Be good

It's called lying. God knows how I ended up in advertising and marketing. I blame my small-town Midwestern upbringing because I have a pathological aversion to not telling the truth. But here I am. I can't stand deception. I don't want people to think less of me because I misrepresented the facts, so I try very hard to not lie. I even feel bad when someone has a different opinion about something than I suggested they would have. Lots of theaters lie. They become so immersed in their work and so obsessed with filling seats that they seemingly don't notice that their show sucks. And if everybody's buying tickets based on a photo and a blurb (see my previous post), the audiences have no one but themselves to blame, right? And season tickets? Even more lying. The shows might not even be cast when the season brochure goes out, yet we want our most dependable customers to fork over top dollar on the promise that they'll like this set of shows as much as last season's. And then they're stuck having to like the shows or else admit they were duped. Flim-flam men, your days are numbered. One of the inconvenient by-products of our information age is that while word can spread quickly about a good show, it can spread equally quickly about a stinker. Whereas in the old days an established theater could depend on a third or more of its seats filled by subscribers -- hit or flop -- nowadays theater marketing people everywhere wait with baited breath to find out whether their artists have given them anything they can hang a promotional campaign on. And it doesn't matter if you have friends in the press because everybody's just reading their favorite blogs and friends' Twitter feeds. If you suck, you can't hide. But sucking can be relative. "Under-promise, over-deliver," they say; the reality is both more complicated and more useful than that. It's why your "brand" is really, really important. People need to know what you are. You need to know what you are. The best movement theater is going to seem awful to an audience that likes Ibsen. If you're not funny, don't try to convince unwitting potential audience members that you are. You have to work with your reality and be the best at what you are, or else you'll be mediocre at what you aren't, and that's not going to bring the crowds. And you have to tell people what you are, and I don't mean explaining the theory at a talkback. I mean making it abundantly clear that you're a site-specific, political, literature-based troupe and if someone doesn't think they're into that, then they're probably not going to like your piece. (And that also means facing the reality that, possibly, only a very small and potentially unsustaining number of people will have any interest in what you do.) Defining what you are, however, is only part of the job. You do have to be good. If not, and you're a new company, your roommates and parents will still love your work, because they love you. If you've been around for 25 years, some of the people who liked you 15 years ago will still love your work, because it reminds them of work you used to do. But neither of these "strategies" is going to grow your audience, and they're certainly not going to deliver you fans. The world is full of bad art; fortunately or unfortunately much of it is blindly consumed by people who just want easy entertainment. There's not much demand for pedestrian performance art or half-baked renditions of Jacobean dramas. (Note: I have used these examples because I liked the way they sound. They do not intentionally refer to any theater artists, local or national, so if it sounds like I'm talking about you, don't be so sensitive.) If you're going to be working in a medium that isn't particularly popular, then you have to do really quality work or else you're just amusing yourself. Save the cost of the postcards and the venue rental and just rehearse until you're tired of it. Be good. Please. Don't make your marketing people lie. Make it so your donors are the people who like you so much they wish they could have paid more for their tickets. Step back, be objective, and make sure you're making art that somebody who doesn't know you can heartily recommend. There are many marketing strategies, but none quite so effective as being good. Next: But what is good theater, anyway?