I imagine this is a constinuous topic with all community theatres:  who is our audience.  Does anyone have any hard evidence--not anecdotal--about who are community theatre audiecnes: age, education, race, gender, anything that will help us better address and build a clientele.  We here tend to do everything ad hoc with no coherent plan of appraoch for a season.

Any ideas or help?

thanks doug

After our last play I did an informal exit poll and found that our audience is so varied that it would be quite impossible to "type" it.  Not only did they cover all age, gender and economic possiblities they heard about our play from a lot of different sources.

When we opened Romeo and Juliet last summer a very frail old lady showed up alone (she had taken a taxi).  Our theater has a long flight of stairs or a tiny, cranky elevator.  I helped her into the elevator and into her seat where she sat, rapt.  She was leaning forward, smiling and enjoying the play more than anyone else.  The next night she showed up again and brought an elderly friend.  I chatted with her while the elevator clanked along and she told me that she had lived in Manhattan all of her life, retired here (80  miles away) and missed the theater so much.  She lives in a big retirement community and you can bet that we will be advertising there..maybe even doing some scenes and offering discount tickets.

You never know where your audience comes from.....

This is a question that we're continually debating at out ct.   Some of us want to do mostly popular or money shows.   Some of us want to do more edgey or challenging material.    My argument is that there's audience for almost every show and it's up to us to market it.

Seems as though our choices are based on how we did finacially the previous season or two.   If we've done well we're more likely to take on more risky scripts, if not we're more likely to do more well known things like a Simon or a good old fashioned thriller (or a relatively newer one like Veronica's Room like we are next seson).

I've always wanted to see a survey of who DOESN'T attend, and why.  We're always doing things because "this is what our audience wants."  Well, what if there's an audience out there that WOULD want something different, but we don't know about it?

Why do people stay away?

• Do they think it's too expensive?
• Do they not like the shows we do?  What shows would they like?
• Are shows too long?  Too late? 
• Is our location bad?  Parking problems?  No place to eat before?
• Do they think everyone in theatre is gay?  (I can't begin to count the number of times I get this reaction when people find out I do theatre.)
• Are the shows too dirty?  Not dirty enough? :)

That's the kind of data I'd like to see.

What's wrong with Dunkin' Donuts??!!   Some of the best coffee that's gotten me through a long tech or light hang into the wee hours of the morning.