In the June 8 Globe and Mail, there appeared an excellent wakeup call of an article by culture reporter Josh O’Kane, called “Squeezed Out: The State of the Canadian Arts.” The sub-heading read, “Costs are rising, audiences are hesitant and funding is shaky […] It’s a make-or-break year for the country’s cultural sector.”
Sad but true – and the result of a perfect storm of causes, including the continuing psychological impact of the pandemic; competing technology that keeps people at home; and rising costs for everything, including evenings out. Live theatre is taking an especially big hit. O’Kane writes, “This past March, [the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres] published a startling number […] Theatre attendance was down 46 per cent from 2019 across the country.”
Well, take heart, because I am now going to solve this. I’ve been compiling a list of the things wrong with theatre today, and how to fix them. Admittedly, these are small factors, but they may have some sort of cumulative effect.
Let’s begin where the theatregoer often begins: at the websites. It’s astonishing how uninformative and un-navigable are many theatre websites, and not just because I’m old. Staffers construct them from inside the company, where everybody knows who’s who and what’s going on. They seem not to consider the average theatregoer who’s new to all this.
So I suggest that every theatre pay an outsider, who has attended none of the meetings and knows nothing about the upcoming season, to visit the site and try to find out how to buy tickets to shows. Some companies might be surprised to learn how frustrating it is for mere civilians to find their way around.
Next: this is elementary, but notably missing from both websites and programs is information about the show’s history and the artists, including what they’ve done before. My wife Lin Bennett, former actor, publicist and critic, wrote recently on Facebook: “If companies want to increase the chances of my attendance at a show (or spreading the word), then they can give me simple, readable, factual information in advance that helps me to know what’s genuinely special about the show: i.e., who is doing it? Who wrote it? And briefly, ‘Why choose this piece / Why now?’”
Related to this: bring back paper programs. Some audience members seem happy with the QR codes on the posters in the lobby, but many of us miss those little sheafs of slick paper that we could sneak glances at, during the show, to see who that new actor is. I grant that it’s easy enough to download the program with the QR reader, and there are reasonable arguments for the QR programs: one is environmental, and another is the cost. Well, paper is recyclable. Print half, or fewer, of the programs you used to, and let the rest of them have their QR codes.
Next: Please stop thanking audiences, in publicity and pre-show speeches, for “supporting” the theatre by attending. I don’t buy tickets to support your theatre. I support the theatre by contributing time or money, and voting for candidates who’ll fund the arts, but I buy tickets in the hopes of a good time. Calling our ticket purchases “support” reduces the theatre to a charity case.
The last and largest of these issues relates back, again, to both the websites and the programs, chiefly the artists’ bios. I have mixed feelings about a current trend towards identity-politics-related publicity and bios.
On the one hand, it seems a particular shame that audiences are dwindling just as Canadian playwriting is going through one of its most interesting phases, as we white folks are finally stepping aside, and playwrights of different ethnicities, queernesses and abilities are taking over our stages and telling their own, or their own people’s, stories, to exciting effect. And, refreshingly, the plays themselves are often set in a world in which it’s assumed, by both characters and audience, that we’ve moved past old bigotries.
But on the other hand, when it comes to the publicity and programs, even this heartening development is occasionally contaminated with a tinge of self-righteousness, which seems to tout the plays as good for our moral development, or as compliments on how far we’ve come.
Michael Paulson, in a piece recently published in the The New York Times, quotes an avid theatregoer as saying, “There’s so much going on with the ‘ought-to-see-this-because-you’re-going-to-be-taught-a-lesson’ stuff, and I’m OK with that, but part of me thinks we’re going a little overboard, and I need to have some fun.” (My thanks to website designer Claire Grady-Smith for this paragraph.)
In their bios especially, some well-meaning artists seem eager to promote themselves more by their ethnicities and orientations than by what work they’ve done, as if their identities prove their credibility. And it doesn’t help when their interests and areas of discipline are described in fashionable critical-theory jargon.
Recently, a prominent playwrights’ organization invited its members to update their bios, and offered a new (and optional) set of categories: “demographic-like data,” including those ethnicities, genders, orientations and abilities. I do see that there’s a legitimate point to this. They make it clear that their purpose is to help users identify “playwrights whose social positioning serves as an inspiration to them, their community, and many more.”
But it still seems a bit self-congratulatory, or flattering to the audience: almost like a present-day version of the old approach of presenting live theatre as an art form for superior people. This used to mean people with more money or “class.” I remember a long-ago ad in a theatre program which informed us that our presence at the theatre proved that we were of the exceptional taste required to appreciate their luxury automobiles. Nowadays it’s more about subtly flattering us that we are a cut above those racist, sexist homophobes out there watching vulgar movies.
(However, there may be a light at the end of this tunnel. These proud bios do reflect a real and heartening fact, which is that more and more theatre artists are not straight, white folks – and that, in response, there are also more non-straight and non-white fans in the house than there used to be.)
In any case, there you have it: my strategies to save our theatres! Or if not, to at least make their death throes a little more entertaining for everybody.
*****