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By Hook or by Crook! Luring the Oppressor into the Lair
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226 By Hook or by Crook! Luring the Oppressor into the Lair Daniel-R aymond Nadon As the project coordinator for the Theatre for Social Justice Institute at Kent State in 2007, my jobs were primarily administrative. Guidelines were agreed upon and set for the planning and implementation of the Institute process. Our Kent team, along with Fringe Benefits’ administration, mapped out a detailed schedule and set of expectations that would begin at the time we signed our contract and continue through Fringe Benefits’ arrival at Kent State and until the time when the completed pre- and post-show surveys were submitted to Fringe Benefits—from the time we conceived of the idea until the results were tabulated and the numbers were crunched. My team and I worked tirelessly to be sure that the schedule and expectations were met, a diverse representation of participants arrived, copies were made, attendance was taken, food and beverages were served, technology was available, phone calls were made, letters were sent out, and so on. The scaffolded structure of the Institute is precise, consistent, and tested. It is designed to offer groups the best chance to achieve the final objective of reaching and inspiring change among their target audiences through their devised play. The Kent State Institute participants wanted to respond to recent anti-LGBT hate crimes on campus through our play, True Lives: I’m a Kent State Freshman, and to aid in the development of Safe Space for incoming LGBT freshman. To do this, we hoped to reach a target audience of freshmen, primarily straight male freshmen. It was determined , by the collaborating team, that this group would, most likely, be resistant to attending events with LGBT subject matter and would perhaps be hostile toward LGBT students. Immediately following the By Hook or by Crook! 227 Institute, we began strategizing how to locate and entice this target audience into viewing our play. Among the many jobs of the project coordinator is that of marketing director, both for the Institute and for the final play. It soon became clear to me that my usual marketing methodology would prove to be ineffective in marketing this play. My instinct as a theatre producer and marketing director is to discover and target the audience most likely to be interested in the show, then to strategize how to reach and entice that particular audience (rifle-shot marketing), while simultaneously working to reach the general community (scatter-shot marketing) through posters, press releases, and direct mail.1 The project needs turned my usual process on its head. First, we were charged with the assignment to reach—to rifle-shoot— the audience least likely to come willingly to our show. So, in initial marketing conversations that took place during Day Five of the Institute, we decided that the best practices with regard to this were to (1) make it mandatory (thereby removing the option to self-select out of attending ) and/or (2) try to avoid signaling the LGBT content of the show (thereby tricking audiences into attending willingly and surprising them with the focus of the show upon their arrival). We needed to get them by hook or by crook, by enticement, force, or deceit—by any means necessary. In spite of the moral implications of baiting our hook with trickery and deceit, we forged ahead bravely. We agreed that the best time to reach our target audience of freshmen was early in the semester. At this time, members of our target audience were most likely still carrying their prejudices from home and from high school; this might be the time when they would learn to act on their prejudices, thereby increasing the unsafe environment of the campus. However, as they were newly adjusting to campus life, they might also be open to accepting new ideas and information as part of their new culture. Most important, perhaps, before the semester began, these freshmen would be treated to a week of scheduled programming, which could offer us opportunities to lure them in (although we wondered how successful we would be in mandating their attendance at our play). Logistically, we also discovered that, given our performance-space restrictions, we would need to have two separate performances to achieve our goal of reaching five hundred freshmen. Given these circumstances, we decided we would need to bring in our audiences both by hook and by crook to get the job done. [35.153.156.108] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:07 GMT...