What is "theater" anyway?

And what is it that makes theater good? I should know better than to wade into that morass, but just watch. Actually, I'm going to hedge and answer with a question: What is theater, anyway? One of the disadvantages of a "non-market" like the Twin Cities theater scene is that you really can't use popular success as a quality benchmark. The sample's too small. But there's nothing quite like real popular success to make you feel like you're doing your job well. (Chances are that's not happening for you.) But really, everyone has a different benchmark. How are we supposed to get people to see more theater when the offerings are so vastly different? The problem is in the word. "Theater." What a stupidly useless categorization. Is it live performance that happens on a stage? But that would include pop music and preaching, but exclude site-specific work. So, not on a stage necessarily, but it has to have a text. That leaves out some physical theater and includes poetry readings. And how different is some theater from dance on one end, and how different is it from stand-up on another? This is a problem. This might be the problem. It's particularly a problem for us marketing folks. How many of you have done mailing list swaps? Raise your hands. How hard did you think about whether the fans of the theater you swapped with would really have any interest in seeing your show? Or did you just think that there's a big pool of theater patrons (there's that word again) out there and some organizations are better at capturing names and maybe you can get some of those? Think about it: what's the likelihood that any given theatergoer will be interested in both Park Square and Live Action Set? The Guthrie and Bedlam? Not unless they're in the business; those people already see everything, and you really don't need to mail them anything. I just wrote "theatergoer." That's like "music listener": it's factual, but not helpful. How much do fans of Carrie Underwood, the Buzzcocks, Lil Wayne, Caribou, Coltrane, or Mahler really want to listen to each other's music? Punk bands wouldn't staple fliers to bulletin boards in the Orchestra Hall lobby, even if they could. But how much do we do the equivalent? Admit it, we do. By my count, there are at least four separate art forms currently lumped under "theater." Some people have suggested a few others to me, and I'm not inclined to argue. Let me try to make a list, without bias:

• Classic theater. Traditional scripts, traditional structure. Valued for its place in the literary and cultural canon.
• Spectacle. May or may not include musicals. Popular for its ability to dazzle. Very entertaining and often most appealing to those who don't see much theater.
• Script- and playwright-driven work. In some ways similar to classic theater, except that the appeal is in experiencing a new creative expression, and not so much participating in our cultural heritage.
• Physical theater. New work, often ensemble-driven, that puts equal value on the creative vision of the performer as that of the writer. If there's a writer at all.
• Experimental. A vague term, but what I'm thinking about is work that's primary appeal is in its pushing of boundaries, where shock and surprise are expected, and experimentation (obviously) is required.
• Musicals. Probably includes opera. Appealing for the music.

Of course, any piece might straddle a couple of these, and I may have sliced the categories wrong. But the important part of the exercise is that we start to see things from the audience's perspective. These aren't fuzzy distinctions like the video categories at Blockbuster, they're fundamentally different ways of approaching live performance, with dramatically divergent kinds of experiences and expectations. We do our audiences (and potential audiences) a great disservice by talking about them as one thing. I know what you're thinking. There isn't enough of a market for all of these together, let alone five or six different ones. (OK, that's not what you're thinking. That's what I'm thinking. You're probably thinking that everybody already is aware of these distinctions and chooses accordingly and what am I, dumb? Serious theater aficionados are keenly aware of the difference, but the casual audience member isn't, nor is the audience you don't yet have. Remember, you're trying to get more audience, not weed out the stragglers.) You're also thinking that local theaters have a hard enough time as it is without giving up the support our big artistic bloc gives us. That's why some folks have worked for years to create a theater alliance. We need to do more as a group. Structurally, maybe. Behind the scenes. But out in the world, we 're not going to get significantly more people to be fans of what we do if we can't give a more precise idea of what we do. If we're serious about making our art thrive, then we have to be willing to discard conventional constructs, limits, classifications, rules. We need to start embracing the part of our art that isn't theater (if that makes any sense at all). There's a whole world of potential audience out there that doesn't like "theater," but they might like what you do. "Theater" is a dead end, a box that's simultaneously too vague and too small. Either way, that box can't contain your artistic vision. We need to believe that, if we're any good, lots of people want to see what we make. Lots more than the people who consider themselves "theatergoers." How will you reach those people? Next: How to really grow a pie, or, breaking theater of its live performance fetish.