Newsday

Chasing a rainbow audience

Faced with a mostly white theater audience, marketers turn their attention to New York's minorities

BY KATTI GRAY
STAFF WRITER

August 17, 2004

As he prepared for another workday, Kojo Ade stuffed into his oversized leather pouch postcards pitching the Off-Broadway plays "From My Hometown" and "Waitin' 2 End Hell."

In his brand of street-level marketing, the post- cards are dropped mainly into the hands of black and brown people wherever Ade meets them - at street fairs, in churches or concert halls. If any taker pauses long enough, especially one for whom the theater seems intergalactic turf, Ade starts talking.

"I tell them that theater, all of the arts really, gives us a universal message. It gives us a picture of what can happen and what is possible," said Ade, president of Kojo & Associates, a small arts marketing and audience development business.

Ade's company is one in a handful of New York firms specializing in so-called audience development, targeting home- grown minorities and immigrants of color. More and more, these groups are being looked to as potential audiences for a theater industry that has faced declining ticket sales for the past several years.

A 2003 survey by the nonprofit League of American Theatres and Producers found that, for the fourth straight year, there was an increase in the percentage of white theatergoers on Broadway, the wealthiest tier of the stratified theater world.

Audience demographics

According to the most recent Census data available, New York City residents of Asian, Hispanic and African origin combined constituted only 20.5 percent of Broadway ticket- holders and 25.4 percent of Off-Broadway theatergoers in 2000. Whites, while comprising 43 percent of the city's population, accounted for 79.9 percent of Broadway theatergoers and 74.6 percent of those venturing off Broadway.

Enter the audience developers, hired for their close-up knowledge of nonwhite communities and their unconventional marketing, whether posting fliers about performances at social service agencies or, as Ade does, taking to the pavement with postcards.

Some show producers have begun trying to draw more racially mixed crowds to plays large and small by refocusing on how - and to whom - they aim to sell their plays, which ones they stage and which actors they cast. "The theater is sacrosanct to some," said Veronica Claypool, who, three years ago, was the first black named as managing director of the 36-year-old nonprofit Theatre Development Fund. "But, culturally, people won't come back to a place where they don't feel welcome. You've got to pitch art to them, make it work for them. Who are you going to produce for if you're not cultivating all these audiences?"

'Diddy' did it

The payoff for such efforts is apparent. Sean "P. Diddy" Combs was not previously known for his stage work, but casting that mega-mogul as Walter Lee in "A Raisin in the Sun" helped this year's revival of the 1959 classic gross the highest first-week box office receipts of any Broadway show ever. "Raisin" attracted waves of patrons more familiar with Combs, emperor of hip-hop, than Lorraine Hansberry, groundbreaking playwright.

"I saw people in the theater who were only there because Sean Combs was there, people in baggy pants and bandannas," Claypool said.

Indeed, some in theatrical quarters were buzzing about the tactics that made "Raisin" a hit: P. Diddy's name in the Playbill, P. Diddy's voice touting the show on urban radio, the show being pitched to select groups across the Internet, in record stores and nightclubs. How might that sort of success be replicated? Would the theatrical powers-that-be pay attention to that model of success?

Many believe they will have to: Broadway attendance, which has been declining for years, was down by 7 percent in 2002 and 5 percent more in 2003.

Against that backdrop came the hugely successful "Raisin." But it was not the first show to prove what could be accomplished with a little targeted marketing, said playwright Eduardo Machado, artistic director of Off-Broadway's INTAR (International Artists Relations) theater company.

"When Greg Mosher produced 'Freak,' John Leguizamo's [1998] piece, he offered $15 tickets up in the balcony and sold them in advance ... advertised them only on Spanish stations," Machado said. "That was the money he used to pay off his investors. He paid all of them back, and he said no one ever asked him how he did it."

Audience developers say that such strategies, while effective, often seem alien to traditional investors, used to promoting to the predominantly white female audience that is the longtime norm for New York theater. The interest in such approaches, audience developers say, has been uneven.

"August Wilson once said Broadway was interested, but only to a point, in reaching a black audience. I say they're not interested yet in Spanish arts, Spanish audiences, and that is why I came to INTAR as artistic director. I wanted to be free to do what I believe people want," said Machado, whose last play, "The Cook," ran last year at INTAR.

Said audience developer Marcia Pendelton, president of Walk Tall Girl Productions, "There are some Broadway producers who see audiences of color as viable, important ticket-buyers and others who say, 'As long as the show is selling to traditional audiences, why bother?'... That's a lot to work against...."

In church for 'Aida'

Still, producers have hired her to reach out to nonwhite communities. In March, for example, she arranged for R&B star Debra Cox, the current lead in "Aida," to attend Sunday services at Emmanuel Baptist Church in Brooklyn, one of the city's largest black congregations.

"She signed autographs and posed for pictures and gave out fans and other stuff to publicize the show," said Pendelton, who, with Donna Walker- Kuhne of Walker International Communications Group, also was hired by producers of "Caroline, or Change" to do audience development for that Broadway production.

It opened in April and, though it was not advertised as a limited run, its producers are closing the show on Aug. 29. Ticket sales have been slower than they hoped, said Walker- Kuhne, who travels the country training others in her type of work.

Walker-Kuhne is frustrated, she said, that a show as serious as "Caroline" has not been more widely received.

"It's a smart show, political, cultural, intellectual; it lends itself to dialogue on so many different levels. Certainly, if there were more African-Americans going, it would help build an audience. Except for 'Raisin,' I cannot imagine any show on Broadway that has a multicultural theme, or actors, that does not need a diverse audience to sustain the box-office expectation."

Off-Broadway, the need is much the same, said Pendelton, also hired to do marketing for "On Edge," showing off Off- Broadway, and "Ellen Craft," an opera about a runaway slave masked as a white man that opened Tuesday as part of the New York International Fringe Festival.

"We're not buying advertising in traditional press because it's just so costly," she said of those two productions. "We have to go to the Internet; e-mail ... people who go to independent films or take in other visual arts, people who read. [Mom-and-pop] bookstores have amazing databases, and there is a strong correlation between people who read and people who go to theater."

Playwright Machado said he witnessed what such hands-on marketing can yield a decade ago, when he publicized one of his English-language productions at Longwood Theater in New Haven, Conn., on the area's seven Spanish-language stations.

"We packed the house. And the audiences knew exactly what we were talking about. They talked back. They had emotions about it," he said.

Producer David Binder has his own vision for what a theater audience can look like. Binder, who is white, revived "Raisin." At 37, he's spent 14 years as a producer. He wants, he said, to present work that appeals to his contemporaries, Gen X-ers weaned on hip-hop and MTV and used to mingling across racial lines in ways that many in earlier eras were not. As a practical matter, he also wants to win over to theater younger audiences that can replace older ones as they begin to die out.

"Not only do I not have an interest in creating theater for the traditional audience - older and white - I wouldn't even know how," said Binder, also producer of the avant- garde "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" in 1997 and the current "De La Guarda." That show has attracted ethnically diverse audiences, in part because of its free form and, as Binder says, the commonalities some in his generation see crossing racial boundaries. The cast in "De La Guarda" - which regularly draws an audience that is a racial rainbow - speaks in what Binder said is gibberish, swings by cables from the ceiling and invites audience participation. In addition, a star DJ is hired for certain performances.

"We heard it was casual, and that the DJ was Fatboy Slim. That's why we came," said Kaya Davis, standing outside Daryl Roth Theatre on Union Square before a "De La Guarda" performance. Davis, who is black, is an MBA candidate at Northwestern University.

Goutham Kandiar, 26, a computer software designer, said he took in the show because someone offered free tickets, and he is a lover of the theater, attending a production every few months. His love of theater is a variation on his parents' - immigrants from India - love of film.

Kandiar has not, however, seen "Bombay Dreams," which is running on Broadway and was created, in large measure, to attract an East Indian audience.

The Asian challenge

Drawing New York City's diverse Asian community (in which 32 languages are spoken) to theater poses a unique challenge, said Lillian Cho, executive director of the Asian American Arts Alliance - an informational clearinghouse, fund-raiser and advocate for 200 individuals or groups, both visual and performing artists. The city's Asian melange includes new immigrants and longtime Asian-Americans.

"In some cases, we're talking about people who may not be used to sitting in the Signature or Roundabout...," Cho said. "There are many ways of participating in theater, and much of it starts at the grassroots level."

So the alliance produces an events calendar that is delivered to its 3,000 e-mail subscribers every other week. And it has linked its affiliated performers with larger arts houses such as the Metropolitan Museum, which named Cho to its cultural advisory board. The museum is collaborating in efforts to build minority theater audiences, and has staged abbreviated versions of "Caroline, or Change," and "Harlem Song," and hosted an evening with actress Cicely Tyson.

Those programs came with the cost of admission to the Metropolitan, a charge that pales in comparison to theater prices. High ticket prices frequently are cited as a key reason for the overall decline in theater attendance, but not everyone is convinced that price is an issue for every minority theatergoer.

The cost factor

"I've never ever bought into the idea that we don't have money. It's a question of what we value," said Neyda Martinez, president of Monserrat Ltd., a marketing and publicity firm that has done audience development for, among others, the Classical Theater of Harlem, Public Theater and INTAR.

Producer Binder said plenty of hip-hop heads in their teens and 20s who drop $65 on a ticket to stand up throughout "De La Guarda" also buy $150 sneakers.

For some veterans of ethnic theater who began creating their own work when the big playhouses showed no interest in work with nonwhite themes, the question of how to draw minorities to the theater is more complicated - and not new. Developing audiences of color has long required extra effort, said Voza Rivers of Voz Entertainment, who, during 40 years in the industry, has produced shows on Broadway and off.

When pioneering black theater companies, including Woodie King's New Federal Theatre, which is producing "Waitin' 2 End Hell," began carving a niche for themselves, everyone involved in the production was expected to promote it, down to selling their share of tickets.

"Back then," Rivers said, "it wasn't enough to say, 'I'm an actor, I'm in a play.... You had to bring in an audience. Even the actors had to sell a certain number of tickets. Actors would get a third to a half of that money, and the box office would take the rest."

The current efforts at audience development expand upon those earlier strategies, said Rivers. He brought "Sarafina" to Broadway in 1998, and is now planning a production at Lincoln Center Theater, but also concentrates much of his effort on cultivating the arts in Harlem, where he houses his company.

Reaching out to youth

Just as playwright Wendy Wasserstein's 6-year-old Open Doors project has been ferrying high school students from the five boroughs to the theater to watch performances and talk with cast members, Impact Repertory Theatre, which Rivers co-founded, has spent seven years enrolling schoolkids for eight-hour Saturdays at City College. There, they train to act, sing, dance and lead rehearsals, with the hope that some will be inspired to continue that work professionally while others will simply develop a lifetime love of theater.

Given the changing racial makeup of the region and the nation, collaborations between producers and those who know how to stir new audiences will become even more crucial, Walker-Kuhne said.

"Theater, the arts, cannot survive without a serious focus on how we embrace the beautiful diversity of our country, and that is based on the U.S. Census. It's not an opinion, it's a fact," she said. "In 20 years, 50 years, the majority of people will not be from Europe. How are we preparing ourselves?"

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