With perfect timing, the Chicago theatrosphere is also talking about free theatre tickets. And – unlike the UK’s top-down, centralising, money-to-venues-already-getting-money approach – this scheme depends on companies opting in.
Here’s Kris Vire:
Theater companies, in my understanding, choose to opt in and choose how many tickets at which performances they want to give away. Audiences get a free sample, giving up nothing more than their email addresses and anonymous demographic information. And, if TCG’s numbers from other cities can be trusted, that exchange results in a significant return: one-third of Free Night patrons return to the same theater to buy tickets or subscriptions within the year.Even better is this: TCG, and particularly its executive director Teresa Eyring and its house magazine, American Theatre, have been criticized in many corners of the theatrosphere in recent months for only representing the interests and outlooks of its members, our country’s big-box regional institutions—the Goodmans, Guthries, Intimans and South Coast Reps of the world—and not reflecting the realities of the smaller theaters that make up the vast majorities, in offerings if not in budgets, of most of our cities’ theater scenes.
So, because there’s an open door policy, it’s equally open to companies of all sizes and flavours. In contrast, the UK scheme reflects existing hierarchies of money and approval: financial support to venues – not companies or productions – which already have the tacit support of state funding.
And there’s the major difference: the companies involved in the Free Night of Theater are choosing to make blocks of free tickets available for their October shows, rather than being subsidised (or persuaded, or bribed) by a funding body.
Read More