Theater’s Online Community Is Dying. Can We Save It?

This is a piece I wrote for The Clyde Fitch Report in response to The New York Times's list of the 25 best plays of the last 25 years, and the conversation surrounding that. The editor-in-chief of American Theatre Magazine, Rob Weinert-Kendt, had been surprised there hadn't been more discussion of the list, so it felt like a good time to reflect on how small the theater audience really is. There are also some suggestions on how theater can do a better job of reaching people with today's content and information channels. If you're in the theater industry, I hope this article can help you form some strategies on expanding the reach of your own work or company, and for anyone else, there's also some advice for finding the excellent, but often under-publicized, theater in your own communities.

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Critics Diep Tran and Jose Solís with actor and singer Lena Hall, in a photo from their welcome new web series Token Theatre Friends. Photo: Twitter

"I know this isn’t a new conversation: When it comes to how many people in the US attend live theater, we can consider it around one in 10. A recent National Endowment for the Arts study found about 15% of people attend a musical over the course of a year, with play attendance somewhat lower — an average of about 10%-ish, six years out from the study, seems fair. I’ve also found in the past (through an admittedly very unscientific survey) that only about one in 20 people can name a living playwright. So when it comes to the number of people who can look back at several decades of theater, with a working vocabulary of plays and playwrights, who also feel like writing up their own lists or counter-essays to the Times, it’s … not a lot. (Broadway is, fortunately, booming — but a large portion of those audiences are tourists or very casual theater fans.)"

(For the full article, you can read the rest here.)