Second-guessing AUDIENCE: a cautionary tale

I’ve been reading The Creative Act: a way of being, by Rick Rubin. It is a lovely book, one that I will review when I’m finished reading it; as I read, I pencil in the Lichtenbergian Precepts as they pop up. (Of course they pop up. We’ve all written the same book, and we all say the same thing: MAKE THE THING THAT IS NOT, and FAIL UNTIL YOU SUCCEED.)

Last night a sentence jumped out at me and I’d like to share a little history from theatre in Newnan as illustrative of the point Rubin is making.

“If we second-guess our inner knowing to attempt to predict what others may like, our best work will never appear.” (p.220)

Or, as I say in Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy, “MOMA is not your AUDIENCE.”

Back when I was a lad, theatre in Newnan was produced by the Newnan Playmakers. They’d been around since the 1930s in form or another, and the first real play I saw was Pygmalion, staged on a postage stamp stage out in their Patchwork Playhouse, a ramshackle building left over from Dunaway Gardens’ glory days.

Sometime in 1967–68 the Playmakers had to leave Dunaway Gardens — the property was sold, or the Playhouse became unsafe, something — and so they started doing their shows at the Municipal Auditorium (now the Wadsworth Auditorium) in town. My first role in a play was as a villager in The Teahouse of the August Moon in that auditorium.

But then something happened. They began to lose membership and audience, and their response must have seemed sensible to them: Their play selection committee began to choose plays based on whether they thought the public would be familiar with the title, either from the theatre or the movies. In other words, they went for simple and safe.

In time they devolved into doing mostly what I called “community theatre crap,” i.e., plays that were written specifically for small amateur theatres: midsize casts, anodyne plots, inoffensive themes (if any). It was awful stuff.

Eventually a small group of newcomers to the group decided they wanted to do better scripts, more interesting theatre, and so they split off to become the Newnan Repertory Company. For a while they did more modern scripts, things that passed as “edgier” to Newnan, GA, in the early 1970s.

By the time I graduated with a degree in theatre and returned home, though, both groups were in trouble; they decided to reunite and pool their resources. Unfortunately, the play selection committee was just as moribund as it had been before the split, and the group’s fortunes continued to decline.

They tapped me to direct the first ever musical in Newnan, and they chose Once Upon a Mattress solely on the memory of the Carol Burnett TV broadcast from 1964 (and perhaps the 1972 version). I objected on the grounds that the show has no jokes — it really doesn’t — and the only way it works is with gifted clowns in the cast, which needless to say we did not have. It didn’t matter; the only thing that mattered was that our audiences “will know it.”

I survived, but it was the last time I directed a play that I had not selected myself. Indeed, within a year or so after Mattress, the group was disintegrating. After we held a cocktail party to attract new membership and absolutely no one came, it looked like we were done for.

As a sidenote, my fellow theatre nerds should have known better. At that point I had been directing teens in separate productions for four years — Feydeau, Moliere, Shakespeare, Wilde — and the adults had seen for themselves that the great works were not only do-able and fun to do, but also audiences enjoyed them.

As I and my Lovely First Wife drove home from the abortive new membership drive, I found myself thinking of plays I’d like to do, and Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound came to mind. In talking it over, we were able to cast it in our minds with the current membership, so I called everyone to see if they’d be on board.

They all said yes except for one member, who huffed that I had “bypassed” the play selection committee.

What play selection committee? I asked. I have polled every single remaining member of this company and they all said yes.

What happens, he sniffed, if I decide I want to direct [some play I’ve forgotten] in the fall?

Easy, I said. If you have the cast and we have the resources, you’ll direct [that play] in the fall. Do theatre that interests you, and the audience you build will be one that wants to see the work you do.

And that’s how I became the first artistic director of the Newnan Community Theatre Company, and that’s how I ran the company for 25 years: Anyone who wanted to direct could submit a script (or scripts) that interested them, and I would assemble the season from those submissions. We were our own AUDIENCE, and by being so attracted THOSE PEOPLE OUT THERE to be our paying customers.

The point is that trying to achieve artistic “success” by chasing some putative marketplace is a fool’s errand. Make art that interests you; the AUDIENCE you need will come to that. After all, if you create stuff only for others, then is the AUDIENCE really yours?

Here endeth the lesson.

(I recently told this story on the Theatre Kids podcast. It was a fun interview.)