Wow, many great comments on this post.  It seems like the majority of community theatres are on the more conservative side of things.  Many comments about not wanting to alienate customers, or losing the good old base of older folks.  A director in Arizona told me he does almost no programming for older folks because if that's mostly what you do, that's mostly what you get and you'll never get new people, younger kids, middle age and the rest.  We also tend to be more conservative than not.  Someone else said to me "we'll we're a theatre, we're not church.  If they want church that's a different building down the street."  I really think most people are pretty open minded and I think it's healthy to give them different experiences that they might not normally see in life.  We produced Death of a Salesman and there is some strong language and a lot of arguing or yelling.  We had a couple of people walk out and one of them told me "I just can't watch it, it's too uncomfortable, I didn't grow up with that in my household.  But they're doing a good job with the show, it's just not for me".  But the show sold several hundred tickets better than expected and I think we need to make people uncomfortable sometimes, get them to move off their mark, think and see things differently.  I think people respected us for the good piece of theatre it was.  With some other shows we've done, we might have lost a couple/few people but we've gained more than we lost.  We're still probably fairly conservative in the choice of plays and as you know, it's hard to find the right balance.  But we try not to "always pick safe" plays.  We'll never please everyone all of the time and our challenges are great.