Know Your Audience

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Clarissa

November 7, 2015

N and I love theater and often go to our regional rep. The audience tends to be on the elderly side. N and I are often the youngest people in the room.

What I find weird is that this season the theater decided to put on a play about teenagers who are preparing a school report and talking about their relationships. My teenage years are so far behind that I can’t muster any interest whatsoever in the subject. And I can’t imagine suddenly finding it fascinating when I turn 70.

It just seems like a very weird play to put on for this particular audience where most people are way too old even to be raising teenagers, let alone to remember their own teenage years very vividly.

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24 responses to “Know Your Audience”

J. Otto Pohl

November 7, 2015

They could very well have grandchildren of that age that they take an avid interest in, however.

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1. Clarissa
  
  November 7, 2015
  
  Two hours of simulated teenage angst? I’m not sure that’s even a healthy interest. 🙂
  
  Maybe I’m jaded because I spend too much time with teenage students.
  
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Michael Blekhman

November 7, 2015

I do remember my teenage years as if they were still going on… 🙂

But I am not sure that any book or play can say more about that age than The Catcher in the Rye… and my own stories. 🙂 🙂 🙂

The latter is a joke, but, hopefully, a good one. I mean my stories, of course.

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Vic Crain

November 7, 2015

It wouldn’t be the first time that a director has chosen a play of little interest to the audience. While it would seem like there are a lot of choices of material, there are also remarkable limits. From conversations I’ve had with a director, I’ve learned that there are restrictions based on how recently a play has been shown in the local area, the magnitude of fees for use of the material, and the talent available to the director. There’s also an allure do doing something new, that no one in the crew has performed before. Selecting a play just isn’t as simple as it sounds.

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The Dark Avenger

November 7, 2015

The local community theater here was going to do Annie at the beginning of next year, but since there is a road show going around the state, they denied all the rights to anyone else, so as to not have any competition in any cities that they’re doing it in.

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1. Clarissa
  
  November 7, 2015
  
  To me this sounds very crazy but I’m just a spectator, not an insider.
  
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Dreidel

November 7, 2015

The rules stated above make sense from a business standpoint. Remember that most theaters that show “art” (stage plays and movies) have to make a profit to cover operating expenses, and that the writers / copyright holders expect to be compensated for their intellectual property, and don’t want it to be presented in competing venues.

It’s similar to selling the “serial rights” of a fictional short story to a magazine. The author retains the copyright, but there’s at least an informal agreement that the author won’t sell the story to another publication as a reprint for at least a year.

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Shakti

November 7, 2015

What I find weird is that this season the theater decided to put on a play about teenagers who are preparing a school report and talking about their relationships.
This is the reasoning:
The theater actors are young and the audience is sort of interested in looking at young people rather than people their own age, instead of looking at young actors who put flour in their hair and wrinkle makeup to play older people. Plus, I’m sure a lot of elderly people like the same standbys of theater which often have younger characters.
Although with the average talent of actors, this means you have people in their 20s to early 30s playing teenagers. So you have some old playwright’s idea of teen angst acted by youngish adults which satisfies everyone’s idea of culture. Ageism is also an issue in the theater.

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1. Clarissa
  
  November 7, 2015
  
  The next thing they are putting on is some sort of a Peter Pan themed play. I mean, Peter Pan! This isn’t even aimed at teenagers. This is infant territory.
  
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  1. Dreidel
    
    November 7, 2015
    
    Is it starring a slender, flat-chested, middle-aged actress as Peter Pan? That’s been the traditional way the play has always been presented on stage, and in multiple television specials. Casting directors can find a competent adolescent actress to play “Annie,” but apparently not a real boy to play the title tole in “Peter Pan.”
    
    Whenever men have played female characters (as in ancient Greek and more recent Japanese Geisha plays), that’s considered outrageously sexist.
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      November 7, 2015
      
      It was the same back in the USSR. It got so boring having to watch one 40 – year-old actress after another pretend to be a boy. Totally broke the magic for me.
      
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    2. Rhoda
      
      November 8, 2015
      
      Part of the British pantomime tradition involves the principal boy being played by a woman and the dame being played by a man.
      Though in recent years commercial pantomimes haven’t stuck to this. An amateur pantomime is more likely to do things the traditional way.
      
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  2. Shakti
    
    November 7, 2015
    
    But Clarissa, you are mistaken! Peter Pan is about the fantasy of never growing up let alone growing old. Plus it features an adult woman playing a boy and is a classic. That’s perfectly aimed at these elderly theatergoers! Think of how many adults are secretly infantile and it makes sense. Plus you can drag children to the play.
    
    Plus, there’s a lot of people who romanticize the idea of being young or a child when they’ve forgotten what that’s like.
    
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    1. Clarissa
      
      November 7, 2015
      
      I don’t know, I hate the story and feel repulsed by people who enjoy it in any way. I tried reading when I was 10 or so and even then I was way too old for it.
      
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    2. Vic Crain
      
      November 7, 2015
      
      There are good reasons to be troubled by the story. The original intent apparently was to have Peter be a relatively nasty imp, not a hero. Barrie, the author, may have had a sexual obsession with young boys and in many respects was a relatively nasty character himself. Disney did a complete spin on the story to create something that fit his vision of what childhood should be like, and that’s what audiences know today. Like the author, the original of the play had a much darker tone. I wonder which version of the play they will present?
      
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      1. Clarissa
        
        November 8, 2015
        
        Ah! I knew the while thing was disturbing.
        
        Plus, I come from a culture of infantilized men so I don’t find them cute.
        
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      2. Dreidel
        
        November 8, 2015
        
        @Vic Crain
        
        “Disney did a complete spin on the story.”
        
        Disney’s 1953 cartoon, with an adolescent actor Bobby Dristoll voicing the title role, was a commercial success — but Walt Disney himself was dissatisfied with the result, feeling that the character of Peter Pan was cold and unlikable. Experts on J.M. Barrie praised the cartoon, insisting that Pan was originally written to be a sociopath.
        
        I saw the movie when I was eight years old, and certainly had no knowledge of “feminism” or “sexism” at the time. But I did notice how Pan laughed when the mermaids were trying to drown Wendy, and objected only when Wendy picked up a sea shell to fight back. I also noticed how Wendy’s younger brothers took part in the Indians’ warrior dance at the campfire scene, while Wendy was rudely pushed aside by Indian squaws and made to do laundry.
        
        Only eight years old at the time and the movie made me a nascent feminist (I didn’t see the apparent racism directed at the Indians) — too bad that in the 60-plus years since then, the vastly overreaching, perpetual screams of persecution by both the feminist movement and by the Native American activists have lead me to step aside. I’m not inclined to support groups who clearly count me as the enemy.
        
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Sugs

November 8, 2015

Another possibility for the reason they’ve chosen the teenage play and peter pan is that the theatre are very well aware of the demographic of their audience and want to try to sometimes attract a younger audience. Their choice of plays seems poor, but maybe they haven’t tried before! This could even be because you and N appearing in the audience has made them realise that everybody else there is ancient.

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1. Clarissa
  
  November 8, 2015
  
  Ah, so now it’s our fault! 🙂
  
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Fie Upon This Quiet Life

November 8, 2015

Was the play “I and You” by Lauren Gunderson? I have no idea why this play is suddenly so popular. It was a snooze fest until the unlikely twist at the end when I saw it. And actually, I felt a little annoyed at the twist, as if that made the whole thing okay in retrospect. The whole thing, minus the twist, was only so-so. Meh. No thanks…

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1. Clarissa
  
  November 8, 2015
  
  Yes, exactly! Thank you for confirming that we shouldn’t go because I was starting to waver.
  
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  1. Anonymous
    
    November 8, 2015
    
    I wanted to like this play because I’m particularly invested in supporting the works of women playwrights. But this was just “meh” to me. There’s supposed to be a racial component to it, too, but I didn’t think it played out well — meaning we didn’t learn anything new or surprising or even very interesting from it about race. I took students to see it. They liked it because of the twist. But when I tried talking to them about the race component, they stubbornly refused to see it, even though it’s clearly written in the text. Ah well. You can still learn a lot from bad theater but that doesn’t make me cheerful about paying for it.
    
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    1. Fie Upon This Quiet Life
      
      November 9, 2015
      
      Sorry – the anonymous comment “I wanted to like this play because I’m particularly invested in supporting the works of women playwrights…. etc” was from me (Fie). Somehow my phone didn’t acknowledge my credentials when I put up the comment.
      
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2. Dreidel
  
  November 8, 2015
  
  I’m not familiar with the play, but the grammatically correct order of those pronouns is “You and I.” Putting the “I” pronoun first is both conceited and illiterate — but what would you expect from teenagers?
  
  (Sorry I couldn’t answer your question about the play.) 🙂
  
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