From the Executive Director

More than Meets the Eye

Why doesn't anyone believe us?

For years, we have emphasized the extrinsic value of the arts—and have spent massive amounts of money in quantifying our very real achievements in a variety of domains.

We cite economic impact studies that remind us of the critical role the arts play as an economic stimulus—a multiplier effect of as much as three or five times leveraged for other local businesses for every dollar spent on the arts.

We haul out our copies of Champions of Change and cite those improved SAT scores, those gains in self-esteem and self-confidence, the greater complexity of thinking and verbal acuity, the drops in disciplinary infractions—in sum, the very real differences we make in kids' lives, as documented by Harvard, Stanford, MIT and others.

We turn with pride to the UCLA studies that prove that kids who participate in plays are statistically less likely to tolerate racist behavior than their non-theatre-involved friends.

In short, we have the numbers; we have the data; we have the goods to make our case. We've been told that once we produce and disseminate these real numbers, we can expect our fortunes to rise.

And yet arts budgets continue to face challenges in legislatures that claim they care most about the economy and education. Corporations, even when reminded that more people attend professional arts than professional sports, continue to stick their logos on skyboxes and arenas while turning a deaf ear our way, either shrugging with indifference or looking at our data and saying outright, "I don't believe it."

Where have we gone wrong?

I'm starting to think that we've gone wrong in two key ways. We've relied on the data itself to shore up our case, rather than doing what we do best—tell stories. Economic multipliers are effective but cold: The great politicians in this country typically use numbers in conjunction with faces that make the numbers real. Think of those political conventions where the spotlight hits the welfare mother turned businesswoman or the delinquent teen turned college scholar. Yes, the numbers are there, but it's the face that brings the story home. Rather than telling the story in data format, perhaps we should tell it in terms of the restaurateur and parking lot attendant whose facilities do bang-up business when we are open, but echo in emptiness on dark nights. For an art form dedicated to personal stories, we can be surprisingly impersonal when it comes to making our case.

Even more to the point, however, I wonder whether audiences resist our data because the information doesn't feel organic to the theatregoing experience. We do, in fact, seem to do everything in our power to insulate our audiences from the fullest range of our community service. At most theatres I visit for a performance, I find myself in a lobby filled with pictures of actors and scenes from the play I'm about to see—pictures often reproduced in the program itself. Unless I get into the fine-print section, my attention is focused on the play at hand—extensive dramaturgical notes, actor bios and the like. And, by the time I leave, I can easily believe that producing plays is the only thing that this particular theatre does.

Compare that with the experience at a Target store, where at checkout we encounter the large banners proclaiming the 5-percent-giving policy; the lobby at the Y where I work out, filled not with pictures of musclemen pumping iron but instead with pictures of school kids at Y camp or in swimming classes; even the fast-food franchise where we are reminded of the Ronald McDonald House.

Would our arguments carry more weight if we followed those models—if we dedicated a portion of lobby space to depicting our school programs; if we kept a running tally of how many people have seen the play or taken our classes? Or if we manifested our economic presence not by showing headshots of actors only, but of every single person—receptionists, carpenters, accountants, board members and so on—that it took to bring the play to life? By focusing the audience's attention on the full range of things we do and putting a face to those activities, would we begin to have our arguments heard?

There's scarcely a community I visit where the press is not excoriated behind closed doors and where the declining coverage is not a constant source of frustration. The studies out of Columbia University's School of Journalism documenting the coverage of arts in our nation are alarming, to be sure, and we are right to call the press to task for their increasingly shortsighted attention.

And yet the press will do what the press will do—we can't control them. But we can control our own lobbies, our own facilities—the space where we have the potential to direct our community's attention to exactly what we want them to know. We direct their eyes every second they're in our space, and any theatre that feels underappreciated for its wider role in the community may have itself to blame for the lion's share of neglect. By telling our fullest story to every person who crosses our threshold, we may begin to build a new kind of awareness, a community of believers and advocates, a new family of donors who well may write the check that has never come our way simply because of the lack of understanding of how we intersect with those things they value most. And who knows, the press itself—that critic who attends the opening night—may suddenly find a new interest as well.