In 1991, the company decided that a major part of Roadside’s work for the next six years would be to attract an audience which was a cross-section of each community that we visited on our national tours. Our colleagues wished us luck. They pointed out that such an audience would be too different, measured by education and income, from the established theater audience, and that to attract such a new audience in communities where we didn’t live made it a fool’s errand.
We decided to go for it anyway, because for our Appalachian plays and actors to be their best, they need audiences that include people who know what it means to be poor and working-class. This class sensibility is integral to our plays because it is inseparable from our Appalachian culture. Because theater relies on audience and actors to collaborate each evening to make the play come to life, who’s in the house is critical. The audience is part of the show. Even the greatest script requires this audience/actor combustion to become great theater.
To have any chance of attracting an audience representing a cross-section of an unknown community, we decided that each company member (performer, writer, designer, technician, administrator, director) would have to become an audience development person as well. To involve all of us was the only hope to handle Roadside’s average annual workload of 300 events in 52 different places. We assigned a company producer to each engagement.
The strategy worked, but it was an upstream swim. When any one of us stopped kicking, back we went, flowing with the status quo of fairly wealthy folk. “Why fight it!” exclaimed presenters and company members alike.
After six years, the ensemble was tired from fighting it. But we were also excited because we had accomplished our goal and, as a bonus, the campaign had helped us become more responsive to the issues and local culture in each community we visited.
Based on six years of tracking by the independent AMS Planning and Research Corporation in Fairfield, Connecticut, Roadside’s national audience now looks like this: 73% have annual incomes under $50,000 and 30% of these earn $20,000 or less a year; 45% are college graduates.
Is there the will on the part of the nonprofit theater to achieve access? Don’t know. But now we do know, given a concerted effort to lower barriers, a popular U.S. theater is possible. This is good news, because when a cross-section of a community is present, the increase in the i.q. and emotion in the auditorium is palpable. With diverse and committed audiences, who look like who we are as a nation, comes the possibility of a great American theater.
Dudley Cocke
Director
Roadside Theater
