What will draw audiences back to live theater?
Despite COVID and changing business models, the stage’s fundamentals will always be timeless.
What do today’s theater audiences want? Carefree fluff? More sensational distraction? Or perhaps something more demanding and involving if not quite so evanescent?
Attendance declines have made this question more urgent for artistic leaders and producers as well as critics concerned about the future of the art form. The COVID-19 pandemic didn’t just shut down venues for 18 months. It broke the theatergoing habit.
Regional theaters are having a particularly hard time putting back the pieces of their audiences.
Subscriptions have long been a fundamental element of the nonprofit theater business plan. But surfeited with at-home entertainment options, former subscribers are preferring the flexibility of single-ticket sales. Why sign up for a season when you can pick and choose what you really want to see?
The obvious answer is to support a cultural organization in your community. But communal ties have frayed. One consequence of the decades-long commercialization of nonprofit theater is that patrons have been transformed back into consumers by companies that have been forced to rely to an ever-greater extent on box office revenue.
Buying a ticket to a show has become as transactional as a trip to the mall. The loyalty that Mark Taper Forum founder Gordon Davidson instilled in his audience has sadly become a relic of a bygone era.
Our digital culture and economy have only compounded the social disconnection. Netflix queues and social media feeds have made silos-for-one more luxurious than ever.
But the question of what theatergoers want is not the same as what will induce them to buy a ticket. The success of recent shows suggests that the right celebrity on the bill will still put butts in the seats, regardless of the quality of the vehicle. “Power of Sail,” no masterpiece, was the highest-selling season subscription production in Geffen Playhouse history. The not-so-secret weapon of this 2022 production was its star, Bryan Cranston, whose performance was everything you would hope it might be in a play I struggled to remember a few days later.
I wrote recently about Broadway audiences enhancing my experience of “Into the Woods,” “Parade,” “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” and “Fat Ham.” The spectator din at each of these shows was different in volume, tone and general excitability. In “Parade,” for instance, you could hear a pin drop as audience members followed the story of Leo Frank’s trial and antisemitic lynching. In “Sweeney Todd,” there was a boisterous electricity, which had partly to do with the magnificent singing (and gleeful fandom) of Josh Groban and partly to do with the genius of Stephen Sondheim.
Uniting these disparate offerings was the palpable concentration directed toward the proscenium. A group of strangers was converted by the ancient alchemy of theater into a collective thinking and feeling organism.
Theater as an institution may have evolved, but audiences haven’t fundamentally changed since they started gathering at dramatic festivals in ancient Greece. What they want is to be absorbed, to lose themselves for a couple of hours in a grander vision that leaves their hearts and minds a little larger than when they took their seats.
A good story well told is a tried-and-true method of achieving this effect, but it’s not the only method. It is possible to be rapt by virtuosity, or eloquent wit, or intellectual brilliance. To be absorbed isn’t the same thing as to be hypnotized. This is not a call for theaters to return to an exclusive menu of domestic realism, with its invisible fourth wall blurring the line between art and life.
There are many paths to catharsis — or its alternative. The German playwright, poet and director Bertolt Brecht, one of the revolutionary figures in modern theater, was adamantly anti-Aristotelian. Pity and fear weren’t for him. He didn’t want emotional identification to short-circuit critical thought. But he still furnished audiences with compelling tales that engaged their most pressing societal concerns.
Public storytelling is the source of theater’s power. Shakespeare won over harried Elizabethan Londoners not by delivering homilies but by seizing hold of their moral imaginations in irresistible dramatic yarns. Without such enthrallment, this venerable art form is just another TED Talk.
“The artist is not there to indict, nor to lecture, not to harangue, and least of all to teach,” British director Peter Brook wrote in his classic 1968 treatise, “The Empty Space.” “He is part of ‘them.’ He challenges the audience truly when he is the spike in the side of an audience that is determined to challenge itself. He celebrates with an audience most truly when he is the mouthpiece of an audience that has a ground of joy.”
“Fat Ham,” James Ijames’ Pulitzer Prize-winning riff on “Hamlet,” verifies the wisdom of Brook’s words. The play, which is part of the Geffen Playhouse’s next season, extends an invitation to an audience to reconsider a story that has attained the status of theatrical myth. Ijames uses the Shakespearean convention of asides and soliloquies to develop a close rapport with those who have assembled for this audacious update.
In bestowing pleasure, “Fat Ham” entices an audience to rethink its assumptions about a famous tragedy. Edification and illumination follow delight. Theater’s broken business model won’t be solved by a few cracking good tales. But if theatergoers aren’t returning, perhaps it’s time to reflect on what they’ve been missing.
This article is taken from the July 1 edition of The Times’ weekly Essential Arts newsletter. Sign up at latimes.com/newsletters.
Theater may have evolved, but audiences haven’t fundamentally changed since they started gathering at dramatic festivals in ancient Greece.