At the post-HTFA roundtable discussion, an audience member
asked a question that (loosely paraphrased) went like this:
Let’s say you really love a play and you’re talking to a friend about it. How do you communicate that experience, that love of that play in such a way to get them into it?
To which I responded You buy them a ticket and take them to see the show.
Now, this might sound a little flippant at first, but I want to tease it out a bit more, because I’ve been chewing on this thing that I said for a couple of weeks now. So here goes:
First: Theatre is spontaneous, ephemeral and live. This makes it difficult to describe in a way that isn’t just a reader’s digest encapsulation of your favorite moments. It’s even more difficult when you are talking to someone who doesn’t really have a theatrical vocabulary. Of course, we describe plays all the time, we describe them to each other, or if we are reviewers, we review them on our websites and in our print journals, but the great distance between the description of the thing and the thing itself is on some level unbridgeable.
With a painting, you can look up the painting online and see a picture of it, or at least see some version of the artist’s work. With a film, you can usually YouTube a trailer of some kind. With plays, none of this will work. Plays exist in the moment they are performed in the space between performance and spectator. The way to communicate that love of the event is to share that event with someone. If our theatre tickets were even remotely reasonable in their pricing, it would make this easier. A possible solution is to offer half-price tickets to people who want to see the show again, provided they bring a friend.
Second: Habits are habits. And forming habits is key. One of the reasons we go to see movies and television shows is that (besides being cheap and readily available everywhere) we are habitualized to it. Most people I know who stopped watching television thought they’d never be able to do it, until the habit was broken and then they didn’t really ever think about it. It goes back to something Will Power once said when I went to a reading of his I just want people to include theatre when they’re thinking about what to do on their weekends. That’s not happening if they’re not already going. They’re not going to go unless someone takes them. People aren’t that adventurous unless their adventurousness is nurtured.
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