On Stage
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Play Money What it takes nowadays to get people into a playhouse! As the age of leisure lumbers forward, resident theater companies have to go to ridiculous lengths to...
...and nearly 500 miles from Vermillion, South Dakota, and Waterloo, Iowa, north to the Canadian border...
...It was not...
...Morison drew up a report that "leapt to a three-point general strategy for selling the theater to the Maybes and the Yeses"—the Noes did not come in for sustained attention until later...
...But I'm not sure anybody ever uses them...
...How about you...
...extra staff, i.e...
...The authors almost hit on this discovery on pages 21 and 22, but they refuse to pursue it seriously in the remaining 193 pages of text: While pouring over some lists of potential spectators in 1962, they say...
...The three points of the "general strategy" branched into many subsidiary prongs having to do with images, "image gaps," sweet-talking box-office attendants, and the conscription of voluntary help...
...The authors tried in a bewildering assortment of ways to win friends...
...with most of the proceeds going to the actors, the director, the playright, and the folk out front...
...Yet what if they were paid guests...
...These devotees did their mightiest to recruit new subscribers, cling to the old ones, and push neighborhood interest in the theater by means of coffee parties and expeditions across stretches of Midwestern snow months before the season...
...My heart sank, insofar as a heart can actually sink, as the Prologue yielded such lingo as "unique opportunity . . . audience-development . . . explore new concepts . . . exciting possibilities . . . shift in emphasis . . . fresh and creative approaches...
...But they evidently hope it will serve as an object-lesson for other troupes...
...an extensive program of public education," and similar upbeat notions, all designed "to show people how the arts can be rewarding in their lives...
...They cross-split them by profession, place, and age ("demographic characteristics...
...She's nutty about opera and she's rich...
...the audience are guests of the theater, and, because they are paying guests, there is an even greater obligation to make their experience a pleasant one...
...The only obligation the company would owe the auditorium is a first-rate performance so that spectators could feel they are honestly earning their way...
...Surely the best way to persuade audiences to occupy those empty seats, and to show them how rewarding it all can be...
...Free seats are a gimmick...
...welcomed out-of-towners by having trumpets bray a sennet at the airport...
...4,772 miles of rivers, and some of the world's richest farming country...
...The authors, Bradley G. Morison and Kay Fliehr, ran the pr department from 1963, when the Guthrie building was deposited on not-al-together-alien soil, until the end of the fourth season in 1966...
...As the house lights went down he said to a companion, "I don't care how good this performance is, I'm not going to enjoy it...
...On the following pages we learn that, despite "inadequate rest-room facilities" and "precisely two water fountains in the entire public area of the building," the Guthrie Theater is clean and attractive...
...It is an incredible 400,000 square miles in size...
...Fliehr, if devoid of lyricism, are modest, admirable people who undoubtedly lived for their work...
...People in and around Minneapolis may have felt sated...
...Morison and Mrs...
...The authors divided the inhabitants of these settlements, farms, parks, peaks, surface waters and rivers into different types of prospects: men and women, married and unmarried, theater enthusiasts and others (Yeses, Maybes, and Noes...
...Only, where will the money come from...
...Everybody would be warned to use his own home toilet in advance, in case he is a mirror type, and to bring his own waterbottle if he compulsively consumes water...
...We need "ever-widening circles of dedicated evangelists...
...is tj pay them...
...There were, of course, the conventional publicity routines: getting plugs in the news media...
...the full growth and free expression of the art and of the institution itself...
...This policy, untried but democatic, would be un-traditional enough to do away with the expense of sales promotion and advertising, as well as ever-widening circles of dedicated evangelists (slave labor...
...Paul, on the other extreme hand, "is the only major metropolitan center within a vast, yet cohesive, area which stretches an awesome 1,500 miles from the Rocky Mountains east to Eau Claire, Wisconsin...
...The cash that goes into water coolers (and water), expensive lobbies, solarium-like lighting, usherettes' uniforms, box offices, carvings, sculptures, chandeliers, glossy programs containing Essays by Authorities, electronic machinery, and wall-sized mirrors for the washroom primpers could be paid out at the door...
...As the age of leisure lumbers forward, resident theater companies have to go to ridiculous lengths to steal some of that free time from patrons...
...But Mr...
...Minneapolis-St...
...It would enlarge the theater public to include the have-nots and the need-mosts, without repelling the haves, most of whom are willing to be promoted to have-mores...
...After four years of such heroic endeavors the attendance at an average performance had slightly declined...
...These phrases hardly amount to a radical prescription...
...Morison wrote the screenplay for Miracle in Minnesota, in 16 millimeters and color, which the volunteers borrowed, together with lp recordings, lecturers and other "audiovisual aids" as "adult-education packages...
...They have compiled a case history of their gains and mistakes, rather than a how-to document...
...hosted their own theater conferences and helped out at other people's...
...But is there anything in the American tradition that goes against remunerating a spectator who has sat conscientiously in one place for three hours, laughed or wept when laughter or tears would put ginger into the acting, and maintained a polite, even meditative, even absorbed silence when the moments called for it...
...People in the balcony would receive the heaviest compensation...
...There would be no such obligation...
...Ticket prices had gone up...
...In the Athens of yore plays arrived and so did the population, while slaves stayed home and babysat...
...a primary function of arts management...
...They kept future audiences in mind by arranging theater parties for high schools and supplying teachers with "study guides" to the plays...
...This cannot be done with traditional techniques of promotion and press agentry...
...Within the area are located five million acres of state and national parks, mountain peaks soaring up to 12,799 feet, the nation's second largest seaport by tonnage (Duluth), more than 12 per cent of the nation's surface water, the geographic center of the United States (in Butte County, South Dakota...
...You-get-what-you-pay-for dies hard in these United States: Whatever comes for free is worthless...
...Other reasons come to mind, as post-hoc reasons for anything readily do...
...Naturally...
...They sound like more of the same...
...So she buys a lot of tickets and gives them away...
...photographed visitors from outlying spots and mailed the snaps to the visitors' home newspapers...
...a secretary found that an unnamed small town "had opera ticket sales of 382 per 10,000 population...
...so do the Associated Councils of the Arts and the Shell Companies Foundation, which sponsored the book...
...It may mean writing off Sir Tyrone as a spectator, but how many houses does he fill a season...
...In Search of an Audience tells us that Sir Tyrone Guthrie went to a show in London where he had to survive "an overcrowded, dark and drab lobby" and "tatty and uncomfortable seats...
...This figure was about seven times the average...
...They took their actors around to meet the public in person...
...Was this all...
...They also invited teenagers to form their own theatergoing groups so that the drama need not seem inextricably tied to education...
...There is simply no sense of occasion about coming to this theater...
...The male volunteers were known as the Producers, the female as The Stagehands...
...money...
...Some Stagehands went so far as to maintain the press-clipping book and to knit chain mail armor for the costume shop...
...sneaking 20-second commercials into broadcasts of the Twins' ball games and making sure they were uttered by a popular, unarguably masculine announcer who could not be suspected of sissyish or longhaired behavior...
...a concerted national effort in research, public relations, and education . . . more knowledge about audience characteristics, including the attitudes and psychological barriers to the arts...
...Attica, the hinterland of Athens, was roughly half the size of Long Island, as they might put it...
...The smaller the theater the more swiftly and cheaply it would fill up...
...The authors conclude that artistic institutions "must find ways to communicate with the majority of the population who will not listen because they have been intimidated into believing the arts are not for them...
...Critics, admitted free, could freely pour out their acid indigestion without doing any damage or being corrupted...
...They work (with Shakespeare in Central Park, for example) only when people know that they will have a chance to offer a contribution at the end of the performance if they like it...
...One reason may be that many of the audience-winning ventures had to be abandoned for lack of money or time (i.e...
...In today's Twin Cities, Minneapolis and St...
...She made inquiries and was told, "Well, there's this one woman in town...
...Paul, which are four times as populous as 5th-century Athens, the Tyrone Guthrie Theater's public relations department has to slog so hard and variously that one breaks into a sweat reading about its labors in In Search of an Audience (Pitman, 230 pp., $5.95...
...a climate must be established...
...after all...
...I am now thinking wistfully of a theater in which millions would be collected beforehand by those confidential phone calls between members of a chamber of commerce ("Charlie, we felt our corporate duty demanded 50 Gs as a token of our appreciation to the community...
...I wonder...
...turning out promotional copy and brochures...
...The later production at the Guthrie possibly proved disappointing...
...Even these tasks involved complications, such as getting the ad agency's artist to pick colors for the mailings that the company's scenic designer did not "despise...
Vol. 51 • September 1968 • No. 17
