How to Shape an Onstage Season
That there is no guaranteed formula for success is a much-repeated tenet of show business. When it comes to planning a production lineup for an upcoming theater season, achieving a balance between creatively challenging and crowd-pleasing can feel like a daunting task. For seasoned companies, from high school programs to high-profile off-Broadway theaters, artistic excitement is a key starting point.
For the famed Manhattan-based Atlantic Theater Company, founded by David Mamet and William H. Macy in 1985, programming is determined primarily by what Artistic Director Neil Pepe, Director of New Play Development Abigail Katz and Associate Artistic Director Annie MacRae deem both inspiring and aligning with the company’s mission. The Atlantic is known for producing boundary-pushing critical favorites: one of its high-profile success stories was Spring Awakening, which debuted at the Atlantic in 2006 and went on to win eight Tony Awards during its Broadway run.
“We want to program from the place of who we are as an organization and what we find to be great theater,” says Katz. “We have a wonderful member base [of about 2700 subscribers], and while we are always interested in how they respond to our programming, we choose the plays we do because we find particular writers and their work exciting, and we hope our members will too.”
Planning for the Atlantic’s year-long season usually begins in earnest in January, and a final schedule of productions is locked down in the late spring. Several factors play into the process of selecting suitable works: in addition to staying on the lookout for outstanding texts, Pepe, MacRae and Katz aim to stage plays and musicals that showcase the Atlantic’s ensemble members. In addition, several of the company’s productions — such as Doug Wright’s Posterity this year — are commissioned from playwrights specifically for the Atlantic.
“We also look at the season as a whole to make sure there aren’t things that are too similar to one another — we have to make sure we are diversified, not only in terms of our writers’ backgrounds but in terms of having a menu of options to appeal to a wide group of theatergoers,” says Katz.
While the Atlantic caters to Manhattan’s theater-saturated crowds, The Bristol Valley Theater, located roughly 300 miles north of New York City, has a mission to bring high-quality productions of plays and musicals to rural audiences. Its season runs from June to September. In addition to staying abreast of industry news, artistic director Karin Bowersock says she is often brainstorming next year’s season with her actors while current summer shows are still in production.
“We work with a high degree of return with our artists — between 75 and 80 percent of them return from one season to the next — so we talk with them a lot about what shows might be a good fit,” says Bowersock. The best brainstorming, she says, often happens at a bar or restaurant post-performance.
“I feel guilty always wanting to talk about what’s next, so I try not to do it when I’m hanging out with the cast, but the actors are happy to bring it up,” she says.
About one-third of Bristol Valley’s audience base is made up of subscribers. Bowersock also makes a concentrated effort to involve her audience in the show-selection process as closely as possible by selecting a focus group of about a dozen patrons each season to provide feedback and react to Bowersock and Associate Artistic Director David Shane’s suggestions for next season’s lineup.
“People pick some surprising things — shows that I wouldn’t have guessed are sometimes at the top of their lists,” she says. One offbeat vote cast by the focus group was Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx’s Avenue Q, which will open Bristol Valley’s 2016 season. A final lineup is announced by November 1st of the previous year.
The rare negative feedback from audiences generally comes from false presumptions about the tone or theme of a production. “Last year we did Joe Orton’s What the Butler Saw, which people falsely presumed was a mystery; I’ve realized that most people don’t really read the marketing materials you send them, even three-sentence paragraphs,” Bowersock says. “We try to make the descriptions shorter each year.”
High school theaters, too, can be well advised to prioritize artistic achievement over guaranteed audience approval. After all, the latter can be impossible to predict.
“A few years ago we put on Spring Awakening, which went off without a hitch and we had a full house every night; we felt our kids were mentally and emotionally mature enough for it, and parents supported our decision,” says Annie Dragoo, Theatre Director at Austin High School in Texas. “But when we did Legally Blonde, someone sent a letter to the principle saying how inappropriate the musical was because of the song ‘Gay or European;’ every once and a while we have these wacky things happen, but for the most part the parents say how wonderful the shows are.”
Dragoo and her husband Billy Dragoo, Austin High School’s Chair of Fine Arts, usually develop a season around productions that personally inspire them.
“We want to be drawn to a show and train the kids up to that level,” says Dragoo. “Neither of us is picking shows because we have certain kids to fit those roles; we pick shows we want to do as directors. Of course we have a very active booster club that supports us, and we always listen to them, but Billy has been here for 20 years and I’ve been here for 12, so in the end we go with what we want.”
Sometimes a talented crop of students presents an opportunity for a challenging work: After putting on Nicholas Nickelby earlier this fall, Billy Dragoo saw an opportunity to produce Alan Ayckbourn’s Living Together, part of The Norman Conquests trilogy.
Austin High’s theater department, the Red Dragon Players, has a solid reputation in the region and has won accolades at the University Interscholastic League’s One-Act Play Contest, the world’s largest high school play festival. Thus the Dragoos often have several seniors auditioning for undergraduate theater programs.
“Sometimes this does factor in to our selections, as we try to provide our seniors with as much opportunity as possible,” says Annie Dragoo. “Last year, for example, we had an exceptional bunch of 17-year-old seniors who sang and danced, so we did Gypsy, which gave them great roles they could use in their audition tapes.”
Austin High’s season also always includes one show designed for a large cast, which allows as many interested students as possible to audition and become involved.
“We always say that the best person for the role gets the role; that’s what real life and real theater is like, and our job is imitate that for the kids,” Dragoo says.
