For many years now I’ve played guitar and sang in my church band in Brooklyn. This part-time music ministry means I’m no longer really a layman, and have occasionally guiltily wondered: If I weren’t leading the music, how often would I actually go to church and sit in the pews?
My relationship to the art form I cover sometimes prompts a similar soul searching. As a critic and reporter, I not only see much more theatre than the average person; I am also blessedly insulated from ticket prices by press comps. So while I have what I think are informed impressions and opinions about the state of the art form and the industry, I know I am not representative of most theatregoers. I once heard a critic describe his job as “professional audience member,” but neither he nor I could be mistaken for a typical audience member.
So, as with my musing about churchgoing, I sometimes think: If it were not my job to see theatre and I had to pay for tickets, which shows (and how many of them) would I actually show up for? I won’t play favorites here, but suffice it to say I would be choosier. I might prioritize proximity and decent parking; I might prize familiarity, not necessarily in the sense of seeking out time-tested classics or buzzy revivals but in the sense of loyalty to artists I love and have grown up watching.
The question of which and how much theatre average folks will support with their time and money has become freshly urgent, even hotly contested, in the past year, as theatres’ reopening since the Covid lockdown has faced a perfect storm of diminishing funding, rising materials and labor costs, and declining attendance in the aggregate, despite some bright spots. In trying to get my head around these daunting challenges, particularly the last one, my theatregoing thought experiment (which shows would I personally pay for?) can only take me so far.
Thankfully, that’s where journalism comes in, and not only by yours truly. In this special issue focused on the audience, we’ve got Rosie Brownlow-Calkin’s look at the state of subscriptions, Amanda Finn’s examination of evolving audience norms, Gabriela Furtado Coutinho’s roundtable with access advocates about how to make theatre a true home for all, and Cara Joy David’s overview of theatres’ health and the various ways to measure it. In much the same way I consider myself conversant with the aesthetics and operations of the theatre in the U.S. over the past few decades, I would venture this magazine has a good track record as a trade publication for and about the folks who make theatre. With this issue, we are consciously turning our gaze away from the stage to take stock of the folks who all this theatre is made for. Who are they and what do they value? We hope to answer some of that.
Among the many portraits of theatre audiences in this issue, my favorite is a photo illustrating Crystal Paul’s account of La Liga Teatro Elástico’s Beast Dance, a puppet theatre piece that was part of Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival in January. We see an all-ages crowd in rapt attention, some standing, many sitting on the floor of the National Museum of Mexican Art, wearing handmade paper headpieces that mirror the elaborate wolf-human hybrids of the puppeteer-performers. I don’t know about you, but for me this image evokes the kind of intimate, blurred-boundary audience engagement that first introduced most of us to the vivifying interaction of live performance—the garden, to cite Joni Mitchell, which all of us have got to get ourselves back to.
Rob Weinert-Kendt (he/him) is editor-in-chief of American Theatre.
