Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog
August 12, 2009
Economics of the Curtain Call
Chris Jones doesn’t like the money-back guarantee policy that came with Collaboraction and Teatro Visto’s El Grito del Bronx at the Goodman:
I hope the money-back guarantee dies a quick death, never to return. It’s not that I’m opposed to money-back guarantees in general—I recently took Home Depot up on a similar offer. But a piece of art is not a light fixture. And I think that such a speech [offering money back at the end of the show] is beneath the dignity of a fine artist like Torres.
It’s a bit like watching an actor leap down from the stage and start clearing tables. Those in the audience know about economic realities, but it still makes us uncomfortable. We don’t like to see those who bare their souls for an audience’s edification and enjoyment have to stoop to such things.
And although I had my problems with “El Grito del Bronx,” which I did not recommend, no reasonable person could have failed to see the effort, heart and craft behind that show. Nobody was making much money. Indeed, this wasn’t about the making of money. Demonstrably, this was a very personal endeavor on the part of everyone involved. Any thus I think anyone demanding a refund was being unreasonable.
Chris’s aversion to the money-back guarantee (and it does, understandably, seem to be a visceral aversion for him) reminds me Nicholas Ridout’s study on curtain calls—the social exchange at the end of a performance where the actors emerge to accept the applause of the audience. Ridout, a British performance theorist, writes about curtain calls as an economic exchange, but an exchange founded on gift-giving, which seeks to cloak its commodity-values in a social ritual
The audience is trying to figure itself as the recipient of a gift. Its applause is a paradoxical return, because it wishes to establish a relationship in which excess is preserved, in which the economics of exchange are somehow suspended. It wants to feel something extra, garner some ‘affecting surplus’ from the encounter…. A further indication of the affective force of the desire for this experience of the gift might be adduced from the sense of disappointment felt by an audience when actors do not take a curtain call at all. Applause that is offered, but no, as it were, accepted, with good grace, fails to satisfy, because it deprives an audience of the gain it has set out to win for itself through the gift of applause. (p. 165-6)
Is El Grito‘s money-back guarantee the same as receiving, say, a gift receipt with a birthday gift from your friend? Are you offended when the gift-giver says: “If you don’t like it, you can exchange it”? What if your boss says it? What if your child says it? I suppose it depends on the social configuration. For Chris, the appearance of actor Eddie Torres to offer the audience’s money back was a disruption, an offensive disruption, of a social pact, like forgetting to take the price tag off of a sweater you give to your mother. It’s tacky, it’s a faux-pas, it ruins the meaning of the act, to expose the economics of your gift. Ridout again:
...in the theatre the repudiation of the curtain call tends to signify a conviction that both actors and audience share something in their reasons for attending that transcends the theatre, and with it the comparable triviality of the market economy. (p.166)
On the one hand, my instinct is to agree with Chris that, no, theater is not a light fixture. On the other hand, to ignore the ways in which the theater we produce is a commodity bought and sold on a very particular marketplace leaves a lot out of the whole picture. Sure, American theater artists put in a lot of extra unpaid time because they love their craft, but that doesn’t mean that money, what little money there is that circulates in this industry, doesn’t have a very real effect, not only on theater workers but on the way we experience the work, too. It’s a tension, it’s a tension. A lot of my friends in theater ask themselves: what’s the tipping point where I stop giving my free labor to this company/director?
Pierre Corneille’s L’Illusion Comique ends with a comic scene depicting the actors dividing up the money from the night’s proceeds (curiously enough, the scene is cut from the Tony Kushner adaptation we’re staging early next year). Not to go all Marxist on Chris Jones, but if we can raise consciousness about what it is we do here, won’t our audiences be richer for it? My sense is that if we take a challenging piece of theater to an audience and say, “Look. We’re predicting this isn’t going to make a lot of money. It’s long/weird/offensive/unpopular/confusing/uncomfortable. Despite that, we’re convinced that it’s worth your $32 and two hours of your time. Please join us,” then audiences will come along for the ride. If a money-back guarantee can make risk more palatable, then let’s go for it.
(Source: Nicholas Ridout, Stage fright, animals, and other theatrical problems. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.)
11 Responses to Economics of the Curtain Call
When it comes to theater, a promise of satisfaction guaranteed or your money back is more of a warning than an invitation!
I agree with Mr. Jones in that I do not think reducing art to a commodity will catch on.
As to the curtain call, I believe the audience is obligated to stay if they have stayed until the end of the performance. Sir Georg Solti used to bow to the upper levels and not the main floor because the main floor patrons scurried to catch trains rather than stay until the orchestra finished their bows. I see applause by the audience as something due the actors who have given their all in a performance and only ask a few minutes in return from the audience.
I only recall one time an actor did not take a curtain call and she did not dare too!
By Marilyn Litt on August 13, 2009 at 4:52 pm
Concerning the money back guarantee offer, you bet I have a comment.
I think it’s cheap and pandering. It demeans the play, the actors and offends me as a member of the audience.
My wife and I have been series subscribers to Court since there was a Court. We consider ourselves a part of the “place”. I mean that in the sense of being a repertory audience member of a repertory theater group. I want that rep theater group to try things. If you suceed, and mostly you do, that’s great. If not, fine, I’ll be back for the next play and the next after that. The money for the ticket is my guarantee that you’ll keep trying.
It’s about our partnership in something grand and special. Live Theater.
By marty rosenbush on August 13, 2009 at 4:52 pm
It almost—almost—strikes me as funny that in criticizing this program, which is being applied for the first time to a play about race, about white privilege, about class privilege, (with no little rumination on the compromises that artists make to remain economically viable to boot), Jones chooses the analogy he does: It’s embarrassing for the audience to be reminded that artists very frequently have to labor at something other than their art? Good. Perhaps audiences need embarrassing. Perhaps the comfort of the audience—almost by definition in a position of privilege relative to the artists—is not the most important thing in the world in this context.
By Christine Malcom on August 13, 2009 at 5:09 pm
You want arts to progress and include a wider array of peoples; drop the pretentious attitudes. When was the last time you thanked a brick layer for the back breaking labor he did so you can sit in a nice air conditioned office. We don’t personally thank people for their hard work all the time, and I don’t see why actors should be any different. Believe me a packed theater would be a much better way of thanking the actor.
By Anon on August 13, 2009 at 5:55 pm
Yup. Fill dem seats in a myriad of ways and have the regard and applause flow as best it can beyond the gelt that also flows. Humility is often (not always) followed by exaltation. Here’s wishing for a full house and filled hearts.
By Jim Lavin on August 13, 2009 at 7:45 pm
I am not an actor, but an audience member. @Anon—I think “Give us bread, but give us roses” applies here. There is a special relationship and experience in that wooden o during the hour upon the stage.
To not applaud as you would not applaud a brick layer is wrong, but also flawed logic. If a bricklayer comes to my house, I shake his hand and I thank him and I compliment him. There are two many players and (we hope) too many audience members to make shaking hands practical after a performance, so the audience applauds.
(If the bricklayer builds my house, then the example would be like going to an art exhibit. You don’t applaud because the artist is not there. If you would happen to meet the artist, then you would shake hands.)
Taking away applause not only would diminish satisfaction for the giver and receiver, it would change the special experience of watching and performing.
I am curious Anon, are you currently an actor?
By Marilyn Litt on August 14, 2009 at 9:21 am
A play, opera etc cannot be treated like a garment which does not fit. What rationale would be applied to ‘money bak” on a play, concert, operta etc? You go there to see what is being presented with the knowledge that you may think it is great, soso or terrible. It is an experience you take with you. You do not wear it!
By Filomna Albee on August 14, 2009 at 10:02 am
If you had a money back guarantee for the 2007-2008 season, I would gladly have asked it back for at least half of the plays. The most miserable season in our fifteen years of subscribing.
By Stephen Lewis on August 17, 2009 at 10:00 pm
Interesting reactions as well as an interesting original comment! I have often felt entitled to my money back when a play was different from what was advertised, when a key actor was missing, or when condictions, e.g., cold or heat, or absurd requirements about what one could bring into the theatre have been in effect, but it does seem as though the way it was offered in this instance was at least boorish.
To refer to the CSO and Solti in this context is amazing. There must be no performing group less responsive to an audience’s applause than the CSO. They sometimes deign to stand, but there are few if any smiles, a strong aversion to eye contact, and some of them are wiping their instruments and encasing them as they “acknowledge” the audience. No wonder people walk out as the music ends!
I once gave a couple a wedding gift that I had selected to be part of a collection of glass that they had begun over the years while living together. I was hurt and shocked when I received a credit for it from the store where I had bought it. With no word to me, they had simply returned it. Of course, in that instance, I got my money back, but it still rankled.
I do think of ticket purchases and subscriptions as sort of social contracts. I have subscribed to Court some times, not currently. When I drop my subscription there, it is usually because of an unappealing choice of plays, but it has also been because of discourteous treatment at the box office and annoyance at the lack of a real exchange of ideas in the after-show talks. When they are offered, I almost always stay for them, but am frequently disappointed, especially when the artistic director uses them as opportunities for monologs, yet is unwilling to give his own rationale for many choices of programming, staging, etc.
By Peggy Sullivan on August 21, 2009 at 11:00 am
I am an artist in the San Francisco Bay Area who offers a money back guarantee. I am a firm proponent of the merging of “creativity” with business principles.To anyone who says that we need to teach the audience how to appreciate art or that the audience needs to learn to appreciate art, I think are missing the boat here.
The life blood of theater is draining because we, as a community, have too long felt that the audience needs to do this or that, for it to be art. “The audience needs to understand that we are doing Art” (with a big”A”)
Theater is dying because, as a community, we refuse to adapt and change. Theatre is dying because of our “noble” thoughts about what the arts are.
Can great art exist if theatre is a commodity? Of course it can. Are there artists and companies out there who can make it work for them? Of course there are!
Maybe, if we as artists started thinking that we produce a product, we can save ourselves from our own demise and begin to make some money that we can feed back into our society with the ability to do greater things than if we continue to pander to the “to be an artist one must be poor” mentality.
It is time to survive! And if you want to continue on with the old ways, then more power to you.
But if you really look at the arts landscape, there is no lifeline in sight. The audiences are getting no younger. The younger are getting older. We better adapt to the ways of the younger, if we want any of their business.
Michael Wayne Rice
YouReallyShouldBeFollowingMe dot com
By Michael Wayne Rice on September 1, 2009 at 11:58 pm
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I guess artists don’t like to interface with the real world, but I am much more open to going out to the theater where I can walk out and get my money back. After being burned for a number of performances, I’m leery of shelling out the cash to go to anything that doesn’t have stellar reviews.
By Anon on August 13, 2009 at 4:22 pm