Not forms.
The narratives we weave, and the reflections of ourselves that we crave will never go disappear.

We need to stop reacting out of anger and fear at every turn.
We’re storytellers. On the stage, at the pub, by the campfire, in our living rooms, we will continue to be storytellers.

I’m not saying there aren’t challenges. But the challenges aren’t TO THE VERY FABRIC OF THEATRE ITSELF. The challenges are (in my case) producing the theatre I want to in the style I want to without risking my own money. In many cases it’s a challenge to Have a Career in Theatre. Or to Make Money at This.

Those are real challenges and deserve talking about. But choose your words. How you define your challenges becomes the walls of your world. Make it personal.
Which is exactly what your success will be when you achieve it.

What is your Challenge?

“
On the walls of the day
In the shade of the sun
We wrote down
Another vision of us
We are the challengers of
The unknown
”
Challengers – The New Pornographers

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It seems in the aftermath of Diversity Weekend and the subsequent release of Outrageous Fortune that the fog of war has lifted and the folks are seeing the enormity of the problems in front of us.

Of course the problems that face theatre are insurmountable.

T’was ever thus.

We are trying to perform communal alchemic creation in a hastily pasted on corporate structure. We have no funding mechanism that doesn’t involve the kindness of strangers and a talent base that pays lipservice to the good of the artform while silently chafing that they’re not paid on the level of their similarly educated (less romantic) peers. We have no economies of scale, no national infrastructure, no global networking, no buzzrwords of any sort to alleviate the problems.

Reflecting on it doesn’t change it. With no disrespect meant, maybe that’s what happens when you’re inside a system and see the cliffs?

There is no system in the wild. Out here in the provinces we just make theatre. It may not be diverse enough, it may not feature enough women, but it’s pretty high quality and getting better all the time… and efficiently produced as hell.

Pride in indie theatre aside, I have long felt that the entrepreneurial model is a bad idea for theatre. We are forced to it because that’s the language our funders speak so we organize that way.

Theatres should be dealt with as record labels and producing groups like bands. Bands meant to be transitory until you find the true connection and labels to be counted on for a style.

The idea that theatre companies are just like any mini-mart (small businesses with small but measurable ecomnomic effects) is patently ridiculous. Theatremaking is as alchemic as any act of creation. It’s chemistry in four dimensions. Every chemical reaction has a limited effect. One of the components will be consumed by the process and the process will end. Of course we expect the theatremaking to continue just the same, because there are budgets and structures and mouths to feed.

And then we question why exactly theaters fall apart, or slide off mission, or stop taking risks, or any number of things that we expect other theatres to manage to do what we can’t ourselves.

Of course these problems are insurmountable, they are built into the system… But we get up and we keep trying because we need to make theatre. Not for Theatre’s sake, for ours. Theatre was here when we showed up and will be here long after we’re gone. Theatre will die the day after Religion. Stop trying to save Theatre and just make the theatre you think needs making.

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