 Back with us, great. So I'm Polly Carl again and I'm delighted to moderate this panel. And I want to just start with if you guys would introduce yourselves and just talk about, you know, in the introduction, tell us what part you played in either the focus groups or the interviews of that phase two. My name is Nicole Joest. I'm a playwright based out of Washington D.C. I got involved with this project through Dog and Pony D.C. And I conducted the interviews and then I was a note taker for the focus groups. Cool. Hi, everybody. My name's Kristin Jackson and I'm the Connectivity Director at Wolley Mammoth in D.C. and I was note taker for all of the interviews and I conducted one of our focus groups. Hi there. My name's Kyle Circus. I'm the Director of Marketing at Playwrights Horizons in New York City. I conducted both of our focus groups and then served as a note taker for all of our interviews. I'm Andrew Syte, the Resident Playwright, cutting ball theater in San Francisco. I conducted our interviews and took notes in focus groups. Great. So, and then now a moment of truth in your copious preparation for the convening. How many of you read all of the outcomes from both the interviews and the focus groups? Just so I know. Oh, God. I always say, I have this joke. I always say when you're talking about the theater, it's a lot of overachievers and so I just want to say that proved to be true in this instance. So, one of the experiences I had in reading through all that material was, and I don't know if this was true for many of you, I thought actually, Mark, you did a wonderful job summarizing it and making some coherence of it, but for me, when I went through them, it was really like a lot of flip-flopping and so I would think, oh, boy, talkbacks are really great. Oh, no, they hate talkbacks. Oh, they really don't mind risk. Oh, no, actually they don't really want risk. Oh, they love talking to playwrights. Oh, no, they're not at all interested in meeting with playwrights and the whole experience kind of went back and forth like that and it made me wonder for you all as you were involved in it, do you feel like there was either over the course of an interview or over the course of focus groups and interviews, was there a progression in the conversation or an arc to the conversation that helped you feel like you were getting to some knowns in what felt like a lot of, you know, everybody thought something different? I said I was gonna throw a couple curve balls, but yeah. You said no curve. Oh, that's right, sorry. I think what was interesting in my experience of playwrights is that I, we conduct these interviews and focus groups in October and I started at the organization at the very end of September. So it was sort of a gift in a way, a very challenging gift, thank you Carol, to start my career at this organization but also give me a lot of great insight into who our audience was, putting a lot of faces and names with our single ticket buyers and for us, the starkest difference was between those who we interviewed and those who participated in the focus groups in terms of the preparation that they did, in terms of what they anticipated, what they wanted. I think part of it was so much indicated by the recency of their purchase and the recency of their interaction with our organization and in terms of the hunger and curiosity around what we do, that connection to the date they were actually seeing a play played a big role, as opposed to someone who had seen something we did six months ago. I think one of the themes that emerged for me from over the course of talking to many different audience members in the interviews and the focus groups was that Dog and Pony is a kind of unconventional theater company, so they do devise work, they do audience interaction, they break down the fourth wall. So the people we were speaking to were kind of like the ideal new play audiences, so we knew that going in, these are kind of the bright spots we might like to clone, and yet there was still a lot of trepidation about the word world premiere, for example. A lot of people thought, oh, that might mean it's really bad or if it hasn't been vetted in another city, I don't really know about that. And I'm thinking, these are like the best quote unquote audience members, so if there's still trepidation, what does that mean for our field and what are we not communicating to audience members? On the note of world premiere, one commonality among the diverse audience members that we spoke to at Cunningham Ball was that this world, designation of world premiere meant basically nothing to all of our audience members. One, and pretty much all of them were fairly avid theater goers, although not necessarily, I mean, a broad range of the years, not just Cunningham Ball. And one of them did mention world premiere without being prompted, but he knew of this term, but it wasn't a selling point so much for him. And so that makes me wonder, to what extent are we marketing, are pitching our work to ourselves, right? And not to the audience. And there was a great diversity amongst, people in the focus groups and the interviews. And one thing, I think my big takeaway is that the thing that I'm most excited about coming out of this process of phase two is getting to know audience members because I think it's, someone said, I think it was actually in one of the write-ups for, I can't remember which one, there were a few of them, but theater needs to be presented as wide and a diverse art form as music, right? And people have a specific idea of what to play is, whereas music runs the gamut as does theater, but there's not that idea. But I think we have to think of audience in the same light, you know, that people come from all walks of life and if they go to the same show or even are all subscribers to the same theater, we can't make any generalizations. And finally, I think the individual audience members that we got to know are as complex and nuanced and fascinating if not more so than we are, but I think we often think that, we often think the reverse, even if we don't say it. Yeah, and I wonder if others of you would comment on that insider nature of our business and how there were some things revealed in the study of the world premiere being one, even the whole notion of new work being another. I wonder how that played out for you in the conversations you had where you felt like, oh, this is insider speak, these terms don't mean that much to an audience member buying a single ticket. So one of my favorite anecdotes from one of the interviews we conducted was when we asked the gentleman about what world premiere meant to him. He said, well, you know, it doesn't really have meaning to me because I don't think it's applicable across every single art form. There's no such thing as world premiere of a book. I mean, this doesn't, you know, this really doesn't speak to me or say anything to me. So that was, you know, an interesting discovery. With regards to sort of general attitudes towards new works, certainly with the interview subjects, we found sort of two camps. In one camp there were those who actually self-identified as sort of champions of new work and supporters of the performing arts and for them there was an acknowledgement that yes, there was going to be an element of the unknown, but for them that was sort of part of the value of participating and seeking out that work. And then the other camps sort of saw themselves more so as consumers and there was a greater sort of value proposition and they very much were thinking about, you know, how do I get value for my money? How can I ensure that the product that I'm going to go see will be good? And that attitude very much informed the way they made decisions about what they were going to go see and how they wanted to interact as well or not interact with playwrights and other, and designers and directors and actors. I think so often in our line of work we think of a feature in a newspaper is different than a review and is different than online commentary by an audience member, but for so many of our audience members who participated in this study, all of those things wind up looking and feeling and reading the same. When we were doing, conducting our focus groups for a world premiere production that had not been done anywhere else, we had many people say, oh, well, I read a piece about past productions of this work. There was nothing written about past productions because past productions hadn't existed. This was the first. But it's this sort of self-fulfilling prophecy of people sitting in a room saying, oh, well, of course I read that piece and I remember that and this is what it indicated to me about what I was going to take away from this or what I was going to enjoy and why I would buy a ticket. And in the same way it was a show that hadn't been reviewed at the time, but people were saying, oh, I read the review in this publication. So if it's not a review, but they're using the same nomenclature to not distinguish between any of these terms, I think it gives us the freedom to break out of some of these barriers that we typically construct around ourselves in the way we lead up to an opening or lead up to a first performance and gives us a little more room to breathe and say, okay, well, if this looks the same as this, it's all content coming from us and how do we best leverage that to best inform our audiences? Yeah, I mean, so another question I have and maybe this is for the theater institutions, but anyone chime in. You know, there's been a way, I mean, part of this study reflects a change. I think part of the ideal, and I know it didn't work out as the ideal in all cases, but the ideal was to be talking to the single ticket buyers versus the subscriber, right? And there was a way in which even then there was still a sense that the reputation of the theater mattered, that that came up, and there was also a sense, perhaps conflicting, that it was the show that really mattered, right? And I wonder, it feels to me like as a profession, I mean, we've become very much show-to-show marketers, right? And I wonder if these conversations made you think secretly there was hope for that notion of the patron or if, in fact, that is a notion that we should never conceive of again and that it really is about the show. I just wondered where you guys, what you guys saw in your conversations. I think ultimately it gave me hope. I'm relatively new to New York City, but prior to that I was working at Berkeley Repertory Theater on the West Coast, and in that market, which is somewhat less saturated, I think our goal was always to produce an experience that would be memorable and enjoyable and delightful for whoever would walk through our doors, even if they didn't like the play, because ultimately it was the loyalty to our institutional name that mattered to us more because it would help us get them back for a subsequent production in a later season or even later that season. And I think if playwrights were after the same thing and one could argue that in a most saturated market you want your organizational name to be the one that is leaving the impression on these people to say, even whether they enjoyed the play or not, that they got to your doors, they felt welcome, they felt warm, they felt like it was an enjoyable experience for them and the people they came with. And so much of the single show marketing mentality is disappearing with the fact that our runs are getting shorter and shorter, not longer and longer when you're in an institutional marketing setting. So how can we best leverage our name so that it carries all of those positive associations even after the show that that person enjoyed is no longer playing on our stage? I would say that in our conversations we experienced quite a bit of sort of feelings that there was like an institutional loyalty and granted this can very much be skewed by the fact that these conversations were happening in our building. But I say this to say that certainly for some of the folks that we spoke with feeling like there was a certain quality, production quality that they were going to receive was really based on sort of their perception of that, of the theater really helped influence whether they did or did not want to come see a new work. So that was something that emerged. And can we dig a little deeper into the question of the review and the press in general? I think that came up quite a bit. And again it was people were of two minds. One was that the review was the primary driver to the show and the other was that I don't even bother to look at the reviews until after the show is over. But I just wonder if you guys could talk about where the folks you worked with came up around that question of press and are we not putting enough emphasis on press or are we still putting too much emphasis on press as a field? Only one audience member repeatedly mentioned the reviews and he would look at the reviews and they were a definite factor, definitely not the only factor. But for the other people we interviewed a lot of them came to the show because quite a few of them came to the show because they knew somebody in the production, usually an actor. And so they were pretty theatergoers. But one thing that, this is sort of not directly from the interview but there always exists in any marketplace at least I know in New York and the Bay Area, the one reviewer who can make or break a show. But there are maybe a dozen theater reviewers and so I'm wondering is that a conversation worth having, how can the criticism of theater be more democratic so that there's, you know, Robert Hurwood in the Bay Area for example doesn't have a stranglehold and doesn't by himself have the party decide the fate of the show. What I noticed with folks who particularly were focused on again this idea of like getting value for their money was that reviews were the first thing that they went to. The second thing that they would mention might be familiarity with the playwright. And then the third thing that they would usually mention would then also be like the reputation of the theater. For the folks who were coming at it from sort of the other angle, they and the other angle being, you know, champion of new works. They placed emphasis on not reading reviews beforehand but some of them often would go and read reviews afterwards as one person put it, as a way to validate my opinion. They would also, but they were mostly drawn to sort of preview pieces and interviews and then afterwards they may or may not go and read a review. And so that's what we noticed. The one interviewee in particular who did mention the importance that reviews had also emphasized seeing some of the play, not just a photo but a video clip of what the play will look like and so the visual experience to him was as important as what a reviewer said. We were surprised at playwrights that especially in New York City where we view the times as the make or break review for all of our productions and it certainly performs that way for most of our shows and the casual ticket buyer. The people who are participating in this research have a high affinity for theatrical attendance and they don't just attend work on our stages. They're attending at organizations smaller than we are or organizations larger than we are and so the predominant way that they learn about a production is actually through the blurbs that we write and disseminate through our own channels and the videos that we produce about each of our plays. And so we were very surprised by the lack of emphasis that they put on these individual reviews. That might have partially been driven by the fact that we were conducting these interviews as part of our very extended preview period for this production and so we were attracting a very specific type of buyer but I think this dovetails actually with just to pick up a conversation that was happening in the earlier session in that marketing has changed so much in that it's not simply about direct response anymore it's not about communication with the masses through these very traditional channels. So much of what we do and what we have the ability to do now is like a playwright tell a story and rely on narrative to help fill our seats and so it's not simply a revenue oriented activity that certainly drives what we do and what we need to focus on but the ability to create content and to engage people on multiple intellectual levels around all of the work that we do is coming to the fore and we've all got to get on that boat and sail with it. Our respondents were sort of evenly split among those who really didn't want to know much of anything about the play before they saw it and then those who read reviews or you know talked to folks whatever and wanted to kind of read up and study up but I think what was interesting for us is that of the people who didn't want to know much about it and even among the review readers the community connections were always more important so it was either they knew somebody in the show whether they knew them personally or were familiar with the writer or a trusted friend had just told them that it was great or they felt some sort of loyalty to the theater all of our respondents were incredibly loyal to dog and pony which was great and kind of said we'll see anything that you guys do which was really cool. So those community connections sort of trumped press although press was not unimportant. I just want to dive in a little bit to that video question one of the things I was struck by again reading it and this was the part of the reporting that aged me the most I'm not of the YouTube generation but the video really came up right and almost everybody is like that was one of the primary marketing drivers and I just wondered if that played true for you and just any some thoughts about that and also then the trouble that people had finding it they wanted to see it you'd made it but then they couldn't get to it so I just wondered any thoughts about the importance of that visual element versus the language descriptor. We had one subject in our focus group who mentioned very specifically that she watches video before purchasing any tickets to any production of any kind of artistic medium whatsoever because she wants something tangible that will stick in her mind and give her a very clear sense of what she will experience when she's there and I know to everyone in this room that probably sounds very reductive but to have an audience member say that to you and remind you why you're producing some of the content that we all think oh well it's another video trailer like I'm doing it again because I did it last time and it worked. I think it really is a helpful mechanism to give people a sense of that experience especially through a digital media that doesn't always captivate the same sense of excitement and the same sense of for lack of a better word drama that you experience when you're sitting in a dark space with 200 strangers so that's very reassuring that it is serving its purpose and hopefully people will actually be able to find all that content for all of our organizations. Talk a little bit about the pricing question but it seemed in the again another one more consistent piece of reporting out was about pricing that people at a lower ticket price they're more likely to take risk or try things they don't know at a higher ticket price they need 100% certainty that this is going to be worth that and I just wonder again where what you learned about ticket pricing and how much impact is pricing having on that question of attendance. Well again it was in thinking about sort of the importance of pricing and the sort of values proposition that some of our interview subjects really kind of internalized when making decisions about what to attend. One of the things I was surprised about was that even though sort of what they considered to be a large amount of their ticket buying budget was actually not as large as I thought it would be and one of the things they talked about was finding ways to instead of buying one super high price ticket I would much rather budget out my allocation to go see three different shows at three different organizations. So I say this to say there is a certain amount of sort of self selecting going on where people are making the best of whatever the budget is that they have and so that was reassuring to me. Tomcott has a quote which says something to the effect of price is only an issue when value is a mystery and that to me says it all essentially and comes back to sort of the institutional branding question where discounting is prevalent in our business it's prevalent in every market that you examine but sometimes it yields fantastic results and sometimes it doesn't have the same traction that you want and I think so much of that is because we're thinking about a question of pricing as opposed to a question of value and the value proposition that you can provide to anyone in your audience about what happens beyond the stage and the psychological and social connection that happens when participating in theater and the overall positivity that that brings and brings to your affection for the art form affection for the people you attend with affection to the organization that's providing that experience for you I think that's the new challenge because you can price tickets essentially at whatever dollar value you'd like to so long as the value of that overall gestalt of the experience is also made clear in that proposition and that ask you know we certainly are I think in a period of conversation in the insider world of our business about this question of who gets represented on stage and those conversations in the insider world feel very contentious I mean a lot of concern about you know women's voices and people of color and socioeconomic backgrounds and who really is both being who's both on our stages and in our audiences and I wonder how your if those were concerns to the people that you talk to and maybe even if you could speak a little bit to the diversity factor and all of its components of the people that you were in conversation with we were blessed with quite a diverse pool of folks group attendees and interviewees and the diversity question wasn't so on the surface but it was definitely embedded in the conversation one of the interview subjects African American woman she didn't mention race but all the directors and actors and playwrights that she mentioned among her favorites were also African American and one of the actors that she loved was in the play that was going on the time that she took it for there was one transgendered interviewee and the fact that in the prior season we had a very genderqueer play by a genderqueer playwright was and I believe that audience member had come to that play that was it made the just having that play made our theater more welcoming but yeah so it was definitely in the water but it was more out of the composition of the audience than any direct statements one thing I would say is that a lot of the folks that we spoke with did express a lot of anxiety around talking to playwrights and there was a bit of like an intimidation factor and a fear that they might say something that would offend with their perception of these works are deeply personal and the playwrights have an incredible stake what happened when one of our interviewees started thinking about sort of cross cultural conversations with playwrights of color this particular gentleman was a white man and when he started thinking about that his anxiety level about talking to playwrights really rose and you know he his concern was mainly like I'm going to say something that's going to be culturally insensitive he wasn't quite sure how he could bridge that gap himself which made him then want to sort of made him say well I guess you know if the conversation if the play is light and funny and then maybe I can you know be in that situation and be in that room and be in that conversation so you know I say all this to say that as we are sort of facilitating those conversations and having those interactions which we need to have which we need not run away from and in which the material need not be restricted to only those things that are sort of comedic and light we really need to focus on this idea of the talk with and the talk back and how we can really make those you know safe a space for everyone as possible my absolute favorite moment in any of this whole process we were talking to a guy who was like the strongest champion of new plays that we met he said he was perfectly willing to go to something and for it to be just a dud and then we started talking to him about playwrights and would you like to talk to playwrights and express some of the trepidation that we've been you know hearing and he said oh you know I just think my image of a playwright is just stodgy and inaccessible and they're old white men and of course he didn't know I was a playwright so I was just like internally cracking up and when I asked him you know well would you be interested in talking to a playwright if you know it was a younger person a person of color a woman you know whatever not an old white man he's like oh yeah that might be more interesting but at the same time you know some of the theaters that he had mentioned were producing works by you know people of color by women by younger playwrights so it was interesting to me that even though he was a consumer of new work he hadn't internalized or theaters hadn't communicated to him or whatever we haven't fundamentally altered this picture of the playwright as removed stodgy and an old white man just to go off of what you were just saying about you know perception of like who the playwright is and the story that I just mentioned about the gentleman whose anxiety was really raised by thinking about you know what am I gonna say or am I gonna say the wrong thing with the playwright of color he particularly cited you know what if it was like an African-American woman he did not realize that the person he was speaking with was an African-American female playwright it was just all of it's all about that perception um so yeah great so yeah yeah go ahead Marie yeah great yeah go age yeah the age of the folks you guys were all talking to ours was a pretty broad range actually and younger than we would normally expect of our typical single ticket buying audience the people with whom we spoke were predominantly female which is typical I think of most any market and it was actually a very broad mix of races as well but definitely the youngest person we spoke to was early 20s and the oldest person was probably early 60s the youngest person we spoke to was early to mid 30s the oldest person was early 70s most the average age was um somewhere in the 40s um the folks that we spoke to were all across the board young so 20s and 30s um the folks that we spoke to for the interviews were fairly diverse age-wise we had we had two men two women the men were 25 I believe in maybe 30s um and the women were 30s and 40s in our focus groups they were predominantly women actually they were all women all the focus group participants um and they ranged from actually 19 to about 60 um a question about this notion and I think um it was raised in the earlier conversation about this continuum between so my sense in reading it and again tell me if I'm wrong my sense in reading it was that we were talking to the single ticket buyer but we were still talking to a culture consumer so I'm getting some nodding of the heads that we weren't necessarily hitting folks that never attend the theater um and I wonder um I guess I'm hoping at some point over this you know day and a half that we think a little bit about what's the what is that continuum between um you know our first focus as um you know we spent a lot of time in the early years of our business thinking about subscribers and then now we're spending a lot of time thinking about the single ticket buyers and in your mind is there a continuum past that single ticket buyer to the folks that are not you're typically going to walk into a theater we did we conducted an interview or I should say Madeline George conducted an interview with uh a ticket buyer who you know and thinking of this in context as someone who responded to an email filled out a survey did pre-screening and then actually came when she was not going to be seeing a production and she was going to talk with us on a Saturday afternoon you know this is a very intense level of commitment for someone who saw exactly one of our productions a year ago um and she was she was fascinating to talk to and and we asked you know the first question was so what what got you to see this play she said oh well the playwright has a kid who goes to school with my kid and we said oh okay how how interesting is it to see a school who all of us in this room know and and you know it's there's a lot of name recognition there but for her this was a casual acquaintance who she met in line at preschool dropping off and so and so we're talking with her and saying well what you know what is a typical evening outlook like for you and she's saying that there's no typical evening out because she can't really pay for additional childcare and all of these financial barriers and she thinks about going to the theater ours was the one experience she had at a theater in the last year um and in terms of additional engagement all she wanted was to see the play that's the opportunity in her eyes for the playwright and the director and the cast to share their opinions in an artistic through an artistic vehicle and then she wanted to go home and talk about it with her husband and that's it um and so I think even though there is this continuum there is this level of um affiliation and affinity that we're asking for within these subjects there is a very casual theatergoer who's still inclined to be part of this process even in somewhat what we would qualify as a disengaged way and so how do we turn disengagement into engagement light of some variety that's a really interesting really interesting to see her commitment to having the conversation regardless I want to open it up to questions but I want to ask a final question I was really interested in the phase one reading there was this great report from Jack Schwimmer and Zanni Boss talking about playwright perceptions and theater perceptions and one of the things that really fascinated me particularly in light of all of the audience feedback that came in phase two was um this was the 90% of theater respondents believe that they know their audience is either well, between well and very well 90% of theaters believe that they know their audience as well on the other hand only 54% of playwrights perceived theaters knowledge of their audiences in that same way so playwrights the point being that theaters were saying in this early study we know who comes to our theater and playwrights saying we're not sure that you know who comes to your theater and I wonder after having these conversations given it was the second phase this was early reading are you in the 90% of oh yeah we really know our audience as well or did this who was right the theaters or the playwrights in this case is my question very loaded question you stumped us off they're not going to take a stand to me as there are two opinions there are probably more than two sides to this but you look at qualitative data and quantitative data and I think many of us have ample opportunities to gather qualitative data in our spaces as people are arriving sitting in the audience viewing a production with other civilians as it were and then the quantitative data is what can add a completely hopefully sonorous but could be completely different narrative to the whole thing and that is the layer of data that we have less access to as a field and as individual institutions and so I think it's interesting that we're talking about quantitative data about a qualitative question but it's that interaction between the two that ultimately I think can provide different perspectives on that so I know I'm not answering for my organization I'm not really answering your question I'm sorry I'm wondering what we mean by knowing our audiences and does that mean we can you know recite the demographic breakdown figures that we send to funders or do we know audience members' names do we know what neighborhood they live in do we know what kind of plays they love and you know I so I have a bit of a different situation than the other or at least most of the other playwrights who were interviewing because I'm embedded in CUNYBOL I'm a full-time staff member and I'll confess that aside from the regular people who come to every production and most of the readings I don't know that many of our audience members that well you know the ones I know the best are my friends who I tell to come and who sometimes do and so it makes me wonder about the effort that we need to go to so that you know our audience members are not just numbers and if we want them to engage with us as and get to you know become loyal patrons and come to our shows and etc etc there has to be reciprocity it seems to me yeah one of the things I thought throughout this process was you know we asked them to listen to us quite a bit but how often and how much and how actively are we listening to them and just the experience of conducting these interviews and focus groups was really empowering for the folks who were coming in and really sharing their experience and really getting the space to be the expert of their own theatrical experience and we that's something that we I want to do more consistently throughout throughout the season and so that that was a gift for me from this process really yeah and it's just delightful to actually sit down and talk to audience members that's what I kept thinking as I was walking out of interviews when is I haven't ever done this just said what gets you you know to go to the theater why do you do it why do you pick one play over another and I think I had a lot of assumptions going in about dog and pony audience members specifically again because it's a specific aesthetic and I think that dog and pony does know their audience very well and does all these great community events but that didn't mean that they were unable to surprise me especially as regards to you know the rest of their theater going and so that was really lovely and I would also like to do more of it I just want to add one other thought or question really the audience members that we actively get to know how how often are they perceived as potential donors or board members whereas what we make so I went to see winners and losers at Soho Rep a couple days ago on there it happened to be their 99 cent night Sunday 99 cent Sunday and the actors woven multiple references to be 99 cent night in but you know maybe we should make an effort to get to know the 99 cent ticket buyers as well as the people who we are cultivating to write large checks we have just a little under 15 minutes to ask some questions or make some comments and is it and there's Alana with the first one and do you want my microphone or I'm wondering because I didn't I didn't see this in the report itself and I might have missed it because I was reading quickly I admit I'm wondering what the size was of the groups of people that the playwrights interviewed versus I know from the report that the size of the focus groups were really tiny it seemed like I think I did a quick count it seemed like 53 playwright 53 audience members across all the theaters were focus grouped so I didn't know like what the there was a difference in those sizes are you free to aggregate how many audience members are we really talking about when we're talking about this data right we're spending a lot of time in this room and I think these the points are really interesting and I myself I'm gleaning a lot from this but I I think we want to be clear about not just how many audience members are we talking about across the entire American theater you know right in this study but also who are they like what kind of audience members are they just to clarify that was you're absolutely right that it's a tiny group all we were able to do in this we did try and I think we're relatively successful in getting a variety of kinds of theaters right so we you're absolutely right that there is all we all this is is a starting point for conversation and I think we at least think that there's a lot more here to learn but there was a variety of you know large large institutional theaters very small theaters different kinds of work that the theaters were doing so what one of the things that I think the only thing that you can say is it it was across theater sizes there's no there's no expect we're not saying that this is in any way anything other than a little snapshot of some small conversations and and what I mentioned earlier you know there are enormous technical issues in doing this work because you have to be able to find the single ticket buyers so that was the hey I'm Jeremy Cohen from the Playwright Center I have two questions for you guys are for anybody as we or at lunch or whenever we talk one of them is a little bit about the metrics of the word engagement and that understanding kind of what the conversations have been and how kind of circular they were rather than which is great that they kind of kept evolving and being concentric and in some of the reading I think I had some concerns that how the measurement of engagement continued to be defined was by ticket sales which of course it needs to be in a certain level also I think the and for me has more to do with stuff that we were talking about earlier on community building and and that engagement maybe for me and when I was reading some of the playwrights and artists piece of it had to do with sort of empathy or understanding and desire to be part so Adam's point about poor Adam we're not picking we love you that like if I if I connect with an artist and there by actually identifying I'm I suddenly am rooting for you right I'm rooting that it goes well not who knows and you know what that's kind of great because if I met Adam I might say well maybe I'll come to the next show and I'll meet Liz or maybe I'll come to the next show and meet you know so just I'm curious about metrics and I feel cautious around solely looking at the measurement of engagement to ticket sales and then this second point that I just want to talk about a little bit because I feel and maybe we'll get there is that because each theater we keep talking about each theater is different and is talking to their audience in different ways by the stories they're choosing to tell there are some theaters like in this room who they're like you know or even as you're talking about with dog and pony is really interesting to hear like oh yeah we run into even you know stuff that you know there too are we maybe it's part of the same question that the mission but not in a like mission but in an actual living with authenticity and clarity through the work and vision of your organization and through the art that is happening on that stage that to me it seems like people don't come back because they didn't love one play and they'll never come back and we can't get them back it's that as theater organizations sometimes we're not delivering on the promise that we're making to an audience and so all theater companies cutting ball shouldn't probably be making the same promises as playwrights horizons as dog and pony as woolly and so it just what's exciting is that I think it leaves lots of room for us to do that self definition but I kind of call bullshit on the idea that if you are producing arsenic and old lace and pirates of pensance in one season and throw at them either through content or form a play that is new and then condemn the play for being a new play that perhaps we're not quite it's not that you can't do new work on old lace but how are we asking and inviting people into the ability to see both because private lives and Andrew's new play are very different thank wonderful God and let's make sure that we're inviting people into the promise of the vision and the mission that we're asking them to do when we're asking them to spend $75 to see a show just another request from the HowlRound staff if you could please stand when you're in the audience so that the people following along at home can see your lovely faces Gus Schulemberg I want to thank you it was really fun and joyful to read about your experiences with these interviews and be a little fly on the wall and I was wondering if there was some consideration about these interviews about engagement being a form of engagement and as such if there's any attempt to follow up and see how these experiences these exchanges may have changed the relationship of the 50 plus people that you connected with in their relationship to your work in your theater well just to mention one example one of the gentlemen who I interviewed we chatted some after the formal interview was over and that was then when I was a playwright and he was curious to ask some questions and somehow came out that I had lived in Papua New Guinea a couple years ago and he was utterly fascinated by it and he you know fascination with that country and this is the gentleman in his 70s and you know most likely he will not ever get there and so he emailed me and so probably next week we're actually going to hang out and chat and I can't tell you how excited I am about that and I hope it's the first of many coffee dates or happy hours with audience members so I am not like Andrea I'm not full time staff at Dog and Pony but I believe and you can ask Wickham she's right back there but I believe Wickham actually knew most of these people either beforehand or had been you know kind of in character interacting with them before shows but to your point Gus I think you're really right because each and every person that we talked to was so happy to be asked these questions so I think it is something that it is engagement and it is something that really any theater could do not even as a part of this study just to make people feel like wow you want to listen to me as Kristen said so yeah I think that would be great Hi Brian Pollack I want to piggyback well I want to jump on everything Jeremy said but I won't do that but just one thing as far as measurement is concerned we are ostensibly the nonprofit you know organization so measuring our success based on ticket sales is I think kind of a huge mistake we are serving a community at least in theory we are serving communities and we should be looking at it based on the numbers of people who are coming into our space regardless of the base value of the ticket so that's one thing that I think is important I know that going back to something we're not even talking about right now but was mentioned earlier about the sort of democratization of reviews I work, I'm the marketing manager of a theater in Pasadena and I have this battle with the artistic staff all the time because I collect every single review good bad and different I compile them all and I share them all and I just say here is everything you make up your own mind because in Los Angeles which is the community I'm in there's one voice and if he reviews your show and it's positive and it's placed well then you get a big bump but if you don't get that it doesn't kill your show so at least in the small theater community which is what we play in it's either no impact or super positive impact so because of that I feel it fits the mission and the sort of personality of my theater to just be bold and afraid to say oh we have a really shitty review by somebody who thought the show was horrible so what we're Boston court we don't give a shit awesome but that's me speaking our artistic staff is like no Susan fader thanks for a great discussion in the first session there was a lot of talk about the talk with as opposed to the talk back we've not yet brought up the workshops and readings which in the short bus research the playwright cited as their they thought the most effective means of cultivation I think that's a loaded term but in the literature about new play development over the years the burdens of workshops and readings on the playwrights has been a factor and I wonder if in these interviews and focus groups there was any insights that you had on how those might be made more effective as both the means of engagement and productivity for the playwright. It's a great question the research prescription that we were given focused primarily on the aspect of performance and pre-performance engagement and post-performance engagement so it didn't really come up in our conversations. One last question and we'll have break up into plenty of time for more. I just have a question about in each of these during this process was the top leadership of the organization either the executive leadership or the artistic leadership present? Yup. Yes. In every case? No. The reason I ask it's not really a loaded question but in so far as it seems to me that if the top leadership of these organizations aren't engaging this question and even looking at the makeup of this room if this work is being primarily delegated we have a problem. I think it's important to note is to some extent that's not about interest we thought as the three of us that it was really important to make sure we actually got marketing directors in the room so there's a combination but I think you're absolutely right. There's a lot there but just to be fair we really did reach out where they were in many of our theaters those are all the same people but where there's more than one person we were looking at a variety of roles. We've got a couple you've had your hand up back there I didn't see it until just now do you have a quick comment as we're wrapping up? Great. Oh yes, hello again. So I was the playwright secret playwright interviewing for arena stage we talked about post-show discussions and audience members wanted to know where they could attend more of them particularly more on the earlier stages of it because they felt like they could have an investment in the development of it they thought it would be a time to get to know the playwrights a little bit more and I secretly told them that that isn't always the case but maybe afterwards for drinks they could do that moment and then they got really excited about possibly meeting up for drinks for playwrights after reading and not have to talk specifically about the development of a play what does it even mean to be a playwright? So that was my post-show discussion moment at arena stage I was just noticing like right now we're having a talk back and this is how hard it is actually to have a talk with like we just naturally go into this where you guys are we're supposed to ask you questions rather than I'm supposed to talk to you like I saw all these questions get dropped and it's just interesting I think actually we don't know how to make it yet so it's just we have to and as a playwright maybe that's something we could figure out because we do create new events so it may be actually that we have to create a new event anyway and we were going to do some talking with just FYI it is good that's a great point I think we're going to I hate to, yeah so I'm always the timekeeper so I'm just going to say huge thank you to our four panelists for having this conversation and for the great comments and questions and I'm going to hand it now to do the breakout instructions yeah oh yeah thanks a lot thank you