In Sync?
For American ensembles, questions come first - then creativity (cont'd)

1. What is our relationship to the audience?

"It's very direct," declares Laurie McCant, a founding member of Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble. "Our post-show discussion groups take place on Main Street." After 22 years in Bloomsburg, the ensemble knows that its symbiotic relationship to this eastern Pennsylvania town of 12,000 can't be taken for granted. "The real collaboration is in how we interact with the community," says McCant. "The audience feels challenged by us, and so they're loyal."

If BTE has decreased the distance between the ensemble and its audience, Whitesburg, Kentucky's Roadside Theater has eliminated it entirely. For 25 years, Roadside has been making original pieces from regional oral history and song through a unique development process based on Appalachian storytelling and ballad traditions. Roadside's connection to the community gains additional force from its strategy of employing folk artists and other talented community members to perform with the ensemble whenever possible. Such is the case in their current production, New Ground Revival, built around an entire family of Appalachian singers, the legendary Mullins Family.

"I expect we're one of the few theatres who can see ourselves as a company of folk artists," says artistic director Dudley Cocke. Roadside makes pieces that are by, for and about that community. Does this approach close the traditional gap between audience and performer? Laughing, Cocke reports an early success: "In one of our first shows, which was about the first hanging in the county, if people in the audience thought we'd left out a fact, they'd just stand up and correct us."

The audience came looking for San Francisco's A Traveling Jewish Theatre. "We began with no particular sense of who the audience was, but rather a hunch that if we created the deepest, best work we could, an audience would find us," says co-founder Cory Fischer. ATJT's commitment to drawing its material from the Jewish experience was never a marketing strategy, but merely a matter of the ensemble's following its passion. Eventually, the Jewish community found ATJT and has since become the core of its audience - "keeping in mind that the 'Jewish community' is about as diverse a group as you can get," Fischer elaborates. ATJT's experience is that the audience's commitment to the ensemble equals the ensemble's commitment to its work.

This is true of another urban ensemble, the 19-year-old Los Angeles company the Actor's Gang. Born as it was on the doorstep of the film and television industry, the Actor's Gang would have been yet another showcase for film and television industry hopefuls had its founders (including actor Tim Robbins) not had a clear mission in mind. In a downtown loft, the Gang circled their wagons and began experimenting. They assumed L.A.'s usual indifference to theatre would include them. "The good news is that the best theatre actors migrate here," says L.A. native Tracy Young, a director with the Gang. "The bad news is that L.A. audiences don't really go to theatre."

It's notoriously hard to seduce even a fraction of the L.A. audience away from its focus on film and TV - unless you're coming in at a pretty severe angle, that is. When word got out about the edgy, intense, ensemble-developed pieces being presented in the Gang's downtown loft, an audience began to grow up around them, and to this day, Young says, "Our audience is mostly people who have some connection to the arts. People in the arts value the kind of confrontation we provide, and because they're artists, they challenge us right back."

Rural ensembles, on the other hand, tend to make audience diversity part of their mission. "We have a moral responsibility," says James Goode of Bloomsburg. "We're one of the places in this town where people with diverse backgrounds can come. In church, you're there with people who have the same beliefs, but in the theatre, you share with people who have different beliefs."

Roadside Theater also strikes more fire from a diverse audience than from a homogeneous one. "Making our performances accessible to working-class people is especially important in our national tours and collaborations with other ensembles," says Dudley Cocke. "The intelligence of the audience just goes up when diversity is present."

Whether urban or rural, ensembles engage their audiences in a symbiotic relationship that is more direct than a larger theatre can manage. For this reason, the longer an ensemble works in its community, the harder it becomes to tell whether the artists or the audiences are driving the work. Corey Fischer says, "I think a case could be made for saying that the art creates its audience just as much as the audience creates the art."

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