Communication, Stimulation, and Education: Three more of 13 Ways of Looking at Self-Producing

12 min readApr 2, 2024

Three self-produced, one co-produced: each educated us

LOOK # 7

Communication and Collaboration.

Do you ever laugh at yourself for unconsciously expanding a project that started out as a reasonable little effort? Engineers call it ‘scope creep’, and I confess that with these 13 Ways (as well as other writing projects) I am a ‘creeper’ though not as decorative as Parthenocissus quinquefolia. My original piece keeps on expanding as I think about different aspects of this subject. But in order to shift to actually writing the next play, this installment will cover three of 13 Ways of Looking at Self-Producing: Communication, Stimulation, and Education. What I have picked up about the differences in communication for the person initiating self-production, the requirements of stimulating demand for that work, and the necessity of learning from your audiences could prove useful to those considering embarking upon such a theatrical venture.

Just a reminder that I’m writing about these Thirteen Ways from the perspective of a co-playwright who then got involved in the producing of our first Joe Queenan & T.J. Elliott work, Alms, which led to being responsible in several later cases for directing our Knowledge Workings Theater plays. This was not part of the plan five years ago. I would have been very happy (as I suspect many of my playwright readers would) if someone else had jumped up and said, “Hey, we’d love to do all the work to produce your plays.” Didn’t happen Although we have gotten some co-production help along the way from the good folks at TheaterLab, Broom Street Theater, and The Chain Theatre for which we are very grateful. What we recognize now about communication in these situations would have been useful to know from the get go.

For example, be prepared for a little disorientation: communication will not — more likely cannot — work as it might have when you were only the playwright in previous productions. Now instead of being a commentator on the sidelines or even a collaborator lending your voice to various deliberations, now you will be viewed as running the team.

The paradox is that because you have initiated this self-production others will look to you as a leader even though you know that collaboration is necessary for success. In fact, many of your new or even old colleagues have had a model imprinted upon them in which there is supposed to be somebody giving orders. (We insist on paying every team member so being the one handing out the checks tends to warp the view of you as just one of the team.) A successful self-production requires a transformation to a more leaderful dynamic as my old friend Joe Raelin puts it, one in which everyone is willing to take responsibility and to project their voice into the necessary conversations about how to make things happen.

How does that happen? Here are several things I learned:

· Ask actual questions in your interactions — not arguments for your POV disguised as interrogations. This method takes discipline and practice.

· Bring a healthy dose of humility to every session; it will serve you well. The kind of collaboration required is similar to what the British actor and director Michael Blakemore described as his own approach to directing plays: “the director’s most important obligation once he’s done his thinking about the play — to give his passionate attention to what is happening right in front of him. This is where his dialogue with the actors begins and where, in collaboration with them, many of his best ideas will come from.”

· Give up being the expert on everything. Yes, you may need to make the final decision but first be a collaborator. In the Peter Marks WaPo interview with Ralph Fiennes cited in our last installment, Simon Godwin, the director of the production of Macbeth described, noted that they were employing “feedback as a partnership, rather than hierarchical.”

· As J. Richard Hackman found in studying teams, “the most powerful thing a leader can do to foster effective collaboration is to create conditions that help members competently manage themselves. … Leaders are indeed important in collaborative work, but not in the ways we usually think.” Give your team room to innovate in your communications with them.

· Hackman continued to talk about the attributes of Leaders of projects such as self-producing who succeed:

need to know some things;
need to know how to do some things;
need an above-average level of emotional maturity and political acumen.

· If you have initiated the self-production then you are the person responsible for creating those conditions that Hackman references. In this case, as in others that I will reference later on, the learning came from failures on my part to do that, to carry out the best job of not just expressing our ideas but of facilitating the expression of ideas by others on the team. Also it is insufficient to give feedback unless you are also finding a way to facilitate others giving feedback. And you can’t just let the feedback sit there. Harold Clurman used to reply to an actors feedback by saying, “Don’t talk; show me.” That may not work for every situation but it’s a useful move.

· Figure out what medium for non F2F communication is going to be best for everybody on the team. E-mail works for one generation but not the next. Some folks don’t check their text messages because they are on the go trying to make a living. Shared drives are a good repository but there’s no guarantee that folks are going to access what you put there. The same is true with shared documents that are an ongoing editing extravaganza. Get an agreement from everyone as to what is the best way to convey critical information. Most importantly, keep notes of what you are trying and review what did and did not work.

This was self-producing in 1982: things have changed.

LOOK # 8

Stimulating Demand

All of that more enlightened and effective communication will be wasted to a large degree unless there is an audience in front of your eventual performances. Self-producing is an experiment in stimulating demand. Despite the themes of those recent newspaper articles on the dire state of various companies in American theater mentioned in our introduction, the challenges faced by any theatre professional right now are at least as much an issue of demand as of supply. Those articles highlighted the considerable troubles encountered by long established theaters, but their analyses and proposed solutions in most cases ignored the dwindling number of people going to the theater. Self-producing allows — indeed requires — more direct engagement with actual and prospective audiences. If more playwrights follow this route and then share their insights, we might devise some strategies to ignite greater interest in plays especially among younger generations.

And stimulating demand involves promotion of a particular event to a selected audience. Since we are ‘self-producing’ that means ‘self-promotion’, which requires confronting reluctance to toot our own horn. The essayist Simon Leys wrote that, “Half of the misery in this world is caused by people whose only talent is to worm their way into positions for which they otherwise have no competence. However, how many talented individuals remain in obscurity for the lack of one ability: self-promotion?’” But is ability lacking or instead attitude? Admitting to ‘shameless self-promotion’ is actually a contradiction: we would not call it that unless we felt a little shame, a discomfort with advocating (Pleading? Begging?) for others to see the new world that actors, stage managers, lighting and sound designers, set constructors, costumers, and other production team members created. In Art and Fear, authors Bayes and Orland note that, “Fears about yourself prevent you doing your best work, and fear about your reception from others prevent you from doing your own work.” That’s true of self-producing as well as playwrighting (or any creating) When it comes to pushing the awareness of your production out into the world, another quote from these authors seems apt: “Someone has to do your work, and you’re the closest person around.”

And as Wakeman Consulting noted in the middle of this piece: “Marketing is a real issue: Too much of the marketing of the performing arts and theatre is reactive.” A useful resource in this regard is TheaterMakers Studio. This group is generous with their free advice in newsletters and expansive with their course offerings under subscription deals. Here’s an example from their CEO, Monica Hammond:

“When you’re marketing, (and arguably, making) theater, it’s essential to know your audience inside and out.

It’s not enough to say, “everyone would love my show!” You have to get specific, otherwise you’re competing for everyone’s attention . . . and that’s expensive.

So, how can you gain a deeper understanding of your audience?

· Identify Key Themes In Your Show: Start by pulling out key themes, central ideas, important character traits, and other factors about your show that could be appealing to a specific audience.

· Demographic Data: Gather demographic information about your potential audience. This includes age, gender, location, income level, and more. This data can be collected through surveys, ticket sales data, or social media insights.

· Psychographics: Go beyond demographics and delve into psychographics. What are their interests, values, and beliefs? What other forms of entertainment do they enjoy? This information can help you tailor your marketing message to resonate with their interests and emotions.

· Feedback and Surveys: Engage with your existing audience and collect feedback. Ask them what they loved about past readings or productions, what they’d like to see in the future, and how they prefer to hear about upcoming shows. This not only provides valuable insights but also makes your audience feel heard and valued.

· Competitor Analysis: Analyze the marketing strategies of successful theaters or productions that cater to a similar audience. What worked for them? What can you adapt or improve upon?

Once you’ve gathered this information, you’re able to craft a more tailored marketing strategy that speaks directly to your audience. “

What have we tried that has worked? E-mail via MailChimp to a large degree. We kept expanding the list with the emails of those who came to our shows. Social media hasn’t been as fruitful for us from an advertising perspective, but from a posting perspective you have to be on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etcetera. It was self-producing that had me breakdown and go on FB because I was enjoying the promise that I had made to my then teenage daughters of never crossing that threshold. Of course, since they were both in their 30s by the time we started doing plays again they no longer cared about whether I was on that scene or not.

As we’ve gotten more ambitious, we have turned to professionals for press and marketing. That’s another expense but if you want to get reviews it’s a necessary one. Here’s what we did that required expense for The Jester’s Wife:

Artwork: Because you need to catch the eye; remember that the faces of your cast draw needed attention to your promotions

Posters — Graphics: We found that we needed quality digital work that meets th every different demands of each platform; PlayBill wants the images one way, Eventbrite has a different requirement

Publicity TheaterMania: This was useful the last time around because of their HUGE list

Publicity PlayBill: Also useful. Despite the shift to digital programs, we learned that audiences still like to hold a program in their hands

Email Blast TicketCentral: Less impactful but we will give it another try

Broadway World: You have to get your releases up on sites like this one

Yes, they all have a cost in both money and time. But we learned that they make a difference in attracting the right audience.

Stimulating demand could be a series of 13 installments itself, and still we would not cover all of the mistakes we made and, therefore, learning gained in that pursuit. This part of our enterprise is a work in progress, but what never changes is that if you’re going to be self-producing you’re going to have to be thinking about how you assemble your audience, how you persuade people to show up.

His Majesty’s Theater in Perth Australia 1933; we work smaller houses

LOOK # 9

Learning from the audience

David Mamet once wrote that “the correct study of the dramatist was neither his own feelings, nor those of the actors, but the attention of the audience.” While such study can take place in the course of a regular production, self-producing sharpens your concentration upon every aspect of your audience. Even more fundamentally, another Mamet insight militates for self-production: “If there’s no place to put on your play, you can’t learn to write a play, because you learn from the audience.” I don’t know a single playwright working today who doesn’t believe that they are still learning, but if we wait for others to put on our play, to give us that place, then days, weeks and even years pass filled with missed opportunities for the learning we desire.

What other say about audiences

So what did I learn from my audiences?

· They want to see theater. And by that, I mean they want to see stories that are dynamically presented. For the most part, they embrace the challenge of material that can be complex. For the most part…

· They care about issues whether it is political polarization, the vestiges of racism, challenges of trying to be a good person, or the difficulty in determining what constitutes honor.

· They appreciate actors. So, you have to find actors who will hold their attention. And you have to give those actors all of the support they need to do that difficult task. That means rewriting on the run and directing with the concern for the performers.

· They will pay for the privilege of being part of a performance.

· They can be surprisingly generous with their comments, advice, even criticism. That interaction just isn’t possible with other artistic forms. And anything that we can do to enable it is going to be worthwhile.

As mentioned in an earlier post, because of the pandemic, we staged three of our productions on Zoom and I would do my best never to do that again. I guess that constitutes a learning about the audience as well as learning about self-producing. I was a little bit surprised about my own conclusion because as a teenager it was thrilling to watch filmed productions of stage work like Ceremonies In Dark Old Men or Joe Papp’s Much Ado About Nothing or even Olivier’s Hamlet. But with the tables turned, the satisfaction turned to frustration for me.

One of the things that bothered me most about our Zoom productions was that it was much more difficult to learn anything from our audiences. The one time we kept open the participants microphones during a Zoom performance of our adaptation of George WS Trow’s The Context of No Context, chaos ensued as people yelled over each other and one guy tried to get back together with his girlfriends via the chat function!

In our next production, Keeping Right, the inability to hear the reaction of the Zooming audience to that screwball comedy drove us more than a little crazy. Yes, it was nice afterwards to get notes from people that said they were laughing all the way, but actors — and playwrights and directors — need to know what’s hitting and what’s missing in the moment.

Self-producing live theater is quite different from self-producing even a live streamed zoom performance. We’ve done both and now commit only to the former. Why?” Irish critic and essayist Fintan O’Toole explained that: “Live performers … make their own decisions, here and now, in this moment. In a filmed performance, the performer loses that power. It belongs to others — the director, the editor. But this also applies to us as members of the audience. At a live event, we choose where we look and how we listen. In a virtual event, other people are — sometimes heavy-handedly, sometimes subtly — making those choices for us. This is what we miss about live performance: the autonomy and integrity of the performer, our freedom to shape our own responses, the sense of our shared presence in space and time.” These are some of the vital aims that a self-production serves.

And with that, we’ll take a break and hope that others will offer their agreements and disagreements with what we have written so far. Then we will conclude our series with four final installments. In the meantime, break a leg!