 been over the last 18 months, a bit of context for the conversation over the next two days, which will be discussing together what we've turned up and maybe thinking a bit about the future. Maybe the first thing I want is to really encourage everyone in the room, all of us, to think of ourselves over the next two days as being a kind of think tank. We're really just awesomely humbled by the fact that you are all here. You are all leaders in this, which is one of the reasons why we invited you to be here to help us learn more and we believe that we can learn from each other and that's really the point of these two days. The idea for this project and the model, frankly, for today's and tomorrow's conversations came from a convening that Polly and David, we realized now convened four years ago, almost to the day, when they were working at the arena in Washington, D.C. and that was a convening around scarcity and abundance and we were again looking at new work in the United States and about maybe 120-year people or so had come from around the country to discuss these things together and the very first plenary session, we were being addressed by Rocco Landisman, then chair of the NEA, who was being interviewed by Diane Ragsdale, who many of us know, and it was at this auspicious convening where Rocco chose to say that really the greatest problem that theater in America had was that there just were way too many theaters and the way to fix this was to kind of have a targeted die-off, which when, you know, you can imagine how well it was received by people in the room, including ourselves, and it really began the discussion around, some of you may well remember that for months and months afterwards, there was a long discussion around supply and demand in the arts and Tori and I were sitting together then as well and she turned to me and said, you know, really the problem is not about that there's too much supply. The problem is that there's not enough demand and that as service organizations, that was a big part of our job, was to help spark demand for the theater, so that sort of teed up the rest of the two days, you can imagine, conversation and as we were talking about this, one of the breakouts that I was in, someone said, you know, I come from a presenting organization and when we think about the work, what we really bring, because obviously we're not creating the art and we don't hire the artists, what we bring is the audience. Well, that's a really beautiful sort of thought and someone followed up with that, well, you know, every theater institution really ought to be acting as a kind of bridge between the artist and the audience, but too often inadvertently, we wind up acting like walls and it was those two thoughts together that I think for me really reverberated and Tori and I began to talk about what did all of this mean and what could we do and frankly it was that convening that was the whole spark for this work and for where we've been over the last 18 months and for this convening this weekend. And I think as we go into conversations, we were talking this morning that this came out of that, we were saying to Polly and Jamie and I think, you know, that was also when the whole national new play network and the play exchange, all of these were ideas that are and it's kind of auspicious that that was in HowlRound and launching today, so congratulations on that. The other thing that this built on was, of course, TDF had done, as many of you know, a study about American playwrights called Outrageous Fortune. Theater Bay Area had done a study called Counting New Beans on Intrinsic Impact and both of those pieces of work, one of the things that came up in Outrageous Fortune was a fair amount of conversation with playwrights about the audience and what they thought the audience was, what they were told by the theaters in which their work was being produced, the audience was, and a realization that they really weren't in conversation with the audience. And in fact, a suggestion that in some instances, the audience was used as the reason a play didn't get done, right? There's a lot of conversation about, well, it's not right for my audience, I love it, but and then in Intrinsic Impact, really looking at what are some of the things you can do with the audience that make the experience more meaningful. So for both of us, this was a natural conversation to begin having. And so that we spent about a year and a half funding funding. And then once we found the funding, got started. And Mark will take you through the, we'll talk now about the shape of it and what we learned. So the bus and truck tour began about almost exactly a year ago. We had gatherings in all of the cities you see listed here, Minneapolis, Chicago, L.A., San Francisco, D.C. and New York. And in all six of those cities, we invited playwrights, theater staffers and on occasion audience members to just sit and talk to us about their understanding of an audience's relationship to the concept of risk when they come to see a new play. And it's worth pointing out that we did two, we had two pieces of research that led into that. And this was in the somewhat lengthy set of materials that we sensual. One of which was Wolf Brown and the other of which was a study that Zanni Boss said SMU did. And they contextualized for us the idea that something about the way that we engage as artists and practitioners in general with our audiences is tied into this idea of the perception that seeing a new play for an audience is in some way risky. And we were very curious to know if the word risk, which seems loaded for everyone, meant the same thing to everyone all the same. And quite frankly, we were very interested to discover that perhaps no, the word risk is not the same in everyone's mind, even though it is a word that perhaps we all use on a regular basis. And that led us to start to have the conversation that you'll see on the next slide that Tori will tell us a little bit about. We started with the issue of what do we think audiences want. And so this is all stuff that surfaced out of these conversations around the country. And one of the things that is important to note from the beginning and that I think will pick up on through this day and a half is there is no one answer. This is not cookie cutter. These conversations were really different in the six cities that we visited. These are themes that came through everywhere, but the lens by which they come through, the way people think about it, the way theaters talk and think about their communities are radically different depending on where you go. And you can walk in a room and you can kind of begin, the Chicago theater community is different than New York. Everybody's different. But these are the themes that kind of came through. And the context, another thing that's going on underneath all of these conversations is continual drum beats about the fact that the audience for plays is declining. Right? So I mean, all the way to this past Monday where we arranged with the endowment for them to release yet another study that says, you know, it's declining, declining, declining. So that's the, that's, that is, as we're traveling, that's the one thing we heard in every city. But what do we know about what audiences want? What did we hear? To start with, as Mark said, artists and theaters have contradictory assumptions about what makes a work risky, right? And so when a theater talks about the work is risky, versus a playwright talks about the work is risky, versus the audience talks about the work is risky, right? You'll find it when we get into the second phase. You know, we, in this first phase, we focused a lot on was it about form, was it about format, was it about understanding what the play was about, not so much the other things that the audience thinks are risk, but artists and theaters very different points of view about risk. We talked, we heard a lot about talking with versus talk back, right? People really are much, one of the things we asked in everywhere we went, and this is why you guys are all here, and people have said to us, well, a lot of us are doing really good stuff. You're here because you're doing the good stuff, but it's not happening everywhere, but when we asked what are the bright lights, what are the things you're doing that are working, one of the things that was working is places that are not really doing traditional talk backs, but places that are having conversations where the audience gets to talk with each other, with an artist, with a theater maker, but this concept that people, where, how are people invited to talk, where are they invited to talk, and when are they allowed to start talking, right? Some theaters, their audience is much more wanted to have the conversation before the play, right? Do you want to have it before the play? Do you want to have it after the play? Well, there's no either or. Different people want it in different places. Plot detail. There is probably no such thing as telling people too much about the story, right? One of the things is a constant theme, and this is something that is, you know, what do people want to know, and how much do they want to know, and how much do you need to tell them. So issue of, can there be too much information? Community stories. Really successful bright spots where theaters did plays that related directly to the community or some segment of the community. I think it was in Chicago, right, where there was the play about the dentists. Right? Someone, I forget. Yeah. Right. I'm still resonating, right? That there's a whole, it created a whole different kind of community, and people should ask you about that, because it's fabulous. But, you know, what are the role, what is the role of the story in a particular community? It's one of the things, if you read the piece this morning about the new play exchange, the idea that if you're looking for a play that speaks to a certain issue, because it's an issue in your community, then you can find out where those plays are. But that audiences respond really differently because the story is of some relevance in their community. And then the last piece that we heard everywhere is, you know, what are the other things that you hear from your audience they have to manage. Right? It's about everywhere. Everybody was worried about cost. Everybody was, in all six communities, was worried about the cost of tickets. But there's also travel. And there's time. And there is distance. And there's what is, a building that is your theater in your community. A lot of the bright spots, a lot of the places where theaters have really strong relationships with their audiences were places where their buildings were seen as a community center as much as just a place to have plays. Right? It was a place where the building had some other relationship. So that's a little bit of what we learned in six cities about what audiences were interested in. And that actually also often led us to a certain amount of existential crisis in each of these six cities. And it was articulated very well in San Francisco, I remember, where the question came up, well, if we know that these are the things that audiences want, then what does it mean the theater is for? What do we mean when we say that we're a theater company? What role are we playing in people's lives? Is it just that we present plays? Or are we trying to do, are we doing other things? And then the conversation started to evolve into a realization that maybe we feel like we do as a community know what we mean to our subscribers, to our regular audience members. But there's started to become a realization that there's this whole swath of theater goers out there that maybe we don't talk to very often. And that is what, for lack of a better term, I am personally calling the occasional theater goer, the casual theater goer, the person who doesn't have a sustained relationship to any one particular company is maybe not a subscriber to any particular company, but still goes to the theater, what we would consider to be a lot in the grand scheme of things. Maybe a person who goes to the theater three or four times a year, but doesn't have fealty to any one particular place. What are those people thinking that the theater is for? Why do they come to see a new play? What engages them with the experience that the theater can offer, particularly if they are single ticket buyers? And the thing that we started to think about, the thing that we started to touch on in phase one was this sense of the theater perhaps offers to this group a communal experience. And it started to surface in several of the cities that there tended to be maybe ring leaders or proactive ticket purchasers or anti-mames out there who choose the events for their friends. Maybe there's a group of friends or a group of people who look to their ring leader to go and tell them what to do. And that sometimes the ring leaders choose to go to the theater. And that started to become a character, I started to imagine this ring leader in my mind, because that character came up a lot in these conversations. And one of the things that started to sink in for us was that a ring leader who creates an event that we can all just sign up for is someone who is creating an opportunity for us to feel connected to each other. And that's became something that I find actually still very powerful, that if we are going to the theater as a group, and we aren't subscribers, but we're going for a communal outing, then that raises a lot of different sets of questions about what makes the event successful, what is the event giving us, what is it for. And I think it raises questions for the actors, the theater community, about the role that we're playing in the ring leader-based model of theater experience. So that guided us into what we called Phase 2 of Triple Play, which is on the next slide, and I will let Brad give you a little background on Phase 2. Great, thanks. And so all along in this whole process, we had imagined something that we were calling the triangular relationship between the artist, and here particularly the generative artist, because we were looking at new works and playwrights. The audience, and then the theaters that produced them. So back to this idea that the person said, you know, really theater companies ought to be acting as a bridge between artists and audience, but too often we act as walls. So imagine if that relationship actually were not dysfunctional, but functional. So that the theater company was acting as that platform that was bringing together the living artist with the audience. And as we were talking about this, and thinking about other art forms, and we'll talk about that a little bit more for tomorrow, we realized that one of the blessings we have in the theater is that we always have living artists in the room. When you go into the museums around town, those artists may or may not be with us anymore, but our artists, at least those actors, are definitely on stage. What can we do, though, with the generative artist and the playwright that can be a particular sort of door and a connection between the audience, the theater, and the work? So we were thinking about that and we were thinking about what we needed to know about these audience members who come maybe a bit. We were also really interested in this came up in San Francisco and the people who don't go at all. So we were talking with Wolf Brown and Alan Brown there about what could we do to maybe find out more about those folks who aren't coming at all or very, very little. And he said, well, you know, that's really expensive. It's more than you've got in the grant proposal from what you're telling me. And, you know, so we thought, oh, we can't do that. So we sort of flipped the coin over and we said, well, what about, okay, so let's not talk to those people who aren't going at all. What about the people who go a little bit? What got them to get out of the house, off the potato, you know, off the couch potato, this time to get to the theater? So that's, we thought that would be really interesting to know more about that. What were their motivations? What were their expectations in coming to see, particularly new work? How did they respond to the work? What did they need to know? What did they want to know more about? So we began to work with Alan on some survey questions and some protocols about how to dig into that question. And then we began to think about this relationship again that we had posited. And we had the thought of actually using the generative artist, the playwright, to be a researcher, to ask the questions themselves. No, not about their own work, because that would just be probably too weird for everybody in the room. Why did you come see my play tonight? But having playwrights saying, why are you going to go see this other playwright's new play? What is motivating you to go see a new play at all? What are you expecting to see? So we worked with these with a set of playwrights and with a set of... Basically we thanked theaters for coming to the first conversation by asking them to do more work. To do more? Yeah. And we gave them... And we owe you all an enormous debt of gratitude. We gave them just eight theaters, because it was a lot of work. Yeah. And it didn't come with a big sort of like renumeration for that other than your own great feeling for being involved. And the playwrights, we were so grateful for them for participating in this. And so we with Alan devised this survey where playwrights would interview individual audience members who were coming to see a new work with a member of the theater staff listening and taking notes to understand their motivations and their expectations. And this would be about an hour long conversation that playwrights would have with these individual audience members. And then we flipped that over and we had focus groups that the staff member from the theater company would have with a similar sort of audience members who come every once in a while to see a play and every once in a while to see a new play again to interrogate their motivations and expectations and what might make the experience deeper and longer lasting for them with the playwright listening and taking notes. And this was phase two of research that we did just this fall and that you saw a little bit of the reports in the packages that we gave you and you'll be hearing from first hand later this afternoon. And some of the things that we found out from that are the audience members are not wanting nor are they necessarily trusting the marketing material to be where they get their information. I mean people are savvy today, they understand marketing as marketing. But they are wanting to know more about the play and they're wanting to know more about the playwright. So they're looking for the program note and they're looking for other ways to get information about the play and information about the playwright. Now I will say the frustration of almost all the theaters that were participating they would say to us but we already put that up on our website and out in various ways which is not to say that they're not doing that but for somehow for some reason it is not getting to these audience members who are not subscribers. So yes they're doing it somehow it's not getting through the fog. These audience members want to have conversations. Again real conversations not of very formal talk back situations with people on a stage and people back in their seats but actual conversations with the playwright, with the director with the designers. They're less interested in having conversations apparently with the actors but okay. And they actually want to have conversations. They kept saying we want to go and have a drink with them. So I told you playwrights. You got to be really ready to have a lot of drinks playwrights because these are what does that mean? I want to have a drink with them. It probably means some sort of more casual, more genuine feeling I think conversation. So this is what the audience members are looking for. They're interested in having and knowing more about these artists that are involved in the play and not necessarily more about the play but more about the artist. What motivates them? Why do they do what they do? They're interested in having a conversation. Yeah, so anyway, they're wanting these things. Some of these things are already incorporated. And the next slide is I think you were going to take this one. Go ahead. Okay, so in thinking, just hearing Brad make these points again, it's just a reminder. It's sort of oh yes, I wrote some of these. I hope they are a little funny. I just wanted to mix it up a little bit. But it was just a reminder again that a lot of people, they come to see the play and they want to know a lot about the play. But in another sense, the play is an element of what they do and their experience. And not necessarily for these casual audience goers, the only element of why they're coming. And it was just again, very striking. And so then we started to find out about the orientation and context that some of these audience members wanted not only in terms of what they wanted to know about the play but also what they wanted to know about the play right. We were very interested to learn that certain people were very curious to know about a play right. Not just tell me about the reason that Act 3 had a sudden twist and I believe that I found a dramaturgical fillip in the last, none of that. There was some people just wanted to know why are you a play right? Where did you live before you lived here? They just wanted to know those sorts of things. But we were encountered several times by audience members who were convinced that play rights didn't want to talk to them. Which was an interesting thing and it actually happened too much to seem completely anomalous. That somehow these audience members were like, oh no, they would never want to talk to me. And just to throw in, because in case you didn't do all the reading, folks didn't know they were talking to play rights. The play rights said I'm with the theater. So there was not a filter that said I'm talking to a writer and they were just talking to someone who worked with the theater. Yeah. And interestingly enough, they were however, when asked, certainly open and in fact interested in learning more about why the play right wrote this certain play, why the play right does their work. And as I'm a theater journalist by trade and it occurred to me that it sounded to me like sometimes they just want to have the conversations that I have for my job. They just want to talk to people about what they do and why they do it and it's very striking. But then, just to keep things interesting, it started to realize that a lot of these audience goers who again were invited to participate because they come to the theater already. They're not just people plucked out of the mall. They are people who have come to the theater. They didn't actually know the names of any play rights, including the name of the play right of the play that they had seen. Of the play that they had seen. There was one theater company that was startled to learn that a Pulitzer Prize winning play right that has been produced several times by that company in recent seasons was not a household name to these people. And I think that came up a lot. They didn't recognize the name. I have referred to it in my own in our conversations as the Jeopardy phenomenon where if you ever watch Jeopardy and there are theater questions, you think everybody's going to get the August Wilson for $400 and then nobody knows the answer. And it sort of seems to be a similar thing that was happening where there was genuine interest, genuine curiosity, but maybe not a lot of practical details that were surprising to find out about. And then that leads us to the finale of this part of our presentation which I will let Brad and Tori take over. This is one of the places where we so want to talk to so many more theaters, so I just think that's important to throw out. Right. Well, okay, so one of the first things we found and you'll see this in some of the first research that we sent out to you that we had Zanni Vostu which is the idea of risk and that Alan was looking into as well. So there's an idea of risk for the audience. Remember, we talked about this at the very beginning of this presentation. There's an idea of risk for the artist and there's an idea of risk for the theater and this may seem obvious, but I think that too often we conflate these things together. So the audience, remember, sense of risk is, you know, really A, am I going to waste my time and am I going to just have a horrible time while I'm there? Am I going to be offended? Am I going to hate it? I mean, they're worried about the experience, right? And the artist is thinking about other sort of things, you know, whether it's formal or whether it's a topic or whether it's something that they're feeling is the play going to work. Is it going to resonate? Is anyone going to produce it? I mean, these are the things that are, you know, that are included in what an artist thinks of as being risky. And I think in a lot of times for the theater, they're thinking about those things too, but they have to think about is anyone going to come, right? Is it going to be a financial flop? So those things are not completely unrelated, but they're pretty distinct from whether we're talking about risk from the audience points of view, the artist or the theater. Right. And that a couple of the playwrights said in their conversations with the audiences that it's actually very moving to them to think about why people are coming to the theater and to hear this piece that over and over people are coming to the theater to come with other people, right? The play is a motivator, the event is a motivator for allowing them to come with someone else. And the event and the reason they want to come with someone else is they want, I always have thought that, because I love going to the theater alone and I've always kind of thought that, you know, one of the reasons people don't want to go to the theater alone is they think that people will think they don't have any friends or they'll be geeky or why, you know, it's not that. It's that they want to have someone to talk to about it, right? They don't want to go to the play and not have someone to talk to about it afterwards. And that's what, that was I think some of what the playwrights who did some of the interviews were picking up on was that it actually, these folks want to come and see my story and then they want to talk to someone about it. And there was something, and one of the reasons I think that we've got to, you know, that this is something that I'm interested in people's thought, we're interested in people's thoughts about as we move forward is there more and more people living in single households, right? I mean this is a huge, I mean if people don't like to come to the theater by themselves because they want to have someone to talk to about it and they don't, and our structures are changing and more people are, what are we going to do, right? So, and that then goes back to how important that ringleader is. But it was, there is something very moving when you hear people talk about it. The next thing we found, and I have to say we discovered this in our intrinsic impact research as well, that one of the main things that could help an audience, A, be attracted to the work, but also to make that impact land and have the whole play experience be deeper for them and last longer was to know the plot. They want to know the plot before they come. And I think that we're, sometimes we're hesitant to do that because we think that we're going to give away the ending. They don't care. They want to know the plot. And I think maybe playwrights are a little afraid of like, you know, you're concentrating on the wrong thing. It's not just about the plot. It's about blah blah. You know, they want to know the plot before they come. And we were talking last night, and you know, so often the blurbs for a new, for a play will be heartwarming. They're like, no, no, no. I will decide whether it's heartwarming. I want to know the plot. So I think there's, we cannot overstress this. They want to know the plot. That is what will make them have a sense of whether they want to come. And frankly it will free them up in a way to watch the play in a different way so that I think the meaning and the intent of the play will be able to land more easily and more deeply. So fear not, you will spoil nothing. Tell them the plot. And that relates also to the, one of the things that came up a lot that's related to this issue of plot is do they care whether it's new or not, right? We were talking a lot about new plays and risky plays. And you know, more than once we heard someone say, if I haven't seen it, it's new, right? They really, and even more risk, the thing that makes a new play risky to a lot of people isn't that it's a new play. It's that they don't know the story, right? If they're going to, Romeo and Juliet, they know the story. They know what they're going to get. They go to a classic, they know the story. They may not know the form. They may be produced differently. But new play is a scary concept, not so much because it hasn't been done a lot, but because it means you don't know what it's about. So it's another version of this plot problem. I want to know what the story is. And the last thing is Burst the Bubble. And Burst the Bubble, Brad said, what does that mean? We all live in a big bubble. There's the bubble where the playwrights, it relates to the plot. There's a bubble that says the most important thing when we're talking about coming to see a play is the play. The play is only one part of it, obviously, for people. What we hear over and over and what the audience has talked about is the play is part of a period of time, right, where they're coming, it's who they go with, it's what happens around it. And someone, I don't remember because it's a little bit of blur, so maybe it's one of the playwrights who's here. I'm not sure was writing about how liberating that was because in fact the audience is there in the moment and I think here she said, so they probably I realize they don't necessarily link me to the last, to my catastrophe of two productions ago, right? But they actually are just in this play at this moment. But it also means that the success or failure of the evening is not just related to how they feel about the play. Even if it doesn't all, it's that part about when people say well I didn't love every part of it but there was so much to talk about. It's that instigator that goes back to what's moving. They just want to be stimulated and again risk isn't necessarily it's going to upset me. It's these other things that are risky. And the takeaways here, these were the takeaways of the people who did the recording both on the part of the theaters and the part of the playwrights. And I think Alan would say really clearly, he kept saying this isn't research, this is only eight little theaters with eight playwrights. But this was, I think for us this piece was really compelling. It was also, I think there were some real challenges here. And those of you, I mean as I said, not only do we have to thank the eight theaters, the smaller the theaters were, the harder it was, right? Because, and those of you who were here, right? And some of the most interesting engagement work is being done in some of the really small venues. But it's really hard to put together something like this and those single ticket buyers, if you're a really small theater. So if we're able to do more of it, that'll be one of the pieces we'll really have to figure out. Because we just began to tap into who the folks were. But that was that piece. So where this leads us now is we hope and we feel like that what we've done now is just ask a lot of questions and we don't really have answers to these questions. But we hope that we can continue throughout today and tomorrow to just hear from this leaping off point what you think about these things. Because like we, like Tori said earlier, you're all the ones who are already doing really interesting things. But the way that you engage with your audiences and having learned this little bit from this little portion of the world, what can we, what where might it lead our thinking next? What might it encourage us to think about doing next is that we just feel like we're at the cusp of something and that's why it's exciting to invite everybody else in to now talk and tell us what we should be doing next. Not just us. When I say us, I mean us. And I really am excited to hear what this initial phase of the project brings to mind for you. And we look forward over the next day and a half to hearing from everybody. And that's one of the reasons that all of the breakout groups that we have are going to have note takers. So everyone's thoughts are recorded. That's the reason that we're live streaming it. So everyone's thoughts are recorded and we believe fervently that every single person in this room has something unique and distinctive to offer in this conversation in terms of methods, points of view, strategies, things that work, things that failed. And we really think that by getting us all together as you heard from all of our different affinity groups, locations, jobs, whatever, by getting us all together in the room, maybe we can hear things freshly. Maybe we can hear new spins on things that we already knew. Maybe we can hear brand new things. And then we hope by the end of this to have a couple of tools, new tools in the belt that we can spread out and talk about to the rest of the community. And that is why basically the three of us feel that as this panel, this moment ends, we as an entity kind of dissolve. And we look forward to us as an entity figuring out what happens now. So what resonated? We've got time for some. Some of you who are in these... This is just a reminder too that throughout any time that someone speaks we would ask that you use the mic since the live streaming audience won't be able to hear it otherwise. Somebody go first. Hi. Is that good? Yeah. So as a playwright, one of the things that jumped out for me in reading the materials and in hearing it again is the idea of the relationship between the playwright and the audience, which is such a complicated thing. I mean you start out writing for yourself in a sense. What are you excited about? And then gradually you're kind of encouraged to think about what's going to get produced and you kind of resist that because you don't want to be a whore. But meanwhile what gets left out is how can the theaters be a bridge instead of a wall? What comes to mind for me is doing talk backs. Where it generally feels as though the usually person from the staff who is the moderator is there to protect you from the audience. You're not supposed to for some reason talk directly to the audience yourself. And it's moderated so rigorously that the audience isn't even supposed to talk to each other. And I've always been a little puzzled by that, but I haven't thought it through enough to, I feel, take more charge of that process. But what I have done occasionally is try to get questions asked that gets the audience talking to each other because that's what I'm interested in. And I have found that it makes the moderators nervous. Like the audience is a lot of lines of beggars that could get out of control. But I always feel like this great energy enters the room when the audience starts talking back and forth to each other. And then I'm like, yeah, yeah, I want to hear more of this. And I'd love to go out for a drink with them. I mean, I think you become a playwright so you can go out for drinks afterwards and talk about the play. So, well anyway. Get them to buy it. It's awesome. Yeah, I just have a quick question for you guys. I wonder if you could answer maybe in more detail. What were the assumptions that you went into this experiment with? I mean, generally when you start something right, you're maybe expecting you'll find something. Were there things that you expected to come out of this that did not at all or that in fact did? But I'm just wondering if you can give us a little more of what drove you to start the study in the first place. For me, a lot of it kind of came out of thinking about it really was this issue of why are people not going? And it was less an assumption but more a kind of fear because this is what I know. This is what I've done. And you can look at research and go you can poke holes in any methodology but every four years the National Endowment for the Arts does its public participation survey. As most of you know at the Manhattan Theatre Club for a long time before I came to TDF and when I was at MTC I didn't have time to worry about national public participation in the arts. What I worried about was who was coming was how we were doing at our theater. And so it wasn't until I got to TDF that I even began to know such a thing existed. And so in the time that I've been watching that every four years the number for place has just continued to decrease. And in this last one not only the not just plays also musicals which really struck me. So it was really wanting to know what was going on. I think what I one of the things that I heard and began to think about in a really different way was something that's you know there's a lot of conversation about subscription about single ticket buyers about there are these people out there who want to have a relationship with a play and they don't want to have a relationship with a place. And there are huge challenges for us in that but that was one thing that I didn't expect to be. You know I thought we were going to hear about marketing. I mean look I've talked about this with some of you before. You know we all have a road to Damascus moment. Mine was when we were talking in an outrageous fortune breakout and the playwright was talking about never having been allowed to have you know they wished they could like look at the poster and I remember hearing myself saying once I'll you write the play and I'll market the play thank you and you know I was wrong. We should have had that conversation. And so I thought that was the kind of stuff we were going to hear more about. About that wasn't it. It was really about beginning to think about it. So that was it for me. Yeah and if there was an assumption sort of a hunch was that somehow by mixing together this wild and crazy mix of the artist and the audience that something exciting would happen for both. That there would be sparked a greater interest in the work on the part of the audience by actually knowing more about the generative artists. Not just knowing more about them because I read something about them. But because I actually had some sort of a personal experience with the actual real live person. Right so that was my assumption that playwrights are just so fascinating and so in fact just innately charismatic that that was going to happen. But that was my sense. And also that there would be some really interesting learnings that might well happen with the playwrights mixing with the audience as well. And not again about like how you're supposed to fix that problematic you know second scene in the second act. But just about how your work is or isn't landing with the audience and is that or is that not what you were hoping and expecting how your work would land. And I'm also a playwright as well and sometimes I'm even more surprised by I had no idea that it was going to hit you that way. And you know what that's actually kind of awesome. So sometimes it can be like oh that was a problem I need to go work on that if that's how you felt. But other times it can be really eye-opening. So just the idea that the mixing of these two things together what could playwrights learn by mixing more directly with the audience. Either for the work that they're just working on right now or something that's yet to come. And how could we be exciting more interest in the theater and in the new work by having audiences mingle directly with the generative artists. Which I think one of the things we've been talking about together is that that's something we all get to do all the time. We do that. But audience members don't. And we come into a play often knowing an awful lot about the person who wrote the play. Or at least about their work but often a lot about them and we may know them pretty well personally. And that we bring a lot to the work because of that. And how much more rich could the work be if more of the audience has more of that sense as well. I don't have something to say. That just made me think just for a second whenever I sit in an audience with them I turned all the audience members around me and tell them that I wrote it. Do you really? Yeah, I do. I go I wrote this to as many as I can. Before or after? Before because I don't want them to say something that'll hurt my feelings. But then there's this nice warm spot actually. Because they're like oh he wrote it. And they tell each other and then it's interesting. I don't know if that meant anything. I love him. I just had a quick thing to say because based on what you were saying that what I love about this endeavor and this particularly the playwrights interviewing the artists is that on both sides it actually humanizes the people in the room. And I think that whenever that happens we gain a great deal of traction of how to move things forward. We talk about audiences as these sort of groups of people and yet they are individuals as the artists are. So I just appreciate the kind of humanizing intention of it and I think that will gain a lot of traction as we continue to function humanly and artistically. Hi, I was struck by this idea that the audience becomes a kind of community rather than simply a ticket buyer or a consumer. That there is a community of people who are involved and invested in a different way than the artists. And I really hadn't thought about that before but I really like that idea. One of the comments was someone said about an audience member said about a program don't waste space telling me about the next play please use the space to tell me about this play. And I think that speaks to this issue of not being a consumer but I want to know I'm in this community. Yeah, so I thought that that's an interesting perspective and different to me. Hi, just a reminder I'm Lisa Millette from City Lights Theatre Company. Tagging on to what Amy was just talking about. It's part of the culture of the organization that I lead to break down the boundaries between artists and audience so it's part of what we do every day. And what I'm seeing here that gives me so much hope for our future is that it's not about marketing and butts in seats, it's about deepening and lengthening their relationship, the audience's relationship with the work. And I believe that if you can do that in many different ways that they will therefore become their relationship with the organization will become deeper and more meaningful but it starts with the stories. Sort of like the nucleus of our mission and the stories that we tell it starts and everything can radiate out of that but instead of looking at them separately like how am I going to sell this show if we are all and what I'm seeing here is that we're all starting to talk about how do we make it accessible and relevant and exciting and connecting with the story, get everyone connected with the story then of course they're going to end up buying a ticket but we can't go at it from that particular angle. It's more about the engagement in the work and that's a lot of what I'm seeing here and I think that's exactly what we all should be doing. Hey, so I might be stating the obvious but I think it's worth stating what we're taking away from this is actually a pretty radical change in the way that we conceive the nature of our work and what it consists of and how we need to go about that work. So what we're hearing from audiences is that they judge the evening not on the play itself, not on what happens between lights up and lights down but on the evening as a whole. They're also saying that they see a qualitative difference in the nature of the engagement. So it's not enough to throw somebody up on stage and to say we're doing a talk back therefore we're doing engagement. They're really interested in the dramaturgy of that experience and whether it's actually meaningful and to me what this suggests is that we need to be as invested as resilient as ingenious about crafting the experience of the night overall, what happens before they enter the theater and what happens afterwards as we are in those two hours or so of the play itself. And then I want to say one other thing which is that I believe in my experience that engagement can't be one size fits all. Plays make meaning in different ways and so I feel like all engagement needs to begin with what is this play, how does this play make meaning and how can I create something that is deeply intrinsically, organically related to the tone style and content of this play, intent of this play in order to make that the most you want to amplify the play by what you're doing ahead of time and afterwards and it's very easy to provide red herrings or to lead people astray. And I would challenge us also as we go through, there are a lot of the conversations about it all evening but I would encourage especially those of you who are playwrights to talk about or think about and share how that makes you feel because certainly for me, I still want to believe it's actually only about the play and it's about that story and it's really, I know that's where we have to go and then I go but why can't we just, so I think that's a push pull that's got to keep going in this conversation because it is about both things. Anyway, there's people over here too and there anyway. You with the mic are in charge of the judicator. You choose. I'm really curious about the playwright's response to the spoilers. It certainly in my former life as a marketer, that was a sacrilegious thing. So the question is not just to the playwrights but to what I would state as the protectors of the playwrights on the artistic side. How do you feel about being that open with the audiences? I actually do think there are ways we can very cleverly tell the entire plot while withholding any really big surprises that we want to. I really think there's a way to craft that and I don't mind telling the story but I think anything that I really, really, really want to be a surprise, I think we can squirrel that away. So I don't think that's in conflict. Jamie also wants me to remind everyone to identify yourself please before you make your statement. So get some folks over here. Hi, I'm Christian Parker. I'm thinking about this bridge metaphor. I just finished a 13 year stint as the associate artistic director at the Atlantic and so although I'm not wearing an institutional hat right now, I spent a lot of time thinking about this and it's interesting because even with a bridge as opposed to a wall, there's also a question about whether that bridge is a two lane road or a one lane road and it seems like a lot of the implication is that the audience comes over the bridge to the work. And the question it raises to me for artistic leaders or for actually really anybody who's working for a theater is where do you fit in the community, not the theater community, the actual community that the theater exists in or what other communities do you belong to that you can already speak to. I've certainly seen it happen that new audiences have come to at least the Atlantic for example when the artistic director's children were suddenly in school and he and his wife were meeting all these new parents and they found out what they did for a living and all of a sudden there were all these people from the neighborhood who didn't know the artistic was there who were coming because they knew someone in their own community who was doing the work and the reflections of the audiences wanting to feel that contact with the playwrights seems to be part of the same impulse that they want to feel that the artists are actually part of their same sphere or their same community in some way and their fear that the artists won't be interested in who they are is because the fact that they're really not and that the people who run the theater are really not in their community and that there's just this one way traffic that they're meant to come to it and observe and go away but actually we're not all on the same side of the argument so I think the question to artistic leaders to anybody really is where do you fit in the larger community or in the specific neighborhood or whatever it is that you seem to want to appeal to because you've chosen to work in this place if I may that actually speaks to Polly's question about what did I learn from this that I wasn't anticipating that I was going to learn which is I anticipated that what we would hear would be here are the seven things that you can do to make me come see a new play because I already know how to do that and what I learned is that there are so many people who are generally interested in the idea of a new play but maybe feel like they don't know how they're supposed to come and do it because they've never met anybody who works on a play or is in the theater and just strikes me as another and that that made me feel like weirdly sad but also hopeful that there's this interest there but maybe we haven't walked across the bridge toward them to say hey you know what we're not terrifying and coming to see a play is this is how you do it. Hi Corey Kelly with Center Theater Group. It's interesting hearing that perspective and also hearing the playwright as well. I'm in marketing and it's interesting to hear that the playwrights don't feel that they have access to the audience not that they're staying away from the audience. I'm learning what the institution is playing in this role more than anything. I worked at Actors Theatre of Louisville with the Humana Festival for many years so new plays are something that I know well and what we heard all the time there is how interesting it was to have access to the audiences because the artists, the playwrights were in existence for such a long period of time that they had them and there was a community and we really tried to open that up. We did talk to the playwrights about the artwork we did talk to them about the descriptions and one of the biggest challenges in that was the relationship that marketing which in that way represents the audience a lot could speak and interact with the playwright. There was as politically correct as I could say this there tends to be a barrier between artistic staff sometimes that protects the playwright from the audience and that barrier creates this tension between marketing and the playwright and how they can work together. There were ideas that would come up in a marketing way that would never make it to a playwright and a playwright wasn't necessarily allowed into certain conversations so I think by protecting the playwright, the director and the actors as which they're not always sensitive artists and not letting them into the business and understanding the business, they're actually doing harm to the field as a whole because the playwrights then don't necessarily understand what the audiences want or craving and are looking for. Hi, Michael Robertson from The Lark in New York. I'm really curious about the playwright when I started reading all the research and I know it was the order that I did, I got very nervous that the playwright is going to have to do all these extra things, they're going to have to be in each theater for three months, they're never going to make any money because no one's going to pay them to be there for three months what is the drag on their time and then as I went through the research and I go oh people are interested in the story, they don't even know the playwright, that is both sad and kind of freeing to the playwright because playwrights, their desire to engage with the community is as diverse as their plays and as diverse as they are so some are really down with it, they come out of community activism work and some are like I just sit in my apartment and I'm really shy, I'm nervous to talk in front of people and I'm sitting in between and I don't even know that that's the right scale so I think it's really interesting as we, I'm curious to get into some deeper conversations around all these models of the talk with which is super exciting to me, the talk back is over and it's very painful for playwrights and we have to get rid of it, people are scarred and traumatized at theaters around the country because the talk backs are even if people are trying to protect them on stage, they are scarred, we have people who come to The Lark for the first time and are like nope I'm not talking to the audience and I was like what happened to you and so we dissect with them we have a little therapy session, we dissect what were the questions and what was the format and what was, and so you realize when you actually look at the anatomy of many talk backs that they're very unhealthy, they're unhealthy for the audience because the audience doesn't have clear instruction or don't understand their role and the playwright thinks they know their role but they're really being paid by the person who's monitoring the conversation so they're going to do whatever they're told or asked, that's not always the case, I'm not speaking for all playwrights so I'm super excited for us to dig a little deeper into what are all the millions of models that are happening right now regarding the talk width and to look deeply at when that actually involves the playwright and when it actually is involving other people, the actors, the artistic director, the artistic interns who are excited and passionate about some part of whatever the process was how we have that, if it's not the playwright, if the audience isn't going I've got to have the playwright there's a lot of freedom to create a lot of these talk widths so I'm excited to talk to you guys more deeply about specific talk widths, is that what we were calling them talk widths. Hi I'm Suzanne from Cutting Ball Theatre in San Francisco, in addition to this idea of adjusting the talk width how we use the playwright's time while they're at our theaters I'm also interested in the research that showed that many audience members would really like to be able to read the play before they come and I thought when we do both new plays and classics at Cutting Ball and we always have people who read the classic plays before they come into the theater we also did the intrinsic impact research and many of our audiences told us that they really enjoy reading the classics and so I wonder if, I'm actually very curious about what our current resident playwright Andrew thinks about this but of all the other playwrights in the room also what would it be like to have your play available on our website especially if we could find some password protected way or some way of keeping it from being printed and reproduced in ways that you know keep your intellectual property rights with you would you be okay with people reading your play before they show up Jeannie Chan playwright who has worked with Cutting Ball a lot yes, I'm all for any way for people to access the work and to read, anyone who's interested in reading it would be a great way personally for actually me to learn more about what I've just written especially if it's a new play, I think that would just be great Hello, Akiba Abaka from Arts Emerson This is so exciting to hear and read and learn what's happening in the field at Arts Emerson we have a few initiatives that are in the right direction so I'm kind of taking a sigh I'm looking at my colleague Kevin Becerra and like okay we got that we're in the zone, we're in the zone I'm asking a question about the through line between the work in the community and kind of like community development work for the arts and traditional marketing because I think it's important for us to understand that it's a continuum and a conversation in all of what we are as theater and not that it's not just about marketing or we have to change everything I'm wondering how can the work we're doing in the community inform the methods and the parameters that we have to work in the marketing side of it so how do we infuse story and community voice when you think about a listing in the globe it's X amount of space for X amount of money so there's a practical side to that you think about a commercial there's a practical side to that so does anyone have any insight on where's the through line and how do we go down this continuum so we're not throwing out the baby with the bath water Hi, Laura Jackman playwright I'm so terrified by and excited about all this stuff I want people to read the play I want them to read it before I want them to buy it in the lobby and read it after like they do you know over the UK over in London theaters like in a way I think that playwrights I want to be more articulate about my work in general and I think that part of our fear of audience and I've been tweeting about it like I am I want to not be I am and I'm trying to push past it sort of every time I work on a new project how can we engage with audience in a way that we are not self protecting so much so you know maybe this means that I get better at talking about what my plays are about like even when I'm working on a play I am inarticulate and I hate it but in a way I have been allowed to be inarticulate I have been allowed to be sort of like the blubbering protected nervous delicate playwright in the corner I am like the shivering flower I don't want to be that I want to be Adam I want to tell the audience members around me I wrote this it's the most terrifying thing for me you know I think in a way I think about now that I'm writing in other mediums I'm thinking about how people are attracting audience to those mediums so I'm thinking about when I go see a movie I am probably actually reading a review of it somewhere before I go see it I'm also listening to an interview on fresh air with Terry Gross with the writer with the director with the lead actor I am reading a talk of the town piece in the New Yorker about some quirky aspect of it that's like you know usually like walking through New York and getting coffee with somebody who worked on a thing I am sort of even like people getting pulled into screenings at the Beverly Center like whatever however you want to do it across however many you know intellectual or Beverly Center however many methods you want to do that's all the stuff that I'm thinking about when I go see a movie I would love love love to participate in any or all of that as a playwright to sort of get more articulate to get better at selling my own work not just as like a please come to this thing but also how many different ways can I talk about this thing can I talk about it with my director can you interview my director can you interview me can you interview an actor how many other can we steal from other mediums from video games from movies from television shows can we steal from them and say they are better at getting their stuff out there what can we use what can we repurpose from them I'm Ben Pesner-Laura thank you for saying that it's an hour and twenty minutes into the conversation and this is the first time anybody's brought up any other medium which I think is really interesting I think this is hearing from some writers in particular has been really fascinating but I would encourage people to think about the people that don't go to the theater very often or who don't go often enough for our tastes as people who actually consume culture a lot they consume culture all day long they just don't consume the kind of culture that we're making for them and they're consuming culture in ways that have changed enormously in the last say I don't know decade or twenty years and we need to think about that because we're not going to solve this problem internally by just looking at what we do I really want to piggyback on what Laura just said I'll give you two examples off the top of my head Netflix puts its entire season of oranges the new black online all at once they don't care about spoilers you know they know that everybody who watches it is going to tell their friends or not you know what's going to happen in episode three it doesn't matter to them anymore and I know that DVDs are going to get medium now but every single DVD out there has you know at least an hour of additional content beyond the movie itself we're not doing that in theater we're not even talking about it we have to look at how people are consuming culture in other ways and learn from what they're doing and see what works for us and what doesn't we can't just look at what we're doing or not doing Hey I'm Phil Smith from Looking Glass but I also do our marketing so I represent two different wings of our assignment as a work and we do some plays that have a commercial potential and we do some plays that our marketing team goes how the hell are we going to sell this and it's interesting it makes me think about the commercial models the commercial theaters out there how they often sell their plays and that's kind of by barn with imagery and quotes and things like that the found the known entities the safe easy path and then a lot of us in not for profit theater have a more difficult assignment sometimes where we have this play that we really like and feel passionate about but it has a horrible title or it has a subject matter that is tricky and how do we sell those and that's really the assignment that we have and I wonder how much of your information that you as far as your assessment was derived from difficult shows to sell and how they sold well what strategies were used to sell difficult assignments well or is all this assessment from an audience's point of view or a not for profit audience's point of view of what they want when they come to play I'd be interested to hear sort of where the source information came from because it would be valuable to know we didn't really focus just briefly we didn't this was not about how you market a given play this is really about trying to under the task at hand was trying to understand what could be strengthened or changed and a belief frankly that if you allowed the artists in the audience to talk more directly what would come of that and I actually think that the lessons maybe it's because of what I do but the lessons are not just directed at the not for profit because a commercial model there are no subscribers it's all single ticket buyers and this issue of people need to know what it's about they need to know what it's about regardless of the tax status of the producing entity but we were looking at specific engagement strategies but not with respect to selling one particular show so we haven't got we didn't get into that we heard it occasionally success strategies as they were related to a particular show but we weren't looking at that I think we have time for one more comment before we take a short break no pressure right so make it deep yeah okay alright here we go so I would just challenge this all to think about the word risk and perhaps replace that word with adventure and this comment is dedicated to a subscriber at the alliance we have two stages that the alliance went in very large 770 seats house and then a stage that's 200 seats which we've branded as adventurous right so we've branded it as an exciting adventurous decidedly underground space and I was seeing a new play by Meg Moroshnik about women in the 1930s who wanted to play basketball more than anything in the world and a subscriber to me and said you know the place upstairs I often know the writer and often I've heard of them but they're not as much fun as the place downstairs where I've never heard the writer heard of the writer I have no idea what they're about and I always have a great time and I felt so proud because our branding of adventure had trumped storyline plot spoiler all these other other things because we over really the past 10 years have focused on an atmosphere of excitement and adventure within some parameters that our audience understand and finally I would just say when we're talking about plot there also has to be literary values I mean if you like me hate the words Tybalt kills somebody named Mercutio and is then killed by Romeo right who wants to see that I would rather chew glass when we're talking about plot you do have to have plot synopses actually reflect the literary quality and energy and atmosphere of excitement of the play as a whole and I think sometimes audiences just ask for plot because they don't know to ask for anything else and with that it's 230 we'll take a short break and we'll return at 245 for a panel featuring some of the very people who participated in these interviews with audiences in phase 2 so great we'll see you then and thank you all very much