The Playgoer: The "Free Night of Theatre" Experiment

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Tuesday, October 28, 2008

The "Free Night of Theatre" Experiment

Bay Area critic/blogger Chloe Veltman has been airing some worthy questions about TCG's annual "Free Night of Theatre" promotion, just recently passed. Here she interviews Theatre Bay Area's Brad Erikson about the impact on that scene. He's quite bullish, citing:

According to the online survey of 2007 Free Night patrons required when they made their ticket reservation, the program continues to attract a significant number of people who fall into non-traditional theatre participant categories, including infrequent theatre attendees, young people, less educated, non-white and those with lower household incomes.
--Specifically, 77% attended a theatre they had never been to before, 42% are under age 35, 26% have less than a college degree, 27% are non-white, and 33% have combined household incomes under $50,000.
I have yet to participate. What's y'all's sense of how it's going?

2 comments:

Unknown said...

My off-off company (New York Neo-Classical Ensemble) used it as an opportunity to attract an audience beyond the typical friend/family/colleague/etc demographic. We succeeded (over two nights, in a house of 70 seats) in getting roughly 50-60 people who wouldn't normally have encountered our work. Of that 50-60 we had about 10-15 who asked to be kept in the loop about our goings on.

So it worked quite well for us.

Anonymous said...

I'm doing a show in Dallas. On the free night the house was packed and the crowd extremely responsive. One of the best performances during the run and a lot of fun. I'd call it a success.