Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2007 - 13

sneak into the none-too-secure building on Vineland Place. And
when I went to work in the professional theatre, I promised
myself that if ever I found a young person trying to sneak into a
theatre, I would march them to the box office and give them a
free ticket to the best seat available. We need new audiences. We
need their energy, their interest and their love of the theatre.
One has only to look at the newspaper business to see
the perils that we face. Newspaper readership has fallen like
a rock the last couple of years as people have turned to other
media to get their news cheaply and conveniently. They say that
every person who dies is a newspaper reader who will never be
replaced and that, like buggy whips, our idea of the daily paper
will be gone in a decade. Who needs the printed version of the
classifieds when you have Monster.com and CraigsList?
So here we sit, theatre artists, working in a medium that
can't be replicated on the Web-a medium demanding our
physical presence and rapt attention. A medium that is based
on written texts that reflect deep lasting ideas abut human interaction. A medium that absolutely requires metaphorical, symbolic, non-literal ways of seeing the world.
I think that for too long we as theatre practitioners have
felt that what we do must remain mysterious to remain valuable.
We held our secrets dearly.
But if you take a look at the movie business, it is interesting that DVD's didn't really take off as a new technology in
the marketplace until they became crammed with "Behind
the Scenes" featurettes, "Making Of..." documentaries, shot-

by-shot breakdowns, directors' cuts, deleted scenes and fulllength commentary tracks in seventeen different languages. Far
from breaking the bond with the viewers, that kind of information has only brought us closer to the art form of the cinema. It
has made us more passionate about the artists and their work.
More appreciative of the craftspeople whose names fly by in the
closing credits.
It is incumbent on each of us, I think, to be unwavering
cheerleaders for the live theatre in the same way. Everyone
here, whether a designer, a technician, an educator or an artisan, carries with them the original spark of what brought them
to the theatre and vast pools of behind-the-scenes technical
know-how.
Share that. Explain that. Tell your story over and over. Unless we are willing to share, to teach, to carry on the conversation we are in danger of becoming "beside-the-point."
We must be more generous with our time and energy in
lifting the curtain and showing our audiences the wizards working the controls. People love that.
At Arizona Theatre Company, we make enormous efforts
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and spend countless hours to make sure that our audiences can
peek into the process of what we do, with pre-and -post-show
tours, special behind the scenes tech rehearsals, family days and
special learning sessions with many of our production staff. We
will often have Board members, donors and other supporters-or interested patrons who contact us out of the blue-sit
in the booth to watch the stage manager running a show.
So...Share. Teach. Converse.
We also need to work harder to make the theatre a destination that encompasses more than what happens between
curtain up and curtain down. Let me quote from a speech that
was given a few years ago by Ben Cameron, the former head of
TCG, describing the experience of a first time theatregoer:
"We enter a lobby, relatively well lit (in most cases), often
decorated in a kind of inoffensive industrial business chic. We
see ushers, often clad in muted colors, sometimes in a kind
of dress-coded uniform of sorts. We see head shots of the actors we're about to watch and pictures of scenes we're about to
encounter. There's precious little other sensory stimulation-
no music, no distinctive lighting, and certainly no differences
should we choose to return for a second production-an unalterability that already mitigates our claims about the uniqueness and difference of every production."
I'm sure that most of us recognize something of our own
experiences in Ben's description, but we have the tools and
imagination to change the status quo. As designers and technicians, we can work to make the very event of theatergoing more
unique, more special, more differentiated from the sterile multiplex AMC 24s of today-and more like the grand occasions
that were possible in the one-of-a-kind theatres like the one we
are in right now.
Many new facilities have made it their mandate to be
meeting places for social interaction as well as thrilling performance spaces. In the last few months I've been to the amazing
new Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis and the welcoming new
Portland Center Stage in Oregon. They couldn't be more different: the gynormous Guthrie, massive and imposing (and very
very blue) on the banks of the Mississippi; Portland Center
Stage, intimate and warm (and in the environmental sense very
very green) in the middle of the Pearl District. Yet even though
they are vastly different theatres, each has taken as a mandate
that they would be a place for the community to gather and
enjoy social interaction before, after, and even outside of a
playgoing context.
Our challenge is to make the adventure of theatre-going a
joyful and enlivening journey from buying a ticket, to arriving at
the theatre, through the show, the intermission, the curtain call
and the post-show discussion. We must engage our audience
with every tool of modern life at our disposal, every form of
new media-not just as spectators, but as Web-surfers, podcast listeners and MySpace friends.
What the MBAs call BEHAGS-Big Hairy Audacious
Goals-are desperately needed if we are to remain relevant to
an increasingly narrow-casting public. When I talk to my col-

http://www.Monster.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Theatre Design & Technology - Spring 2007