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5/18/09 8:09 AMHeretic’s Foundation III: Smart Plays Need Smart Audiences, Don’t They? « Clyde Fitch ReportPage 1 of 5http://www.clydefitchreport.com/?p=2039
 
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Heretic’s Foundation III: Smart Plays Need Smart Audiences, Don’tThey?
Friday, May 8, 2009Bylines
 ByJohn Hudsondarkladyplayers@aol.com
Americans for the Arts hascalled for$2 billion inarts-specific projectsto “modernize, rehabilitate, and construct our nation’s cultural facilities.” But that won’t help the theater. We have theaters across thecountry; what we don’t have is demand: for straight plays, according to the National Endowment for theArts reportAll America’s aStage, the decline was 16% between 1992 and2008.And because of declining demand, theaters are focusing on marketing issues, such as building a community through Twitter and Facebook, profiling audience segments, and deciding whether their audience-engagement platform shouldprovide add-ons like videos of rehearsals, open rehearsals, texting with cast members or even cell phoneaccess to backstage chatter. Add in the fact that increasing numbers of people now prefer to receive theirbest-buy recommendations from Facebook rather than from theater reviews in newspapers or websites, newkinds of outreach must be developed. Theaters are spending more and more on marketing because that iswhat you must do if your overall demand is declining. Basically, you have to sell the hell out of yourproduct to capture — well, recapture — market share.
 
5/18/09 8:09 AMHeretic’s Foundation III: Smart Plays Need Smart Audiences, Don’t They? « Clyde Fitch ReportPage 2 of 5http://www.clydefitchreport.com/?p=2039
There are two basic economic models for producing theater. One requires targeting large audiences with arelatively safe, typically conservative, mass-marketed product. The alternative is a small, more boutique-style operation that delivers very high value to uniquely targeted niche audiences. Clearly the latter modelrequires a different approach to understanding what constitutes value. When London’s first purpose-builtplayhouses were erected in the 1570s, they represented a new kind of technology, one that enabled a newkind of public discourse. In creating a vision of where we want the theater industry to be in 25 years, whatis wrong with it now, and what process of innovation must occur to get it from here to there, let’s rememberits origins and how that theater of five centuries ago began.It began with a theater that was deeply controversial and embroiled in issues of belief and meaning. Fromthe timethe first wooden ‘O’ known as The Theatrewas built in 1576 in the playing fields of Spitalfields,the ‘theater critics’ of the day had a very clear reaction. They recognized it as a theater of resistance, achallenge to religious orthodoxies and thus the very basis of state power. An entire generation of sermonsand pamphlets criticized the plays and their players. In 1577, Thomas Whitecomplained in a sermonagainst the “common playes in London” and the “multitude that flocketh to them.” The same year, in hisTreatise Against Dicing, Dancing, Plays and Interludes, John Northbrooke claimed stage plays were “nottolerable” and wanted to ban actors from receiving the divine sacrament. In hisAnatomy of Abuses(1583)
, 
Philip Stubbes claimed plays were “sucked out of the Devil’s teats, to nourish us in idolatry, heathenrie, andsin.”A few years later, there would have been clear risks for players at The Rose in performing the plays of Christopher Marlowe. He was, after all, an atheist who had declared the sacred Gospels “all of one man’smaking” and that the figure of Jesus was merely a“deceiver” in “vain and idle stories.” Although some 40% of the English population were nonbelievers in Christianity, such revolutionary ideas were, again, adirect threat to state power. So for Marlowe’s plays — which contain a straightforward anti-Christianallegory most easy to spot in
 Dr Faustus —
as well as others, the secret service would carefully monitorperformances. State Decipherers, as they were called, were seated in the audience trying to work out if secret allegorical meanings were concealed within the plays. From time to time, as with
The Isle of Dogs,
the spies thought they had found something untoward. Then the playwright and the entire acting companywere hauled off to prison, perhaps to be tortured. So performing theater was dangerous work, like walking aliterary tightrope without a net. And that was one exciting reason why audiences went to see it. The castmight be arrested, but no government could arrest a whole audience.The second type of theater production, for which an acting company might be paid 20 pounds (rather morethan for a night at a playhouse) was a private performance for a patron or at Court. The risks of performingat Court were higher, however, since the whole Court was present, not merely a few courtiers occupying thebetter seats. Since courtiers prided themselves on solving allegories — and since Queen Elizabeth was betterat it than anyone else — any playwright penning covert allegories risked losing the battle of wits and dyinglike Marlowe did, asCharles Nicholl points out in his book
The Reckoning
, while being carefully watchedover by a representative from each branch of the secret service.It was in this environment that the Shakespearean plays were written — that is, before theater criticism orliterary analysis existed concretely as a field, but in which there was a strong environment of populardialogue. Will future historians examine how New Yorkers engaged in serious discussions of plays in theirFacebook postings? I have never seen one. Indeed, most of today’s productions are intended as works of entertainment, not as efforts to reveal meaning. Consider how Mike Daisey, in his essayThe Empty Spaces,described many theaters as “mashing up Shakespeare until it is a thin lifeless paste that any reasonableperson would reject as disgusting” simply because it brings in money.
 
5/18/09 8:09 AMHeretic’s Foundation III: Smart Plays Need Smart Audiences, Don’t They? « Clyde Fitch ReportPage 3 of 5http://www.clydefitchreport.com/?p=2039
Surely what is most important for the long term success of the theater is an informed audience able toengage in critical thinking, firstly about the nature of the play, and only secondarily about the nature of itsperformance. Because our culture is so orientated to consuming the surface performance, audiences losesight of the meaning of the play underneath. So long as audiences fixate mostly on the performance, theaterswill never be able to deliver much lasting value. There is only so much value and satisfaction to be gainedfrom seeing a star or great scenery. A much more reliable source of value is in understanding the meaningof the play-again, if it is one that can create startling new insight. If a play actually means something really,really controversial then — as Elizabethan theaters demonstrated — it can deliver value even without stars,scenery, or even a marketing department.When Jacques Petit saw a performance of 
Titus Andronicus
in 1596 he wrote, in French, that he valued thevisual spectacle more than the narrative substance, and in this he might have resembled popular audiencestoday. Even Simon Forman, in his four descriptions of Shakespearean performances, only describes theirsurface plots, andhe gets some of those wrong. Others like Francis Meres, the writer of Palladias Tamia, the Wit’s Treasury (1598),
 
specifically praised the playwright’s “mellifluous and honey-tongued verse.” Thispaid no attention to contemporary literary theory that said one had to look underneath this honeyed surface,especially for pastorals —
 As You Like It 
, for instance — a genre designed to deceive and conceal hiddenmeanings. Yet there were others who could see that deeply: Gabriel Harvey, for example, who noted thatthe Shakespearean plays contained much in them for the “wiser sort.” Similarly, Ben Jonson wrote inHymenaei (1606)that his own figures would be “so to be presented, as upon the view they might withoutcloud or obscuritie, declare themselves to the sharpe and learned” and that his allegory was “very clear”except to those who have “but thick eyes,” for whom the meanings would be would be “steps beyond theirlittle, or (let me not wrong ‘hem) no braine at all.”Today, many theaters compete both against each other and against other media for mass audiences. Butsmart plays need
smart 
audiences. An alternative competitive positioning is to develop a niche audience thatengages with plays because of what they mean and the benefits such an understanding can provide. If thatmeaning is revolutionary and outrageous enough, then perhaps, as in Elizabethan London, it could evencreate new audiences for the performing arts.
 John Hudson
is a strategic consultant who specializes in new industry models and has helped createseveral telecoms and Internet companies. He is currently consulting to a leading think tank on the future of the theater industry and pioneering an innovative Shakespeare theory, as dramaturge to the Dark LadyPlayers. This Fall he will be Artist in Residence at Eastern Connecticut State University. He has degrees inTheater and Shakespeare, in Management, and in Social Science.
This entry was posted on Friday, May 8th, 2009 at 8:00 am and is filed underBylines. You can follow any responses to this entrythrough theRSS 2.0feed. You canleave a response, ortrackbackfrom your own site.
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