It appears to me there are two ways to build and maintain a theatrical audience in the South Bay.
The first way is lean on the white Eurocentric canon. This is where companies stick with what’s worked since the 1950s and pretend that audiences will keep coming back. Stick with dead white male authors and homogenized musical theatre that’s worked for 70 years. Why? Because cultural hegemony is fun.
The second way to build an audience is to produce work that no one else is doing. Producing work that fails to adhere to the white patriarchal artistic colonialism that pervades the South Bay appeals to an extraordinarily wide cultural and age demographic which should be the magic key to audience growth. This is especially the case when partnering with organizations who can amplify audience outreach.
What troubles me most about these two choices is that I usually can't tell them apart from their marketing. Obviously, I have a preference as to the work I am personally interested in, but that’s personal taste. Not everyone enjoys the same thing.
It feels like there’s conspiracy to make sure marketing for South Bay theatre is largely indistinguishable among the various theater companies. When I look at what South Bay theatre companies are doing to market their work, I am finding it harder and hard to see any difference in organizational voice; there’s no visual indication that separates them from one another either. They all look and read the same. It feels like marketing oatmeal in the key of beige flat minor.
This is a theme with me when thinking about South Bay arts in general. We are all nervous church mice fighting for table scraps.
We are all afraid of offending anyone. We are so risk averse that we're majoring in the banalities one might expect from AI driven marketing apps.
If the world is a doughnut, we are all happy living in the empty space in the center. Lots of space, but no calories.
There’s no courage.
There’s no creativity.
There’s no realization that Santa Clara County is home to about 1.9 million people. This means you can offend 1.8 million people - you can drive them away permanently - and still have an audience of 100,000 people.
I once heard a very successful marketing consultant say "there are two kinds of people in the world; those who like my writing and those who don't. To hell with the people who don't, I am writing for the people who like my writing!"
Reach out to your people!
Be bonkers!
Be creative!
Cultivate a goddamn unique voice!!!
One does not need to be particularly insightful to see that South Bay theatre is in serious trouble. If we are not courageous and a bit bonkers, if we do not cultivate a unique voice and audience, we probably deserve to just fade away.