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The Delayed Mirror

The Challenges of Matching Plots with Headlines

Writing a script and selling a ticket are two ineluctably linked but diametrically opposed actions. As an indie theatre producer, my foremost goal is to get a given work seen by as many eyes as possible. As a writer, I am trying to engage in an active dialogue with my times. But the all-consuming effort to remain “current” can also be a trap. Early in my producing career, I learned this expensive lesson.

When my company chose to revive Stephen Belber's play McReele in the fall of 2007, I had barely noticed that the junior senator from Illinois had launched his presidential campaign. McReele follows the burgeoning political career of Darius McReele, a smart, charismatic inmate who is exonerated after an eighteen-year-old murder conviction is overturned. The journalist who champions his cause is drawn into a Quixotic campaign to put McReele in the US Senate, but he begins to question the motives of everyone involved—not least the convict-turned-candidate himself. On the face of things, little connected this real-life Harvard Law graduate with a fictional ex-convict from Delaware. But as we went into dress rehearsals, a contemporary script about a black insurgent politician who captured people's imaginations and challenged accepted norms about black identity was incredibly—improbably—relevant on a far broader scale than I could have hoped.

That our revival of a play about a black politician with cross-cultural appeal coincided with the arrival of the most distinguished black politician in American history was dumb luck. Thinking I could leverage good timing into sold-out houses was just plain dumb.

two actors at a table
Sergei Burbank and Iriemimen Oniha in Conflict of Interest theater company's production of Stephen Belber's McReele, Richmond Shepard Theatre, New York City. Credit: Karen Sieber Photography

We enjoyed more good fortune, as a castmember of an immensely popular crime procedural on television was looking for meaty stage work during a break in filming and was willing to work for a negligible fee.

Having seen the dishearteningly empty houses that accompanied our company's inaugural production the year before and desperate for this play not to suffer the same fate, I swallowed hard and engaged a publicist to ensure better houses this time around. Although her fee would swallow more than a fifth of our production budget, I felt we had to capitalize on the topic, its timing, and our casting.

Publicists hold an alchemical property in the minds of fledgling indie producers, who are still learning the craft of begging funds while deploying talent. New York City offers an inexhaustible supply of theatre-hungry patrons, so when you hang up a poster for your show, it's devastating when those same audience members simply pass you by. You realize quickly that the hustle to put butts in seats is its own full-time endeavor. But unlike loading in a set or gathering costume pieces, audience advance work feels like shouting into a crater; there’s no tangible evidence of one's labor. But coaxing audiences to attend given our play's topicality and a minor celebrity seemed doable—especially when this would be tasked to a seasoned professional.

That our revival of a play about a black politician with cross-cultural appeal coincided with the arrival of the most distinguished black politician in American history was dumb luck. Thinking I could leverage good timing into sold-out houses was just plain dumb.

I confused correlation with causation: our ability to produce a play about an election (in an election year) about a black politician (as it looked increasingly likely we would have our first black president) seemed proof positive it was our company's breakthrough moment. I refused to see this as simply a happy coincidence. I compounded this error in logic with another often made by indie producers: contrary to our wildest hopes, a publicist cannot conjure paying customers out of thin air. She can provide access to multiple platforms potential customers consult, but that's all she can do.

Nothing our casting or publicist did could counteract the single biggest element working against us: our fixed number of performances. Indie producers, when working through Equity's Showcase Code, deprive themselves of the element that's essential to any theatrical production's potential success: momentum. Theatre companies that control their space can reward shows in which they have faith by extending their runs, hoping that some combination of word of mouth, critical recognition, and commercial promotion will fill their houses and sustain the show. An Equity Showcase production, by contrast, has finished its full run in the same period a Broadway show is still in previews. In essence, an indie production working under the Showcase Code hoping to find an audience is looking to hit a missile with a missile—and the margin of error in such an endeavor is maddeningly large.

Our revival of McReele, in the end, was not the game changer I had hoped. We had some great houses (especially when we gave tickets away to a retirement community), and the script was as wonderful on its feet as I thought it was on the page. One cast member was even nominated for a New York Innovative Theatre Award, so I can argue that, objectively, we did something right.

In retrospect, though, it would have been better to ignore the political context of our performances, and instead focus on mounting the best possible show with the hope that audience numbers would reward quality in the long run. That publicist's fee would have been better spent on a number of things (not least providing the cast and crew something approaching a living wage!), and no matter a company's size or clout, productions must succeed as self-contained events. Their wider significance, if any, is not within a producer’s control.

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Where to start with the heckling? Maybe your first sentence, though I applaud the use of "ineluctably." You assert that writing a script and selling a ticket are diametrically opposed, a thesis that you do not really address in the remainder of the article. In fact, the script was already written. Your real thesis seems to be that the run of this type of play is so short that a publicist is unlikely to produce large crowds, so you might as well pay the cast better. Of course, paying them better is not a guarantee of producing such a stellar performance that word of mouth instantly builds audience size. But I suppose it would be good for them to eat better. It sounds like your conclusion is that neither performance quality nor publicity quality is likely to fill the seats, and that the fundamental problem of the limited run is so difficult that even having a moderately well-known lead actor and a timely script will probably not overcome it. The real answer would have been to get Michelle Obama to attend, of course, but even if that worked it is not a scalable solution. You do get extra credit for your devotion to your art, though!