More on free tickets

September 25th, 2008 • production process, theatre

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 »

Staging “The Bird”

August 12th, 2008 • festival, production process, theatre

I’ve caught up with Al Smith - who I’ve known since studying in Edinburgh - a few times since the start of the fringe, during the week when he opened The Bird and The Bee. During the week when he opened his half of the pair of plays twice.

After uncomfortable previews in London and a single performance in Edinburgh, Al took the step of pulling two performances of his play, The Bird, to rapidly rework the script and production. The play just wasn’t working.

It was a step that he couldn’t have taken if he hadn’t had direct control over the whole process as executive producer - and if Matt Hartley (authoring the partner play, The Bee) and James Yeatman (directing The Bird) hadn’t supported the move, or if several years of work with Tom Ferguson and other cast members hadn’t built up a reserve of trust.

Pragmatically (in other words, financially) it’s perhaps hard to think of a better place in a Fringe run to deliberately cancel performances - falling over cheap preview ticket dates and before any major reviews had appeared. Even so, it’s a pretty bold, even crazy move: to not only re-write substantial portions of a play that has already been rehearsed and previewed, but to significantly alter the staging.

The transformation of the sound and lighting design was so radical that Neil Hobbs (also working as the technical director for the Penny Dreadfuls, which I co-produce) was able to tell the Underbelly team that they wouldn’t be using any of the lights on the rig which the production had previously spent time plotting and focussing. Not a single one. Consequently, it’s a design that’s adventurous not merely by contrast, but in its own right.

And the new staging - which exposes the processes of sound, light and characterisation to the audience far more explicitly than before - works well enough that it appears a natural solution to the problem of staging the text, as if it would have been near unthinkable to stage it in any other way.

Of course, you don’t need to know any of this to watch the play; this off-stage narrative of production process has an explicit but still weirdly tangential relationship to the experience of the play as it appears before an audience.

Enough now: go and buy some tickets for the pair.

Aeneas Faversham Forever

July 30th, 2008 • penny dreadfuls, production process

I have a stack of nearly-edited posts that I need to get up here, but the Penny Dreadfuls’ newest show - Aeneas Faversham Forever - opens tonight. Yesterday’s tech ran well but with each year we seem to have increased the technical demands of the show, giving us less time to work with. Yikes. I’ll hopefully have a few production photos before the end of the week, above and beyond the mysterious tricycle.

Aeneas Faversham Forever runs 30th July - 25th August at the Pleasance Courtyard, starting at 7.10pm. Tickets for the previews are an inflation-busting (ahem) £5 and run through until Friday. To book, call the Pleasance box office on 0131 556 6550 or try the Edinburgh Comedy Festival website.

the unexpected role of shower curtains in the magic of theatre

July 11th, 2008 • production process

Occasionally, my family ask me what I actually do as one of the producers for a comedy troupe. I’m not an actor, writer or director, roles that are seemingly transparent or identifiable. The idea of production seems be rather more nebulous, particularly when working in a small team where the production team are the jacks and jills of all trades: press agents, business managers, web and print designers, or stage-managers with occasional responsibility for catering.

But, in the pursuit of the zen theory of production, I find myself thinking of production work as planning plus the real world scramble to solve problems when the plan trips and falls on its face. What’s the proverb? Production schedules do not survive the first encounter with theatre venues?

All of which explains why, a few Fridays back, the realisation that we were short a projection screen for our shadow puppets sent me out into the streets of Greenwich (and after realising that Greenwich only has fine boutiques, restaurants and bars - the streets Deptford) to find a shower curtain which could be pressed into service. And that’s the magic of theatre right there.

Not looking too bad, actually.

death of the company

May 13th, 2008 • production process, research, theatre

Ploughing through a final draft of a journal paper, I hit this quote from Barry Wellman in Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs:

Although people often view the world in terms of groups, they function in networks. In networked societies, boundaries are permeable, interactions are diverse others, connections switch between multiple networks, and hierarchies can be flatter and recursive.

It’s an extremely appealing way to think about collaborative and collective performance, from traditional-looking models for theatre companies right through to more avant-garde, ad-hoc gatherings. In fact, it could help us describe the journey between the two modes. How?

Well, it might allow us to think more clearly about the function of theatre companies - and question company formation as a natural early step of creating theatre. I’ve heard a number of credible, pragmatic arguments why company formation is a good idea, not least of which is work creation for writers and directors.

But these and even the strongest arguments for company formation - a shared,specific artistic or political vision - seems to describe the priority of networked relationships. In other words, you’re not in a company for the sake of having a company, you’re in a company for the kinds of relationships and interactions that the company makes possible.

The question then becomes whether those kind of relationships are accessible in different ways - ways which don’t unthinkingly reproduce hierarchies of financial control and liability, hierarchies of artistic legitimacy and commitment. A theatre company - with a board, an artistic director and core of performers - isn’t the only place through which a network of creative relationships can be generated and sustained.

99 failures

March 27th, 2008 • production process

A problem with learning from successful theatre companies - examining both their artistic methodologies and business models - is that we can run the risk of making very narrow assumptions about how careers and livelihoods can be made from theatre. Or so says Dan Granata and me, running around the track a few blocks from his house last night.

To put it another way (and to embrace the power of negative thinking) for every one company that succeeds beyond the first 18 months of energy, personal financial investment and supportive friends, there are ninety-nine that don’t. Read more »