Is This Play Any Good? (July Fragment)

Having been an usher at a 320+ seat regional theater for the last two seasons, this is a question I've been asked a lot; "is this play any good?" I mean, our patrons are well meaning. In a city with a lot of potential leisure opportunities they choose to attend the theater. Tickets are $20-40 a piece, sometimes more for a 'hot' ticket. Many of our patrons subscribe or even donate additional money. Don't they have a right to expect that they will enjoy at least a percentage of the productions they see at a theater they support?

"Is this play any good?" they ask me. They cite reviews. And they complain about the last play they saw at (fill in the blank) and enumerate the ways in which it was disappointing. "I didn't understand it", "I was insulted by", "it tried to change my views about... but I just can't believe in that", and "I just want to be entertained". I hear these sentiments over and over. A recent favorite was the woman who walked out of 'Bengal Tiger in Baghdad Zoo'; "this is not a pleasant play", she said.

How to answer them? To be honest there aren't that many pieces of theater that I can wholeheartedly endorse. I sit down to watch a play with the cynical eyes of someone who has trained and studied and worked in the medium for 24 years (wow that feels pretentious to say. But it's true I started studying acting and performing semi-professionally at the age of 8). I don't want to discourage the audience members, and I don't want to patronize them either. Sometimes I fall back on citing reviews or the positive feedback I?ve heard from other patrons. I try to highlight aspects of the production that I think they will or should appreciate. But when it comes down to it, I didn't like 'The Little Dog Laughed'; although I thought Julie White gave a great performance, and I thought thematically that it was a good fit for the KDT, being just a block from a major movie studio and with a lot of audience members who work or have worked in the entertainment industry. I didn't like 'Taking Over', although I think Danny Hoch is a very talented performer. I didn't like 'Lydia', although I respect the time and effort that CTG and the Denver Center Theatre put in to developing the play in a time where a lot of lip service is given to new play development but plays and playwrights languish in staged reading hell.


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