Finding a common cause in a common challenge, Chicago’s theater artists spent last weekend sharing plans for survival and measuring the state of their art.
As film actor and Chicago native William Petersen warmly put it: “In Los Angeles you’d never see this, a bunch of theaters getting together to help each other.”
Petersen had come home to join in an annual rite of renewal, the League of Chicago Theatres’ CommUNITY Retreat. The two-day think-tank session, held at the Royal George Theatre and Northwestern University, continues a tradition begun in the 1980s at Wisconsin’s Valley resort. It was revived last year with a one-day event at the Chicago Cultural Center.
Exploiting the current lull before the busy fall theater season, the event is the only time that our theater community gets together, except for the Joseph Jefferson award shows. Actors, directors, producers, designers and playwrights attended discussion panels made up of national and local experts, an open-mike brainstorming session and two blowout parties–the second washed out by Saturday’s storms. Regrettably, Sharon Evans, retreat chairwoman and artistic director of Live Bait Theater, missed the event because she was hospitalized recovering from appendicitis.
It was telling that about half of the nine panels were devoted to survival tactics. Though 23 percent of the population attends one play annually, over the last three years several seemingly established, mid-sized theaters have closed: the Body Politic, Wisdom Bridge, Remains, National Jewish, and Candlelight. Stagnant household incomes have cut back on ticket buying. Corporate, government and individual giving has declined. Big Loop shows compete with off-Loop venues for a shrinking ticket pie. A younger, less theater-oriented and arts-educated audience is slowly replacing traditional patrons.
Topics of discussion at the retreat included the merits of subscriptions over single-ticket sales, ways to get more media coverage and a detailed examination of why audience members go — or, crucially, don’t go — to see plays.
That last panel offered eye-opening suggestions for how theaters can cultivate customers. Among the motivations for people to attend theater, as explained by marketing consultant Julie Franz, are a quest for relaxation, relief and renewal or family fun, a yearning for roots or for civility in the urban jungle, a craving to develop community and personal connections, and a desire to expose children to different perspectives on the world.
Reasons why people avoid plays are cultural insecurity (they’re unsure how to behave or reluctant to dress up), an unwillingness to plan ahead, or simple ignorance of the arts choices available in their neighborhoods.
Most of all, Franz argued, theatergoers value value — above price, convenience or interest in a specific show. In short, if theaters emphasize the quality of their work, audiences will come. It also helps to offer joint promotions with other arts groups (museums, art fairs, dinner theaters, classical and jazz ensembles).
Inevitably, a few sessions bogged down in nuts-and-bolts detail-mongering. A panel on “What are we doing and why are we doing it?” never addressed the “why” at all; it focused on how to hold an audience by changing a theater’s image or structure, as if shakeups in middle management will atone for bad shows.
But a panel on forging links between the stage and screen industries paid tribute to the immediacy of acting. Petersen, who admitted that he seldom watches his films, confessed that his real pleasure was in shooting a scene, not seeing it. “It’s got to be three-dimensional and live,” the way it felt when he performed at the late Remains Theatre and will again next year at the Victory Gardens Theater.
More specific topics of interest included children’s theater, which is crucial in developing new audiences, and how to perform Shakespeare — whether to play it straight or wrap up the Bard in a “concept” production.
The most passionate event was the retreat’s opening panel, a debate on whether the theater is “a melting pot or a patchwork quilt.” The majority of the speakers, who represented mainstream theaters (Goodman, Victory Gardens and Steppenwolf) and minority companies (Onyx Theater and Teatro Vista), rejected a recent demand by playwright August Wilson that African-American actors should perform only African-American works. Director Jonathan Wilson labeled it cultural isolationism, a self-defeating separatism and a denial of acting opportunities for African-American actors.
His plea for parity in funding, however, led Onyx director Ron OJ Parson to argue in favor of increased support for all communities that want to see their stories on stage. Fortunately, that remains a cause that the League of Chicago Theatres advances at every retreat.
