 Well thank you everyone so much for joining us. It's exciting to see that we have a good mix of folks in the room. So like I said earlier, I'm Jamie Baloon. I'm the co-founder of Hallround. And for those of you who don't know Hallround, although I hope most of you do. We are a free and open platform for theater makers worldwide that amplifies disruptive progressive ideas and facilitates connection between diverse practitioners. Thank you for joining us tonight here and also online via Hallround TV. And a huge thank you to Arts Boston and StageSource for their helping getting the word out about this event. So believe it or not, it was five or six years, depending upon who you ask, ago when this inquiry began for Hallround with Triple Play. In 2012, Brad and Tori reached out and first approached us with the ideas that would become the Triple Play project. And as many of you know, in January 2015, Hallround co-produced with TVF and TVA a two day convening here at Emerson with 70 participants from around the country to digest the results of the study at that point and to talk about potential concrete next steps. Last summer, we continued our work together by facilitating about 30 audience member interviews with playwrights and marketing staff here in Boston as a part of ongoing research. And it's kind of fun to note that we were the first city to do those interviews and we are now the last city to get this presentation of what has come from it. So tonight we're going to hear some of the results from this multi-year study exploring the triangular relationship between playwrights, audience members, and theaters in new work. And we're going to try to uncover ways that we can increase the number of folks who attend new work ultimately. So at this time I will hand it over to Tori and Brad and thank you so much for making the trick up to Boston. And we're happy to have you here. Great, thank you. So that actually moves us along a couple of slides here. So this is the opening which we just sort of covered. The next would be Theater Bay Area and Theater Development Fund who have been the lead partners of many, many others and we'll be looking at those a little more closely further on in the presentation. One of the things that we wanted to talk about was how we did this work. And what we've discovered is that the very way that the work was done actually points to a new way of doing research in this field and really activating networks and activating folks potentially around the whole country around things that we want to find out more about and doing it in an efficient way and frankly a way that's pretty cost effective as well. So that's why we're going to spend some time at the beginning just talking about how did we do it. Because we think it might point to and actually it was John Carnwath and Alan Brown at Wolf Brown who said, you know, you guys have sort of, you've sort of stumbled onto something here and maybe there's something that we all could be learning from going forward as being a model for how to do research. So we're going to talk about how we actually did the work. Where it came from. So in phase one, we, the whole idea started at an event that was hosted by HowlRound when they were then at the arena stage in Washington DC. It was a convening that took place in a very snowy day in January in 2011. And Tori and I were there, maybe a number of you were there as well. The convening was called from scarcity to abundance. And it was looking really particularly at the relationship between artists and particularly generative artists and theater institutions. So that was, it was New Works people from around the country looking at that relationship. How we could, you know, better understand it and strengthen it. That was sort of our talking points for the weekend. And the whole thing started out with a now pretty famous if slash infamous address by the then director, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Rocco Landisman, who was being interviewed by Diane Ragsdale and Rocco posited that perhaps the biggest problem with the American theater was that there were just too many theaters. And that, you know, it might actually be a good thing and maybe it was the job of the NEA in part to do some judicious pruning so that the resources that were limited could go to the healthier sort of parts of the ecosystem. And you can, you can imagine how that went over with, you know, a couple of Havendard practitioners in the room, not very well. Not well at all. And Tori leaned over to me and said, you know, I really don't think that the problem is really about too much supply. The problem is about too little demand. And as service organizations isn't that really at least part of what we're about, which is increasing demand. So that got some wheels turning and over the course of the rest of the weekend as we were exploring this relationship between artists and audiences, artists and theater institutions, someone said, you know, there's a missing element here and that is the audience. Isn't there really not a two-way sort of relationship but a three-way relationship, maybe a triangular relationship which is about the institution, the artist and the audience and what can the institution be doing to sort of bridge artists and audience and are we in fact sometimes acting rather than a bridge acting as a wall. So that idea of, oh, are the practices that we're doing in the American theater actually keeping artists and audience away from each other rather than linking them was part of the idea that we wanted to look into. So we started out by, first of all, we did some fundraising and then we started out to do, first of all, to kind of see what was working well already in the country. We had an idea that the ideas were not going to pop out of Tory in my brain but that it was already out there in the field and so at HowlRound we enlisted P. Carl to do some work and to kind of tell us where were those bright spots that Carl could see around the country. We asked Allen Brown at Wolf Brown to share with us and finding some research that he had been doing around risk and the affinity for risk that certain audiences had and we asked Zani Voss to share with us some information, some research that she'd been doing with playwrights and we sort of, we brought all of that together, sort of foundational sort of understanding also the work that Tory's organization and mine had been doing over years. So Tory at Theatre Development Fund had done research that they put into a book out called Outrageous Fortune Outrageous Fortune which was the study of the lives of playwrights in this country and the thing that was interesting in that was that while most of it was really about production and their livelihood, there was a section that got into marketing and we kind of stumbled into it and we stumbled into a kind of rich conversation about playwrights and audiences and what they thought about them and were they allowed to talk to them. So it had kind of been, I'd been noodling about that and TDF as a service organization is committed only to audiences, that's what we do. So it was kind of just sitting there and then you guys had done... And we had done this research into the intrinsic impact of the theatre experience on the audience which is that deeply felt personal experience that we all have when we go to the theatre and was there a way to actually measure that. Allen Brown had sort of worked out a way of doing that measurement and so we had commissioned Allen and Wolf Brown to do that across the country. We did it in two different phases. We wrapped all of that, those findings together into a book called Counting New Beans and we had reported out on that. So this was sort of the intellectual sort of framework that brought us into this work. Allen worked with us to develop protocols and the idea of using playwrights to be the primary researchers in the field. So we had playwrights talking directly one on one with audience members with theatre staffers assiduously taking notes in six different cities around the country. We went to places where we knew theatres that were committed to new work or where we knew service organizations that were committed to the topic and so we just, we went to those six cities. We said find some playwrights affiliated with your organization not playwrights whose work is being produced right now, right? That was important because that would have been a little scary but it was for the playwrights. But playwrights you like and you want to work with. We also did focus groups. So we flipped that. We had the staff members leading the focus groups and the playwrights taking notes from that focus group. We then all came back together here in Boston in January of 2015 just before the snows began to fall that year. We got out in the morning. Just got out in time. We got out just in time. And we had some really great conversations. There was a lot of interest. There was a lot of people there. It was the, many of the folks that had done the interviews also playwrights and people involved in new work development from around the country about 70 people who came to look at that over the course of a weekend. And there was a lot of interest. But here was the thing. At that point in our study, N, which is the how many people have you actually talked to equaled 70. And it was just 70 is just not a big enough number to like change what we're doing around it because you talk to 70 people, right? So we were sort of tasked with the idea. We really ought to take this and expand it and talk to a lot more than 70 people. And one of the things that was helpful about the convening was that one of Brad's board members was there and she said, I just want to host breakfast the next day. We had a breakfast in the morning in the middle and she did it for service organizations. And so we had a bunch of folks there and we, you know, how can we help? So the idea that we were going to try and all do this together was really born very early on because we had new dramatists. You guys were there. We had the LARC. We had the National New Play Network, which has been an incredible partner on this project. And so there really was this idea that let's try and do this with partners. So phase two, we went and raised some more money. We went back to Doris Duke who had, they'd done a great, they'd done the original funding and we got a grant from them. We got a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and a couple of other folks you'll see later. This time we went to seven cities and we set up, we asked them to find seven playwrights, eight playwrights in the neighborhood of seven or eight playwrights. And we asked either the theaters or the service organizations to reach out to theaters for single ticket buyers. So a couple of points here. This is a study that looks at single ticket buyers. We're not looking at subscribers but the reason for that is that we kind of are working on the assumption that subscribers are subscribing to the theater. They're really choosing to go to the theater and go to a series of plays over the course of the year. And we were really interested in looking at what makes someone decide to go to a play, right? So single ticket buyers. And then the second piece of that was that as subscription is declining and single ticket buyers are getting larger as a percentage of the audience, we have to find more cost-effective ways to get single ticket buyers into the theater. So we looked at single ticket buyers and the theaters identified them for us and we were dealing with theaters that at least some of what they did was new place. So there was no one who was doing only classics because we weren't interested in what made someone buy a single ticket to a classic. So we ended up with 289 one-on-one interviews as opposed to 63 or 70 in the seven cities around the country. Did the interviewing audience members and then a theater staff are ideally a marketing person, but it was whoever was available would record it in every city after we were done and Boston was first. And actually Boston did, you guys did the best job of doing some in the evening, some in the afternoon, some on the weekend. And we think as we looked back on it that was important because one of the self-selecting things about the study is that in cities where like in New York where they were only during the day there were certain folks who just couldn't get there, right? I mean, it skewed it a little older. So we ended up with after each in each city after we were done with the interviews we did a debrief. We did a two-hour debrief where we put the playwrights and the marketing folks and one of us in the room. And the first debrief as Jamie said was here like a year ago, August. Then we took the questions that we had done in the one-on-one interviews. Wolf Brown took them and turned them into essentially an online survey that mirrored the one-on-ones. Nan Barnett who runs the national new play network took it upon herself to make sure that every national new play network theater of the core group of 33 participated and I think by the end almost all of them did, they all did. And then we added other theaters who'd done the interviewing. We ended up, we had hoped to get to 2,000 or 2,500 online surveys and we ended up with 7,213 usable surveys, which was a lot. And we could not have done that without our partners, right? That's not about us, that's about you guys and everyone else in six other cities. But it's a really rich and robust data set and it means that as we go through and look at the conclusions, they are reliable, right? Because it's large enough to be really reliable. Way more than 70. Way more. So we worked with a number of theaters and partners around the country. We've named some of them already, but here they are in the screen. And again, this is a bit of an overview. So 23 theaters were involved in those one-on-one interviews helping us get together with those ticket buyers and then also provided staff members. 28 theaters in seven cities, I'm sorry, it was 33 theaters in the electronics surveys, 28 theaters on the one-on-one interviews, 121 interviewers all told of which 63 were playwrights and some of them are in the room tonight, which is really exciting. So again, a new way of doing the work. And here are some of the funding partners that we mentioned earlier, thanks to all of our funders. So the way, what we're going to look at now is the results, right? So what did we find out? This is how we did the work. And it's important to note, you don't have to take notes. All of this is available. You can get the summaries. You can get the all 70 pages. So it's all available. Yeah. So just take, yeah. And what we're going to do here this evening, just to give you a little bit of an overview, we're going to show you the results in three basic big categories. One about marketing, one about engagement, so those techniques that we use to sort of deepen the experience of the audience once they've already bought a ticket. And then the third, really looking at how can we better utilize playwrights themselves to peak the interest and deepen that engagement for audiences, since this whole thing started out with that hunch, that there was a way that if we could really utilize the generative artist, that there was some, there was a key that was there that we could use to unlock interest and to deepen engagement. So that'll be the last piece. Then we'll have a bit of Q and A that we'll all do together and online. Then we'll shut down the online piece and we'll break up into small groups. And we've got some questions that we want you all to discuss and then report back to us because really the research is continuing, which is about how the field, how you all as practitioners are responding to this information. And we will be out of here by 8.30. So that's an overview of the evening. So we started out, and here's a pretty fancy graph, by asking this question, which is pretty simple. Generally, what do you hope to get out of an evening in the theater? And the first thing is people want to relax and have a good time, which makes sense. You don't go out to have a bad time. So that's the first thing that they want to do. The second thing that they want to do is to have this good time with someone that they care about, right? But then pretty quickly, it begins to move into some pretty interesting things. They're very interested, these single ticket buyers who don't go to the theater all that often, in discovering new plays and new playwrights. Very strong motivator. And right after that, is deal with a challenging idea. Challenge my assumptions. So one of the things that we discovered was that for these single ticket buyers, again, who do not go to the theater all that often, that's who we looked for, having a good time out can mean thinking hard. Right. Which is really encouraging, because I think there are artistic directors, in particular, who if you just said, you know, 42% ranked at the very top, having a good time, that they would think that means, you know, musicals are 46, it doesn't. People actually view being challenged as something that is relaxing and entertaining. And it's important just to caveat here, none of you would have been in this survey, right? We weeded out anybody who worked in the theater, anybody who volunteered in the theater, anybody, the most times you could go to the theater in a year was 10. And in fact, a lot of folks were five and less. So these are really people who, these are not us, right? And those folks want to be challenged. Right. So one of the really interesting things we had with this study was that we had such a large pool of both the qualitative data, those one-on-one interviews, the 289 one-on-one interviews, and the 7,000 plus that were the quantitative data. So we're able to sort of toggle back and forth between that quantitative data that you're seeing in the charts. And then we're pulling out here some quotes that we got in the debriefs around the country. Directly, these are playwrights and those theater staffers telling us about what they heard directly from those audience members. So this is what they say they're wanting to get out of the evening and what is attracting them. And of course, the main thing that we heard was that they want a good story. That showed up in city after city after city. The main motivator was that they wanted to be engaged in a good story. Some people were interested in escapism and other people were obviously interested in having a more qualitative experience. And we picked these out. These were picked as rich quotes. They're not meant to be reflective in particular of the communities in question. Except that you'll notice in San Francisco they wanted to do with social justice issues, but that's probably... He always says that. Most importantly, we asked, what do they want to know about before they see a new play? And so as you look about, we were asking, when do you want stuff? So the light color is I want it before the performance. The blue is I want it after. And the purple is I don't need it at all. 83% of the people ahead of time wanted information about the style and type of the play. This is gonna come up over and over and over. People want to know what they're going to see. 68% interested in background information about the play and a detailed description of characters. 60% ahead of time. Once you get into what inspired the playwright to write the play, it's only half of them wanted ahead of time. It doesn't mean they don't want it. They're interested in getting it later, but they don't want it ahead of time. This is a hard study for directors, because over and over people are not overly interested in what the directors are up to. So an explanation of the director's interpretation, nobody wanted it ahead of time. 60% of the people were interested in after the performance. So this is the beginning of a theme you'll see all the way through. People want to go. They trust their instincts. They want to make their decisions. Did you do interviews? You're nodding your head. No? Okay. No, I didn't. Did anyone hear of the playwright's do interviews? Yeah, right. So it's interesting. I don't know how much resonates and how much doesn't, but this is what they want. Not so much interested on that side. Right. And so again, toggling back to the qualitative side, this is how they sort of put it in their own words. So for them, the most important thing that we do to draw them in to see a new play is what they call that three sentence blurb. And what they wanted in that blurb was enough information to understand what the play was about. Oftentimes that can mean the plot. They want an idea of what the plot is about. They want to know what the content is about. What's the theme? What are the ideas behind the play? And they're interested in knowing basically what's the style of the play. They want to have enough information to make a decision. If we don't give them enough information to make a decision, the decision they make is not to come. Is not to come. Right? And so when we kind of try to like sneak them in with sort of like, it's an enchanting romantic comedy. That just says nothing. It's not working. And it doesn't pull them in at all. So I think what, this was a really important piece that we pulled away is that we shouldn't, we don't want to pull in people who are not going to like the play. They've got a pretty strong sense of what they are going to like and what they're not going to like. They trust their own instincts on that if we give them enough information. So give them the information and they trust themselves to make the right decision. And we heard it from the very beginning. I remember the session, the debrief we had here. We heard really loud and clear from the interviewers that they had heard from the single ticket buyers. They remember when they've been duped. Right? And that's how they view it, right? If they thought they were seeing one thing and they end up seeing something else, they're not happy about it. And they have long memories and they associate that with the venue and they associate that with the act of going to the theater. So three sentences. That's what they want. And as Tori has been pointing out, a lot of these single ticket buyers, they're bringing someone else, right? So they're vouching for this play that they have not seen what they know about it is from your three sentence blurb to someone else. And suddenly their credibility is on the line when they're watching their spouse squirming in the seat beside them or their best friend. So we want to really set them up to be able to understand as best we can what they're going to see and prepare them well for that. It was at the convening. One of the players said, I think it was Adam Bach, but somebody said, and that doesn't mean you can't keep the secrets. I can tell you what my play is about without giving away the thing I don't want anyone to know. You know, the moment. I can still protect that. So how does someone decide to see a play? What do they look up? And about a third of the single ticket buyers the blue is, and this was by age. So under 25, 25 to 44, 45 to 65, 65 plus, very constant look up their favorite theater companies. So the brand of your company is important. They don't always distinguish between a theater company and the building in which a bunch of theater companies perform. Okay, so that's a problem. And so it came up a lot here, right? But they do look up. They start with the favorite companies. Look for shows featuring favorite playwrights, directors, or actors. Not very many. This is not personality driven. And this relates to stuff we'll get to later. Inverse relationship. The purple is good reviews from professional critics. The older you are, the more important it was, right? So the kind of outside affirmation by a professional still way more important to older folks than younger folks. Inversely, the recommendations from friends and family members much more important for people who were younger, which is probably much more reliance on social media. Very few people don't use something to pick a play. Right. Right. So spoiler alert, here comes the biggest surprise of the entire research. Are they attracted to the idea of it being a premiere? No! They don't care. Either the word means nothing to them, or we found out in some of the debriefs that it's actually off-putting. People tend to conflate premiere with opening night, and they think they have to get all dressed up to have the champagne, or... That was big in Atlanta. Or they feel that the premiere means that it's really kind of still in beta, and they just assume wait for 2.0 to come around. That happened here a lot. We heard that loud and clear, right? Loud and clear, we heard that in Boston. Not interested in premiere, even less interested in this. The regional premiere. We do this in the Bay Area all the time. We even have South Bay premieres, or East Bay premieres. Totally just you're wasting that, that precious real estate on your postcard is just being wasted. And that's the real point, is that we put on the card a world premiere. You just only have a little bit of room on the card. It doesn't matter. It's just not interesting to them. As we were talking about this, I've been talking with folks about it as we've been doing it, marketing directors who were like, well, yeah, I know that. And it's like, okay, but now we really know it, because we've seen it with 7,000 plus people, which is different than it. So you can take that to the folks in your theater that think it's really important. And I mean, we've had some conversations with people of where does the premiere pressure come from? A lot of it comes from the funders, right? So this is an interesting thing to share with the funders that it's not necessarily serving building new audiences. Now, with us to say the flip side of this coin is new is good. New is fine. New is attractive to these audiences. They like new. It's just that premiere doesn't mean anything to them. And if we think about it, we've been talking for years in our field that there's this premiere itis. It's really premiere filia. We're in love with premieres, at least, right? So try to get your second production, right? Or your third production. But for those folks who haven't lived in that city that did the very first production, it's still brand new to them. And new is exciting. It's just the word premiere doesn't mean anything. And it's important here. One of the things we don't know, this is single ticket buyers. I have no idea how this would play with subscribers. And we've talked about that a little bit. And it may well be that for subscribers, they are, in fact, subscribing to a particular theater because it does a lot of premieres and they like that. So, you know, I don't think this is... This isn't global. It's about single ticket buyers. There's a slice of the audience. We don't know whether it matters with subscribers. Right. So after all of this information was taken in, the great researchers at Wolf Brown, John, and Alan were taking a look at these audiences and they found some interesting patterns coming up. And here it is. And I'm going to ask John to come up and actually explain this slide and the next because Tori and I always goof this up. Yeah. Not my strong suit. So on the survey that we did, we had a number of questions that all kind of in different ways asked about people's interest and experience going to see new plays. So if you just asked them on a single question, how interested are you in seeing new plays? I think it was 90% of the respondents gave a score of five or up on a seven point scale. So basically almost everyone said, yeah, I want to go see new plays. But as I said, we had a number of other questions that are kind of related that we had. Well, how many new plays did you see in the last 12 months? How interested are you in seeing plays that are still being workshopped? How interested are you in seeing early readings of new plays? If you're weighing going to see a classic versus a new play, which would you choose? So we had a total of eight questions like that. And then if you add up the scores, then you find that there are some people who are just, they're consistently checking the top box. They are like, whenever there's a new play, I'm there. Whether it's early workshop reading, yes. First production, yes, absolutely. How often do you go all the time? And so these people are ending up at the far end of this bell curve. And we're referring to them as co-creators because they're really interested, not only are they seeing a lot of new plays, but they're interested in being a part of the process. Then we have this kind of lump in the middle and we're referring to them as the enthusiasts. So they're going to new plays, but they're not necessarily, maybe they're more selective in seeing the plays that they're interested in for some reason. It's not just that it's new play. They might not be terribly interested in the first reading of the show. So those are our enthusiasts. And then we have the bottom range here we're referring to as skeptics. And in order to be in our dataset, they had to buy a single ticket for a new play at some point in the last two years. So I mean, they're not averse to new plays. They don't seem to be terribly excited about it. So that's kind of what we did here. We were calling this the new play affinity score and we really just kind of developed this as a way of kind of looking at different groups of audiences based on how excited they are about new plays. And if I just move one slide forward. So when we did this, as I said, there were a set of questions on the survey that we used to calculate the score. But then we looked at, well, what other variables in the survey are driving that interest? How could we kind of predict which people are really interested in seeing new plays? What we found, what's actually one of the most interesting thing is what's not driving it. Is it's not driven by young people or wanting to see new plays. It's not driven by race or ethnicity. It's not driven by the kind of demographic variables. But we did find that there were two kind of attitudinal variables that seem to be explaining a lot. That is the desire to challenge one's assumptions and ideas about the world and the desire to engage with important issues in one's community. So there were those two kind of attitudinal variables and then there were two variables around kind of aesthetic exploration or aesthetic risk taking that were heavily influencing the new play affinity score. That was enjoying being taken beyond one's comfort zone with a piece of theater and enjoying plays without a clear narrative, i.e. abstract or non-linear form. And so we found that those four components together were explaining 30% of people's new play affinity. Which is for this type of study a pretty high percentage to explain with just kind of, you know, four variables like that. So yeah, so that's the new play affinity score. And as Brad and Tori go through this, I'll be referring to those skeptics and to the co-creators occasionally. And I just wanted to make sure that you understand where that terminology is coming from and how we develop that. Thank you. Thanks, John. Yeah, and we will see it when we get into the engagement section in a minute or two that will keep popping up over and over again. And these three different types of audiences have very different ways that they want to be engaging with that work. One piece that came up, this is, you know, a little bit of, we asked them, so they told us, suggestion from the audience about what might help them to be more attracted to your next new play. They're looking for something like Amazon. They want the Pandora of new plays, right? So if you like this, then you'll like that. And they're wondering why we as a field can't come up with a mechanism like that. And this is one that I think is interesting and a little bit dangerous, right? Because this is, it's clearly what people want, right? We are now conditioned to, if you like this book, you like this song. I mean, I will get recommendations about books based on books I bought that are books that I would never read. So even, you know, with Amazon, the algorithms are not perfect. People want it. I don't know how you decide that one play is like another play, right? And I don't know, and we're going to ask you in the breakout at the end to one group of you to think about this a little bit more. We're collecting some, we've gotten some very interesting ideas from folks around the country about how you might be able to do this. One thing I'll share with you is that people think that maybe it's come up, I think almost everywhere, that one of the things is that you use television shows as a reference point. That you actually think about, you know, this is like, if you like orange, it's the new black then, right? So that you're actually picking something out. You're not picking another play. You're picking something that has a sensibility or involves a world that is not unlike the world of the play. But I think we have to reckon with it because the fact that everybody said it over and over means that it is what people are looking for. Yep. So now we're moving into the engagement section as we talked about. The first thing that we looked at is like how do people want to reflect about the experience that they've had in the theater after the show is over? And then you can see, you know, it's from dark at the bottom and light at the top. About half of the people are interested in engaging in conversation about the work in some way, whether that's one-on-one with the person that they came with or in an organized talk-back afterwards. About half the folks are really interested in verbally engaging in discussion about the play afterwards. But another half would really just as soon reflect on it quietly on their own. And this is important because I think we spend a lot of time taking care of the people at the top half who want to engage in vigorous conversation. We don't spend very much time and perhaps we don't value enough that people who are actually interested in reflecting privately, but they're important and that reflection is part of what heightens the impact, which is part of what means that they may come again. And so how Alan and John raised that this poses the question, what do we do for those folks? What can we do for them to address the way they want to reflect afterwards? So this slide shows you the different ways that these different audience members like or don't like getting involved with these engagement activities that we've devised, right? And so the purple are the skeptics, the green are the enthusiasts, and that sort of reddish color are the co-creators. And as you can see, there's sort of mirror images of each other. What the skeptics like, the co-creators don't like, and vice versa. So it's really important to keep that in mind. So the first one was when do you want, how well do you want to be informed about the play before you walk into the theater? And for those skeptics, they really want to know about the play before they walk in. They want to have a good deal of information so they're ready, they're set, they're sort of prepared for that experience. The co-creators are much more willing to just go and arrive with you. They are ready to just bring it to me, right? And so those, and the enthusiasts are in between as you can see all the way through. So that's a difference that we're seeing. Talk backs, right? So those co-creators, they are there. They're still hanging out in the theater with you. The skeptics, they're out the door, right? They're out to the parking lot to get their car and get out of here. Tori had this idea. The next one, I had this really interesting idea that what if you did informal discussion groups in the lobby afterwards, and people could join them where they saw fit. Nobody. Don't try it. Not all ideas are good ones. Additional information about the cast. Again, the co-creators want it. The skeptics, not so much. Co-creators want to hear from the playwright. Skeptics, not so much. And so this is just zeroing in. It's sort of like a close-up of this. But again, you can see that sort of mirror effect, that being well-informed versus being a blank canvas and then the other vigorously discussing the play immediately afterwards, they're just mirror opposite. So very different responses. And what are we doing to sort of welcome and engage folks where they are on that spectrum? And I think something that is important here, we heard, one of the frustrations for a lot of the theater folks was when they were doing the interviews, was they would hear from people that they were interviewing. I would love it if. And they're like, but we do that. And it's not landing. I think part that there may be in this when people want to receive and who they are, figuring out where your single ticket buyer is on this thing will help you in getting them the information when they are most likely to read it. And if you think about what most theaters do, theaters are getting better and better at sending you out stuff ahead of time. When I've bought a ticket, I get a lot of stuff ahead of time. There are people who don't want it ahead of time. They want it afterwards. If you send it to them ahead of time, they're not going to read it because they're not ready for it. And if you never send it to them afterwards, they don't think about it. And the other thing is they kind of want it right away. Because by the next morning, they're off. They're back to their day. They've gone to work. The moment to grab people is when they're going, right after they get home, when they're in the car, that's the moment to grab them. One of the things that I would say especially in the regional theater, I found there's really a difference between the playbills in New York and the playbills that we have in the regions. So in the regions, we fill our playbills with lots of information, right? There's something from the director, the artistic director, the playwright has written something, the dramaturg is put in a piece. It's like a whole little compendium of essays about the work. And I don't know if you do this here in Boston, but in the Bay Area, we're very, you know, we're green. We're wanting to save paper. If you put your program back over here, we're going to use it again tomorrow. Don't do that. Really don't do that. They are taking that information home. They're pouring over it the next day, over their breakfast when they get home, reading it on the subway. It deepens that impact and a lot of them, and Alan pointed this out in our intrinsic impact work, they will hold onto it for years and go back and look at it again and be reminded of the play and it'll make them want to go back and see another play and go back to your theater. If you want to spend on that printing of that program, let them keep it. It's really important. So that's just one thing. The next thing we looked at is like, what is the information that we're giving them from whom and when do they want to get it? So the largest thing that everybody wants is to talk about the play on the way home or over drinks or dinner. 46% of the people, that's what they're the most interested in. Receiving information directly from the play rate about his or her creative process 23% that ranked that at 7%, but there's still a fair number of people who are interested in that. Nobody wants to stay afterwards for talk backs with artists involved in the play. Again, at least half of them are 5, 6, and 7 on that. If you look at the 70 page one, the key here is artists. They are not particularly interested in talking to the dramaturgs. They are not particularly interested in talking to artists. They are not particularly interested in talking to the marketing associates. This came up in Washington, D.C., where I guess a lot of theaters all the time now it's a city full of experts, so they bring in experts on subjects. People don't want that. They actually want to talk to the artists. Receiving additional information about the cast, yeah, not as important informal self-guided discussion circles and lobby nobody wants to do. So this next piece is looking at what kinds what ways that are we producing the new work and what do they want to engage in. Not surprisingly, everybody wants to go see the full stage production. That makes a lot of sense. But there are a number of people who are interested in seeing the stage reading and even going to that early reading and from the work that we've seen here now we know who they are. There are those co-creators. We also know that a number of them are not going to be so interested in it, so we don't have to worry about that. When we were having this discussion a week or two ago in Atlanta the Alliance Theater there the woman who was there She's got this whole database she didn't call it co-creators now she will but she's got a whole database of people that she knows are interested in that. She said she can get 50 people in a room with three days' notice to come to a stage reading because those are her co-creators. And these aren't ticket buyers. She just had this idea she realized people were coming up to her and going I'm really interested in what you do and how you do it and she's like give me your email and so she's just collected this group of about 100 people who are totally on board with the idea of doing the stuff the stage reading or the early readings. So we're wondering if we can fine-tune our databases to be able to hold this information to be able to get out that word to the right people who have the desire to come and not bother our skeptics who really they just assume wait till the play and say thank you very much. And something that comes up and starts here and you'll see through the rest of this is there's actually something really lovely about this the audience wants to see the play they don't want to write the play so they want to see it when it's done. And this is some again some from the qualitative research what people said sort of in response to that question many of them they just want to see the polish product they want to see the full show once you're ready but we'll see it a little bit later we'll look at how do they want to engage the play some people say they do want to be a fly on the wall so this isn't 100% and this is a question that Wolf Brown has tossed out for us as a field is to say maybe the problem here is that a number of people those skeptics in particular they don't really understand the process and they don't understand their role as an audience member in that early stage of the process that it's not about playwrights helping you fix your second act thank God they really don't want to do that but they don't necessarily also understand how important it is for us as playwrights to see them react to the play and be able to take that back and think about it with our director maybe just ponder it ourselves to really understand they seem to be really engaged here and lost them and they were lapping at that I thought they were going to cry those responses are really important for the playwright to bring in and understand how important that can be but this was a big liberating factor for playwrights because it meant you don't have to be as scared of the discussion because people actually are not going to take the play apart they want to talk about the play and they want to know why you wrote it they're in awe of the fact that you write plays and they want to know why you write them they're not going to fix it so this leads us to our final section here which is how can we better connect playwrights to audiences with the idea of engaging them more deeply in the work and making them more interested in the work this was a little moment because it became clear pretty early on that most single ticket buyers don't actually know the names of the playwrights of the plays they don't pay much attention to that they kind of don't really think about the playwrights and one of the things that came up is the playwrights when they did the interviews did not reveal themselves as playwrights at the beginning they just said we're working with the theater I'm working with XYZ theater and I'm here to have a conversation with you about why you go to plays and it wasn't till the end that they would reveal that so we were really nervous when this started coming up and there was a playwright who said that well this is really good because it means if they didn't like my play they won't remember my name they won't know I wrote that play and they'll still come to my next play so I guess it's all how you look at it there's another thing that was one of the women playwrights as we were doing these debriefs said too this might also be an argument back for some of those artistic leaders who are saying well you know audiences just don't seem to be as interested to see plays by women as they are by plays by men they don't remember the name they can't remember the gender they want to go see a good story so all of those things this can be a little liberating in a way so this was you know again what are they following what are they looking for and so we asked them on play selection strategies and obviously the skeptics again everyone is looking at theater companies following artists much more important for the co-creators much less important obviously for the skeptics professional reviews the skeptics are reading them the co-creators not so interested in personal recommendations again the skeptics rely on hearing stuff some other people more than co-creators don't care they trust their own opinion completely yeah they're not no it's a term that it's the term that you guys came up with for those folks these are not makers these are not theater makers I think the way to think about co-creator is they are creators as audience members right yeah that's a good question thank you and in those readings and at those talk backs and those are those folks right helping us create in that way but they're not makers themselves we eliminated all those so again this might seem a little bit like wait a minute didn't you just say that they're not interested in the playwright and they can't remember my name but what we found out was is we asked folks if some of the people were surprised that there were such things as living playwrights once they found that the playwright could in fact be alive and you could talk to them and find out more about them and if they could see that they might be younger they might not be a man they might not be white then they became more interested and what they found out was like nearly 70% of them said that if I did know more if I had a way to be more engage the playwright I think that would make me more interested in seeing new plays not a particular new play not that playwright's new play showing this weekend necessarily but new plays in general 18% of the folks said that it would have a significantly positive effect and 48% said it would have a small positive effect and look not very many people go to plays in this country so you know small positive effect the tipping point's not so high so I mean it just isn't and so if you can get you know 66% of these folks said if I had more access to playwrights I would be more interested in going and seeing new plays so I think that there's a lot here that speaks to why we should get the playwrights more engaged in these conversations so then we began to think about and ask the audiences well what might those ways look like and so they had some ideas right a lot of it sort of revolved around social media social media yeah they were interested in you know what are the ways that I could interact with a playwright on social media I mean they started with I mean as one person said it started with I don't know how I would talk to a playwright what would I say and the playwright said well you've been talking to a playwright for 55 minutes now and you seem to have done fine right and so as you kind of demystified it a little bit and that you know that demystification may have something to do with this problem of elitism that you know a lot of people are scared of the theater and I think maybe the person they understand the least is the playwright because they just don't understand what that I mean you kind of get what a director does do I think they're feeling about what makes someone sit down in front of a computer and write a play is really scary to them and so I think this idea about you know should you do Instagram should you do Facebook what are the things you could do is they see this as a way that they could get engaged right and again they understand that they don't have the sort of expertise to to help us rewrite our whatever or like you know post the great greatest ideas for like how to fix your play which is I think to a lot of us really good news I think a way that we might be able to engage them into a place where they are in fact experts which is their own response to your play each audience member is the expert on their response to your play and there we if we can engage them on that which is really that intrinsic impact right how did it hit them and it's fascinating for us to know what that is and they can be the experts on that they are the experts on that there aren't any other experts except them on how they responded to the play and if we can maybe if we can bring them up and have that conversation about how did you respond to the play and then they're wanting to know why did we as playwrights write the play in the first place and what makes us tick and why would you do something is weird with your life is to be a playwright those are the things that they want to know about and that we think and they think might make them more interested in coming soon to see new works and the other thing is people rightly say there's a lot of opportunities for video there's a lot of opportunities for podcast there's a lot of opportunities to see reversal there's a lot they don't understand about the things that get in our way in terms of what we can and can't put out there but they're really looking for us to put some stuff on video that they can have access to it doesn't seem so hard to them right so that is it that's what we found and now we want to entertain some questions some comments do that together as a group and then again we'll do that for a few minutes and once we finish with that we'll break up into small groups and we'll have you answering some questions that we've been looking at across the country so Q&A yeah those four main those four things the prime determinants yes so for the co-creators they were maybe we can find them again but again it was more about that they they were interested in having their assumptions challenged they were interested in dealing with difficult topics they were interested in being taken out of their comfort zone they were interested in seeing works that were not necessarily linear and the more that you were wanting to do that they were ranking it high not true at all John they're taking the microphone we're on air so what you were seeing was a regression analysis so so basically the higher someone rated any one of those variables the higher their score was likely to be and higher scores means pushing them out on that that graph towards the co-creators so I mean I guess the other thing I want to say is well those variables are explaining a lot like if you just kind of on kind of general attitudinal behavior try to kind of model who smokes or doesn't smoke or things like that kind of being able to explain 30% is a lot but at the same time it's like it's increasing the odds that you would be really interested in seeing new plays or being a co-creator but as obviously there are some people who might respond highly and not one of the questions we're going to ask you guys to think about is this question of do we want to move people along that spectrum is that a good thing do you want to mix in the audience or do you want them all at one end or the other so I actually am not sure there's one answer to that right I think it really is it's a way of thinking about how people are and who do you want in your house and another question that we are going to ask you to think about is this whole issue of risk and is that even the right word at least right one of the things we I am convinced of the more we look at this and talk to people and other stuff that we're doing and the idea that we do one single ticket description for everyone who's not a subscriber is probably not helping us and there are and so the thing that's interesting about this curve is we got to figure out how to figure out what somebody is right because right now we don't have the tools necessarily to say oh you're a skeptic in my database and you're a co-creator so you two should be getting different marketing one of the next questions I think is how do we figure out who's who and what data do you need and is there something we could be doing and we've been talking it's come up more than once could we be using the big list for that right could you be using right or what are the characteristics that we need to look at and I don't think I don't think we've answered that yet right right I mean I think it's really interesting to think about because it would help you because I think there's no question but that the skeptics you give them some of the stuff you're giving the co-creators and they're like not me right and that may not be the case yep I don't they heard it this morning I mean seriously that's part of how you do it is you you start sharing it with people I think probably I don't know it from this but I think it has to do with us figuring out a little bit what why people value new right and so it's a little bit about trying to get underneath what are they really doing or saying is important and I don't think I think you know people are again it's the new is okay it's just the premiere right and so I think very clearly you know someone who a playwright who's dead even if they haven't been to that play before that's not a new play right they understand the Shakespeare play they have and see I've told the story a couple of times we're doing some other research at we're looking at single ticket buyers who go less than they used to to plays and why is that and we're just at the beginning of the research and we're doing focus groups and I had a kind of soul deadening experience where one of the focus groups we asked them at you know what new place what have you been to a play in the last two years three years no yeah and they to a group they actually the eight of them said they'd never been to a play they've been to musical they'd never been to a play so I was and this was Broadway ticket buyers okay so this is not folks went in the nonprofit sector so I you can send in a message with to the focus group leaders right so I sent and I said ask them if they've ever seen Shakespeare and they all said oh absolutely we've been to Shakespeare and not only had they been to Shakespeare they then had a conversation amongst themselves about did they like the midsummer's better did they like the history plays better what about the tragedies so what are they what did what do they even hear when we say play so the idea that Shakespeare was not a play that was Shakespeare right so I think all of this is there's a language it's a long way of saying I think for the funder for all of us there's a language piece that we have to figure out better yeah I wonder too about in this age of social media and personal branding what can play rights and generative theater artists be doing in terms of their own personal branding that was interesting about social media I'd take a picture of it suppose some Facebook page tomorrow absolutely so there are some playwrights who are really taking that idea and running with it so I don't know if you all know Lauren Gunderson she's based in the Bay Area as Atlanta loves to tell me she's from Atlanta now based in the Bay Area but she is like you know a fiend about you know being on Facebook and I think Twitter as well obviously are both places and she just she has developed an amazing following you know through her social media interactions others as well they have made you know professional Facebook pages for the and you know identities for themselves which are different maybe than what they do with their friends and family but they've made a point of developing audiences and fan bases and that's one of the things that we'll be talking about when we break into small groups is how can theater companies how can the producers be helping that to happen and how can they be helping their audiences to follow you as you go from their theater to another theater and following your trajectory around and maybe the trajectory of the work as well and using that to peak an interest in just you know the whole sector of new work and I think another thing is you know one of the things we're going to do at the end of this whole thing is whether it's a toolkit or suggestions topic questions for folks is I think for the new play development folks I think there might be something to be said about building up a skill set for playwrights who need help on what social how to interact with social media because some playwrights are there they got it and others it's like clearly off-putting and some people may never want to do it but there's there may actually be some skills development because as you said it's taking the power the power shouldn't just rest with the producers it's got to come back to the artists and you know the more that the artists take responsibility for themselves then the more you know the better it is and so and playwrights as has often been said through this work playwrights are the ones with the most skin in the game right so you know how many people are sitting right so only ones in the theater that whose salaries are directly tied to the box office in any way shape when when playwrights are played up percent right about how many tickets are being sold in the commercial sector they're the only ones right well directors directors right okay another question or comment for now yeah did you intend it to be like an offer on the theater part of ways they could think about the play or an opportunity to state what they thought the first one the first one the first one and and it's something that like we do with all our arts and education programs we keep kids prompts all the time yeah right for them to go right about and so the quit and some theaters do it it's just saying if you give them right then that's really helping the people who just want to sit and think about it by themselves right one more and then we'll split up because some of them will come up yeah everyone was getting the email from a theater company from a theater company as a single ticket buyer to that theater they were asked would they be willing to participate in this survey that's I mean that's how we and that's what John was saying earlier that everybody here had to have gone to a new play that's how you got into the pool either to be interviewed or to be surveyed we had originally thought that what we really wanted to do is to find out why people were not going to the theater and when we talked to Alan and John about that they were like well you can but it's a really expensive and B people don't tell you the truth so they tell you I don't go to the theater because I'm too busy and that's not the reason right so then we look at the flip side which is to say well people who don't go a lot what makes them go when they go which maybe is actually more useful information to be you know to for us to use as practitioners so that's what we were looking at but we did find in the qualitative in the one-on-one interviews it's different around the country right some cities had very strong brand you know sort of awareness the audience is really new theater a from theater B and in other cities not so much actually New York they didn't have such a strong identity about the theaters which was distressing to the marketing directors yeah yeah I guess here I'm going to be drawing on other research that we've been doing and and I think the perspective of audience members on what it means to be a loyal audience member means vastly different things so you you have audience members who come to your theater like once every two or three years but they have really meaningful deep experiences there and if their friends ask them about it they say oh yeah I love that theater company like I love all the things I've ever seen there it's just like their level of theater going is kind of once they would say they go there a lot right because they do for them right so I think it I think it is real right it was yeah but that's also a way of saying that it's basically up to their interpretation whatever they meant by theaters their favorite theater companies and something that the flip side of this is that when they have a bad experience at the theater they remember and it was here I don't know if you remember that someone talked about having had experience this was a year and a half ago at ART that that Robert Brewstein you know you never could be sure what he was doing and you know one had the I think the interviewer finally said you know Brewstein isn't there anymore right so whatever they'd seen however many years ago because Bob's been what 10 I mean a long time now had stuck with them as a negative experience strongly enough that they just saw and they that done I don't go there and so I think that's that's all part of this idea about identifying with the company okay so thank you that's going to be it for the online portion and we're going to break you up now into small groups so that you can