Engaging the Audience: Cultivating Partners, Collaborators, and Stakeholders

Theatres are fundamentally public institutions—cultural, educational, civic—and developing innovative and effective ways to engage the public is central to the stated mission of a number of regional US theatres. Baltimore’s Center Stage is “committed to engaging, educating, and expanding the horizons of diverse audiences”¹; Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., seeks “to ignite an explosive engagement between theatre artists and the community”²; ZACH Theatre in Austin, Texas, “creates intimate theatre experiences that ignite the imagination, inspire the spirit, and engage the community”³; and the Brooklyn Academy of Music describes itself as “the home for adventurous artists, audiences, and ideas—engaging both global and local communities.”⁴ This institutional emphasis on audience engagement serves both the institution and the broader industry by building public participation in the arts.

In their 2001 analysis of how US arts institutions sought to build participation in the arts, Kevin McCarthy and Kimberly Jinnett suggest that “what an [arts] institution means when it says it wants to increase participation” actually encompasses three different kinds of increase in participation (3). An institution might seek to deepen participation by providing new ways for individuals who already participate to participate in new ways; it might seek to diversify participation by attracting new markets of individuals who are not already predisposed to participate; or it might seek to broaden participation by attracting individuals who might be predisposed to participate, but are not currently participating—in other words, capturing a larger share of an existing market. Strategies to build participation in the arts, and metrics to evaluate that participation, vary according to the kind of increase in participation that is sought (3–4).

Artistic directors and governing boards devote careful attention to selecting seasons that, they hope, will attract new audiences, bring back first-time audiences, and keep the interest of loyal audiences: diversifying, broadening, and deepening participation. In addition, not-for-profit theatres in the United States are also working to deepen, broaden, and diversify participation through audience and community engagement. As I examined some of the more innovative strategies for engaging the public, it became apparent to me that professional dramaturgs and others claiming the tools of dramaturgy are playing important roles in inspiring and shaping these kinds of programs. I recognize that the term dramaturgy encompasses quite a wide range of activity surrounding the conception and development, rehearsal and production, and reception of a play, but I would like to propose that dramaturgy as a set of practices and priorities offers some key tools for innovating, developing, and offering pathways to engage audiences and communities in the work of an individual theatre institution, as well as in the work of theatre as an industry and as an art form. Such engagement can radically deepen participation, and potentially broaden or even diversify it as well, by transforming neighbors into partners, specialists into collaborators, and consumers into stakeholders.

Engaging Audiences through Enrichment

Engaging the public nearly always begins with enriching the audience member’s experience of a theatrical production. Audience-enrichment programs have, during the past few decades, seen some significant growth and innovation in American theatres. More pages in printed programs and on theatres’ websites are given over to dramaturgical notes and materials designed to provide audiences with the historical and stylistic contexts of the shows they are seeing. Lectures and panels of invited speakers—even entire symposia, in the case of the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center’s 2013 “Civil War to Civil Rights” event⁵—have joined conventional post-performance discussions as enrichment events for donors or the public. Lobby displays have gone multimedia and interactive, such as the “Media Walls” at Signature Theatre Company in New York City and Center Stage in Baltimore. Even nonprofessional companies are increasingly offering facilitated discussions, program notes, and other kinds of enrichment along with their shows. One such group, a community theatre for whom I occasionally consult, recently introduced with a production of Oklahoma! a series of community discussions in which company members explored the experience of “outsiders” in a community—one of the central themes of its...