In the past few weeks I have been hearing disturbing comments from artistic directors across the country, some of whom are in despair over what they perceive as audience resistance to difficult or challenging material. In several instances, directors report that work they feel is among the best their theatres have ever produced has received a less-than-enthusiastic reception from the local press and audience. One director glumly wondered if this rejection by his and other audiences means that larger theatres with many seats to fill might turn into “booking houses,” producing a narrow range of popular work with broad appeal. Such a trend would constitute a revival of “the road,” which would insure less risk and greater audience acceptance. With theatres responsible for earning so much of their income today, is a lessening of artistic expectations inevitable?
A few years ago, Robert Brustein’s Cambridge, Massachusetts-based American Repertory Theatre lost almost half its subscribers at the end of a season that included avant-garde director Lee Breuer’s pop-culture version of Wedekind’s Lulu, among other fare. Brustein terms the “purging” of his audience life-enhancing. The former subscribers have been replaced and overall subscribership increased by a different, more supportive audience for the innovative repertoire that the company produces. This phenomenon is not unlike timber control, where the ground is periodically burned and purged to make new growth more vigorous.
Brustein did not adjust his subsequent season to ameliorate his disaffected subscribers; rather, he hoped that a continuance of the non-traditional repertoire to which his theatre was committed would attract a new membership—which, happily, it did. Although Boston did not have a history of nourishing an expanding number of theatrical institutions like Seattle or Minneapolis, as a major intellectual/educational center the city should certainly be able to sustain a theatre with a non-traditional repertoire.
Jon Jory, who has developed the Actors Theatre of Louisville’s Humana New American Plays Festival and Shorts Festival in a relatively small city without a long theatre tradition (but with an extraordinary supporter in the Humana Corporation), is convinced that the answer to audience acceptance in his community is balance; his very large subscription audience accepts much of the difficult material presented in the festivals because they know they are also going to get their standard mystery thriller and a light comedy elsewhere within the season. In the first seasons of the Actors Theatre, before Jory arrived, it alienated a considerable segment of its audience through programming a largely avant-garde repertoire. Has that audience been restored and greatly increased because better sensors have been developed to judge how far afield programming can go without alienating an audience?
Certainly an adventurous repertoire is easier to maintain when a theatre has established a loyal audience committed to a season of plays rather than relying solely on reviews to attract single-ticket buyers. One of the most compelling reasons for operating in rotating repertory is the fact that careful scheduling can sustain productions of limited popular appeal. As Tyrone Guthrie used to say, “One works in rep so that one can hide, but not abandon, the less popular plays.” Without the security of a guaranteed audience that subscription provides or the flexibility that rotating repertory offers, the trend may be skewed toward programming only plays perceived to be popular. But then we lose the ability to take chances. This phenomenon is reflected acutely in the publishing business, which increasingly shies away from poetry, plays and essays because of their limited profit potential.
I worry about how much we Americans have become conditioned to “impulse buying.” We can decide at the last minute to go to a movie. In many cities, theatres are served by day-of-performance cut-rate ticket booths. We don’t even have to commit ahead of time to watching television with the widespread introduction of VCRs. Impulse buying is always going to favor that which is known and popularly accepted. Yet, serious, difficult films can attract a considerable audience when equally difficult and serious plays are finding audience resistance. I suspect the explanation is the truly numbing amount of publicity that films receive—ads, reviews and features in daily, weekly and monthly periodicals, as well as on any number of TV interview programs. Audiences are prepared and conditioned long before they plunk down their money. Such public relations tactics are obviously beyond the scope of any theatre.
In this month’s cover story, Jan Stuart discusses a movement away from small-cast plays dealing with intimate material that requires modest physical demands, in favor of a return to large-scale work of broader scope. I think it is an immensely important trend, because it expands the parameters of how we perceive our entire artistic discipline. Imagine symphonies limiting their repertoires to baroque music because Beethoven symphonies are scored for too many players! It is an encouraging sign that some of our playwrights and the adventurous theatres producing their work are swimming against the current, rejecting automatic assumptions and exploring work on a scale not widely known in this country for the past generation. We must find innovative ways of preparing the press and educating current audiences-or if necessary of finding new, more receptive audiences-to come along on this journey.
