From the Executive Director

How to Pack the House (or Not)
by Ben Cameron

There are no magic bullets. God knows, I wish there were—especially in these times. The 2004 fall theatre season has opened with a whimper, not a bang, for many theatres: Even in the face of critical raves, standing ovations and a true sense of artistic pride, many have still fallen short of attendance goals. Stand at the coffee machine at any theatre gathering these days and you'll hear the theories: It's the election; it's our reliance on an intellectually and socially ambitious audience who were out doing political volunteer work in October; it's the economy. Now, with the atypical draw of A Christmas Carol and Santa-linked titles behind us, the real question of whether October was a trend or a bubble is on the table.

But already—especially in board rooms I visit—the scramble for next season's sure-fire titles has begun. The opera field has La Bohème, orchestras Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, dance Swan Lake—all non-holiday titles guaranteed to fill the house, bulwarks against the uncertainties of more obscure or even new works. "What are people producing that is filling houses?" is the question everyone seems to ask.

Nothing is guaranteed to draw a larger laugh than Sara O'Connor's comment in the TCG documentary series Preserving the Legacy that, when the financial chips were down in Boston in the early 1960s, she knew they could remount Waiting for Godot and fill the house. In more recent times, however, this sense of a guaranteed draw has eluded us: Clearly one size doesn't fit all. The Drawer Boy, Art and Proof, the most frequently produced plays in the last three seasons, were box-office hits in some communities but met with lackluster sales in others. Shakespeare festival attendance in many cases is on the wane, despite programming featuring the "big" titles often intermixed with conventional musicals and more modern comedies.

"Well, let's just ask audiences what they want to see," some theatres say—a doubly specious strategy. On the one hand, audiences can only talk about what they've seen already. And, as Malcolm Gladwell notes in his brilliant new book, Blink, such focus groups can lead us notoriously astray. "All in the Family" and "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" both were notorious failures with focus groups: Indeed, it was only because of the faith and commitment of individual leaders at CBS-TV that those shows made it on the air. In more recent times, what audience would ever have told us to create shows about mafiosi, undertakers and—especially in a time of ascendant red states—sex-hungry single women in the big blue city? Ask audiences what they want to see—or base your programming on the perception of what will sell—and you're much more likely to get "Joey" than "The Sopranos," "Six Feet Under" and "Sex and the City." Indeed, HBO has staked its claim to leadership by investing heavily in creativity and by being ahead of, not behind, its audience.

The temptation, of course, is to retreat toward more conservative fare in these times—to shy away from works that are unknown, that may upset or offend. And yet, as one artistic director noted in a recent encounter, "After years of conversation, our board has begun to notice that it's the King Lears that under-perform at the box office, while it's the new plays that are packing the house"—the result, in his case, of careful programming, new partnerships, savvy and informative marketing and a sustained commitment from the board over time to cultivate taste and watch the appetite for new work grow. This combination of commitment to listening to a community—sensing its heartbeat and its deepest concerns—while being just ahead of it is an increasingly strong requirement for artistic leaders.

The common thread in all of this, of course, is risk—risk in dramaturgy, perhaps, but often risk in scale, risk in interpretive choices, risk in allowing artists to test the unknown parts of their own arsenals. Risk—not irresponsibility, but pushing past our comfort zone, transcending the formulaic, taking the chance that must be taken if true inspiration is to result. Especially in an age of increased competition for leisure time, we must find the imperative in every piece we produce that makes it a "must see"—whether the political profundity of a Tony Kushner, the fearless assault on traditional text in an Ivo van Hove Hedda Gabler or even the unexpectedly incandescent ensemble of acting in Twelve Angry Men that lifts us from performance to event.

One of my favorite anecdotes in Gladwell's book involves the Pepsi Challenge, that television commercial we've all seen where blind taste-testers overwhelmingly prefer Pepsi to Coke—a test that panicked Coke into trying to match Pepsi's taste and led to the ill-advised change of formula that almost ruined the company. Why, Gladwell asks, given these consistent test results, don't Pepsi's sales eclipse Coke's? Simple: Pepsi is preferred only if one is comparing first sips of cola: When the test subject is asked to drink the entire can, Coke wins by a huge margin.

In a time of financial urgency, we must keep our eyes on our mission, on those parts of our work that warrant our not-for-profit status, that continue to lead, rather than follow, community taste. Whatever the temptations, the safety of that sweet first taste of the instantly palatable will never be enough: If we are to build institutions that last, we have to think about the entire can.