Abercrombie Talks Theatre

If you're one of those persons eager to bootstrap a theatre company, let me just say this - I admire you, and wish you luck. Seriously. The push is on in theatre journalism to report some good news, and there have been a few articles in the major national newspapers from New York, DC, and Chicago touting some good news.  American Theatre  magazine is also doing its part to paint a rosier picture of the theatrical landscape as we head into 2024. So maybe your plans to start a theatre with some of your friends and colleagues may not be such a bad idea, after all. But please be warned: the odds of starting and sustaining a viable theatre are just as long and just as against you as the odds are of becoming a sustainable working actor. In this post, I want to examine more closely the relationship between a theatre and its audience by digging just a tad deeper into the demographic information contained in the NEA's Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA). A deep look at th...

 Of all the pieces of data that exist relative to attendance at performing arts events, none is more comprehensive than the National Endowment for the Arts' Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA). Begun in 1982, the SPPA has undergone some changes over the years, and has added categories as new types of arts (mainly digital) were created. Their core "benchmark" categories, however, have remain largely unchanged, and theatre is one of those core benchmarks. What I'd like to do here is give a rough overview of the information contained in the SPPA; I hope a deeper dive will follow once all the supporting data is released. It's my belief that the data available in this report, which is usually released about every five years, is the most ignored data set among theatre practitioners and theorists today. The NEA just released its summary findings this past October detailing the years from 2017-2022, and as usual, the news is sobering.One look at this table m...

Recently, I went down a rabbit hole of theatrical news and information. I did so because the news of theatres closing and shrinking across the country was front and center this past summer, and I wanted to see if I could find out more about the causes. Down somewhere at the very depths of this particular rabbit hole, I found a Substack written by a former collaborator and theatre blogger from back in the 2000s. His name is Scott Walters, and his substack has the same name as his former blog -  Theatre Ideas . I was also at that time writing my own blog, and we started corresponding. We found we had similar interests and background, as we were both academics who had come to believe that the academic model for theatre departments was, to put it bluntly, based on a collection of myths and outright lies. We decided to collaborate on a presentation for the 2014 (I believe)  Southeast Theatre Conference . Our presentation was based on facts and statistics we had collected demonstrat...