Eat, Drink, and Stage a New Play: 10 things theaters must do to save themselves

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7. Build bars. Alcohol is both lubricant and bonding agent. Exploit it. Treat your plays like parties and your audience like guests. Encourage them to come early, drink lots, and stay late. Even the meanest fringe company can afford a tub of ice and beer, and the state of regional-theater bars is deplorable: long lines, overpriced drinks, and a famine of comfortable chairs. Theaters try to “build community” with post-play talkbacks, lectures, and other versions of You’ve spent two hours watching my play, now look at me some more! You want community? Give people a place to sit, something to talk about (the play they just saw), and a bottle. They get drinks, you get money, everybody wins.

8. Host boors’ night out. You know what else builds community? Audience participation, on the audience’s terms. For one performance of each show, invite the crowd to behave like an Elizabethan or vaudeville audience: Sell cheap tickets, serve popcorn, encourage people to boo, heckle, and shout out their favorite lines. (“Stella!”) The sucky, facile Rocky Horror Picture Show survives because it’s the only play people are encouraged to mess with.

9. Expect poverty. Theater is a drowning man, and its unions are anvils disguised as life preservers. Theater might drown without its unions, but it will certainly drown with them. Actors and stagehands must jettison the living-wage argument—it just isn’t viable.

10. Drop out of graduate school. Most of you students in MFA programs don’t belong there—your two or three years would be more profitable, financially and artistically, out in the world, making theater. Drama departments are staffed by has-beens and never-weres, artists who might tell you something worthwhile about the past, but not about the present, and certainly not about the future. Historians excepted—art historians are great. If things don’t turn around, they may be the only ones left.

Reprinted from the Stranger (Oct. 9, 2008), the Seattle alternative weekly newspaper led by nationally syndicated Savage Love columnist Dan Savage; www.thestranger.com.

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