Heretic’s Foundation III: Smart Plays Need Smart Audiences, Don’t They?

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Heretic’s Foundation III: Smart Plays Need Smart Audiences, Don’t

They?
Friday, May 8, 2009
Bylines

By John Hudson
darkladyplayers@aol.com

Americans for the Arts has called for $2 billion in arts-specific projects to “modernize, rehabilitate, and
construct our nation’s cultural facilities.” But that won’t help the theater. We have theaters across the
country; what we don’t have is demand: for straight plays, according to the National Endowment for the
Arts report All America’s a Stage, the decline was 16% between 1992 and 2008. And because of declining
demand, theaters are focusing on marketing issues, such as building a community through Twitter and
Facebook, profiling audience segments, and deciding whether their audience-engagement platform should
provide add-ons like videos of rehearsals, open rehearsals, texting with cast members or even cell phone
access to backstage chatter. Add in the fact that increasing numbers of people now prefer to receive their
best-buy recommendations from Facebook rather than from theater reviews in newspapers or websites, new
kinds of outreach must be developed. Theaters are spending more and more on marketing because that is
what you must do if your overall demand is declining. Basically, you have to sell the hell out of your
product to capture — well, recapture — market share.

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Heretic’s Foundation III: Smart Plays Need Smart Audiences, Don’t They? « Clyde Fitch Report 5/18/09 8:09 AM

There are two basic economic models for producing theater. One requires targeting large audiences with a
relatively safe, typically conservative, mass-marketed product. The alternative is a small, more boutique-
style operation that delivers very high value to uniquely targeted niche audiences. Clearly the latter model
requires a different approach to understanding what constitutes value. When London’s first purpose-built
playhouses were erected in the 1570s, they represented a new kind of technology, one that enabled a new
kind of public discourse. In creating a vision of where we want the theater industry to be in 25 years, what
is wrong with it now, and what process of innovation must occur to get it from here to there, let’s remember
its origins and how that theater of five centuries ago began.

It began with a theater that was deeply controversial and embroiled in issues of belief and meaning. From
the time the first wooden ‘O’ known as The Theatre was built in 1576 in the playing fields of Spitalfields,
the ‘theater critics’ of the day had a very clear reaction. They recognized it as a theater of resistance, a
challenge to religious orthodoxies and thus the very basis of state power. An entire generation of sermons
and pamphlets criticized the plays and their players. In 1577, Thomas White complained in a sermon
against the “common playes in London” and the “multitude that flocketh to them.” The same year, in his
Treatise Against Dicing, Dancing, Plays and Interludes, John Northbrooke claimed stage plays were “not
tolerable” and wanted to ban actors from receiving the divine sacrament. In his Anatomy of Abuses (1583),
Philip Stubbes claimed plays were “sucked out of the Devil’s teats, to nourish us in idolatry, heathenrie, and
sin.”

A few years later, there would have been clear risks for players at The Rose in performing the plays of
Christopher Marlowe. He was, after all, an atheist who had declared the sacred Gospels “all of one man’s
making” and that the figure of Jesus was merely a “deceiver” in “vain and idle stories.” Although some
40% of the English population were nonbelievers in Christianity, such revolutionary ideas were, again, a
direct threat to state power. So for Marlowe’s plays — which contain a straightforward anti-Christian
allegory most easy to spot in Dr Faustus — as well as others, the secret service would carefully monitor
performances. State Decipherers, as they were called, were seated in the audience trying to work out if
secret allegorical meanings were concealed within the plays. From time to time, as with The Isle of Dogs,
the spies thought they had found something untoward. Then the playwright and the entire acting company
were hauled off to prison, perhaps to be tortured. So performing theater was dangerous work, like walking a
literary tightrope without a net. And that was one exciting reason why audiences went to see it. The cast
might be arrested, but no government could arrest a whole audience.

The second type of theater production, for which an acting company might be paid 20 pounds (rather more
than for a night at a playhouse) was a private performance for a patron or at Court. The risks of performing
at Court were higher, however, since the whole Court was present, not merely a few courtiers occupying the
better seats. Since courtiers prided themselves on solving allegories — and since Queen Elizabeth was better
at it than anyone else — any playwright penning covert allegories risked losing the battle of wits and dying
like Marlowe did, as Charles Nicholl points out in his book The Reckoning, while being carefully watched
over by a representative from each branch of the secret service.

It was in this environment that the Shakespearean plays were written — that is, before theater criticism or
literary analysis existed concretely as a field, but in which there was a strong environment of popular
dialogue. Will future historians examine how New Yorkers engaged in serious discussions of plays in their
Facebook postings? I have never seen one. Indeed, most of today’s productions are intended as works of
entertainment, not as efforts to reveal meaning. Consider how Mike Daisey, in his essay The Empty Spaces,
described many theaters as “mashing up Shakespeare until it is a thin lifeless paste that any reasonable
person would reject as disgusting” simply because it brings in money.

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Heretic’s Foundation III: Smart Plays Need Smart Audiences, Don’t They? « Clyde Fitch Report 5/18/09 8:09 AM

Surely what is most important for the long term success of the theater is an informed audience able to
engage in critical thinking, firstly about the nature of the play, and only secondarily about the nature of its
performance. Because our culture is so orientated to consuming the surface performance, audiences lose
sight of the meaning of the play underneath. So long as audiences fixate mostly on the performance, theaters
will never be able to deliver much lasting value. There is only so much value and satisfaction to be gained
from seeing a star or great scenery. A much more reliable source of value is in understanding the meaning
of the play-again, if it is one that can create startling new insight. If a play actually means something really,
really controversial then — as Elizabethan theaters demonstrated — it can deliver value even without stars,
scenery, or even a marketing department.

When Jacques Petit saw a performance of Titus Andronicus in 1596 he wrote, in French, that he valued the
visual spectacle more than the narrative substance, and in this he might have resembled popular audiences
today. Even Simon Forman, in his four descriptions of Shakespearean performances, only describes their
surface plots, and he gets some of those wrong. Others like Francis Meres, the writer of Palladias Tamia, the
Wit’s Treasury (1598), specifically praised the playwright’s “mellifluous and honey-tongued verse.” This
paid no attention to contemporary literary theory that said one had to look underneath this honeyed surface,
especially for pastorals — As You Like It, for instance — a genre designed to deceive and conceal hidden
meanings. Yet there were others who could see that deeply: Gabriel Harvey, for example, who noted that
the Shakespearean plays contained much in them for the “wiser sort.” Similarly, Ben Jonson wrote in
Hymenaei (1606) that his own figures would be “so to be presented, as upon the view they might without
cloud or obscuritie, declare themselves to the sharpe and learned” and that his allegory was “very clear”
except to those who have “but thick eyes,” for whom the meanings would be would be “steps beyond their
little, or (let me not wrong ‘hem) no braine at all.”

Today, many theaters compete both against each other and against other media for mass audiences. But
smart plays need smart audiences. An alternative competitive positioning is to develop a niche audience that
engages with plays because of what they mean and the benefits such an understanding can provide. If that
meaning is revolutionary and outrageous enough, then perhaps, as in Elizabethan London, it could even
create new audiences for the performing arts.

John Hudson is a strategic consultant who specializes in new industry models and has helped create
several telecoms and Internet companies. He is currently consulting to a leading think tank on the future of
the theater industry and pioneering an innovative Shakespeare theory, as dramaturge to the Dark Lady
Players. This Fall he will be Artist in Residence at Eastern Connecticut State University. He has degrees in
Theater and Shakespeare, in Management, and in Social Science.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 8th, 2009 at 8:00 am and is filed under Bylines. You can follow any responses to this entry
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