Director’s Statement

A fact is derailing the future of the not-for-profit professional theater: the wealthiest 15% of the people have come to represent more than 80% of its audience. Great theater cannot rise from such a narrow social base, especially in an epoch when democracy is the ideal and diversity is its renewable source of energy.

To make meaning and magic, theater depends on uniting the imagination of the audience with the imagination of the actors. Roadside's artistic choices are guided by this reality; for example, we dissolve the imaginary fourth wall separating the stage from the house to provide the opportunity for the audience to sing and talk back to the actors, much like the call-and-response in a southern church service.

Because everyone present, on and off stage, is creating the ephemeral experience that we call an evening at the theater, Roadside pays special attention to who is present. As we toured to 43 states in the 1980's, we noticed that theater audiences were becoming less diverse. In our not-for-profit theater world, it was becoming easy to lose sight of the fact that 85% of the American people 18 years old and more earn less than $50,000 a year, and that the annual U.S. median income is less than $22,000. In 1989, the company and its management decided that forthwith it would only accept engagements in communities that would commit to broadening participation.

This decision led us to new ways of working based on partnerships with a diverse group of a community's organizations - churches, arts councils, social service agencies, schools, and many others. With our help, a community's stories, songs, and histories were collected and presented in public by community members. Drawing on this collected material, we then helped these communities write and produce their own plays. Some of the communities that had no resident theater became so excited by their results that they started theater companies. Over a period of months, and sometimes years, we encouraged the host community to find its own voice. Enabling local life to become aware of itself became one of Roadside's artistic goals.

This model of engagement based on participation, combined with new marketing strategies, had its intended effect. The AMS Planning and Research Corporation of Connecticut tracked our audience from 1991-1996 and found it to be the opposite of the wealthiest 15%: 73% of Roadside's national audience is drawn from the 85% of the people now seldom seen in the theater. This profile was the same whether we were collaborating with a community's artists or presenting work from the Roadside repertoire, which we often did as part of our mentoring process.

We expected that the field would respond with huzzas to the news of this popular appetite for theater, because it demonstrated that the barriers to broad participation were surmountable - a good thing for the box office, for the art form, and for democracy.

We were wrong. The silence, as the saying goes, was deafening. Nevertheless, engaging a broad audience remains the key to the not-for-profit professional theater's future greatness.

—Dudley Cocke
Director, Roadside Theater

Mar. 2004 Statement
Oct. 2001 Statement