1. Everybody's family is usually a huge resource.  Draft them into service. 

2. Choose the best writer in your group to write articles for your local newspapers and submit them on a weekly basis when you have something coming up.

3. Young people don't read newspapers... use facebook or myspace to find young people in your area that might be interested.

4. Have a presence at community functions such as art fairs, holiday celebrations, etc. such as a booth where you do face painting or balloon sculptures for kids, or something crazy like fortune telling.  Have volunteer questionaires for anyone to take that lists all the ways someone can volunteer and let them check off their interest areas.  Contact them.

5. Invite people personally to participate.  Most of our participants (I'm guessing 90%) were personally asked.

Good luck.  I hope this helps.

 

1. First, talk to EVERYBODY!  Everyone you speak to (even just buying groceries or at the bank or whatever), mention the group.  You never know who they know, or who might overhear you and ask about it.

 

2. Be observant.  I once was waiting for a flower arrangement to be made at my local florist.  A lady came in and ordered some flowers, and was wearing a sweatshirt from a production with a group about 20 miles away.  I asked her how long ago she did the show, and learned a lot about her involvement as well as her son's interest, too.

 

3.  Churches are a huge opportunity to find people.  If you have any churches in your area that have done or are interested in doing any kind of drama with a more "contemporary" kind of service, go talk to them.  Usually the youth pastor heads up that kind of thing, but not always.  And people in choir may not only sing well, but be decent actors too.

 

4.  Go to your local library and talk to the folks at the front desk.  See if they know of people that have checked out drama or theater books recently, or do so regularly.  You have to be careful about how you do this, because you don't want to be seen as a stalker!  But if you're friendly about it and make it known that you're looking for like-minded folks, they may be very helpful.  (I'm meeting someone later this week that my wife met at the library who's interested in getting some theater classes started.)

 

5.  Put an ad in the classifieds section of the local paper.  Or put up flyers in the grocery store or post office (or anywhere else you can put up a flyer).  Make NICE ones, with "tear off tabs" so people can call you / email you.

 

Hope that helps, best of luck!

 

High school can also give you access to others that may develop into theatre interest - shop teacher, home econ teachers, janitors, music teachers, secretaries, administrators, and many others can bring in skills very helpful to your theatre.  Remember the people on stage are just a small part of a production.

 

One of the theatres I work with started as an off shoot of HS theatre, basically a summer show outlet.  But parents got involved and decided it was too much fun and wanted to be further involved. We have a set building crew that were "Dads" with no theatre experience.  Now they are very experienced. We have a dynamyte stage manager -- a "Mom" that learned the ropes. The list goes on.

 

For the first two years a lot of kids had to play older (18 year olds playing 40, etc), but now involvement is so great that everyone is cast age appropriate.