Open Rehearsal: The Court Theatre Blog
January 29, 2010
Sixty Five and Older
The Guardian asks: are audiences just too old?
Walters is particularly angered by the assumption that just because an audience is old, it’s reactionary: “Those people in your audience who are currently 60, the ones who get hammered as ‘conservative’ and ‘unimaginative’? They were born in 1950, which means they were graduating from high school in 1968. Maybe you’ve read about 1968 ... it was the year America was on fire.”
The real reason why older audiences are not so interested by some younger writers, he suggests, is because they’ve seen it all before.“Being shocked isn’t that big of a thrill anymore,” he writes. “Tell us something important about life. Something with some depth and complexity. Something with some heart and soul, some deep understanding.”
Walters’s attitude is a refreshing counterblast to a society that often seems in thrall to the cult of youth. But as Isaac Butler argues, it’s not entirely fair. Butler describes how one artistic director he knows did some market research into the baby-boom generation – people who are now 60-plus – and what he found shocked and depressed him: “Boomers, by and large, dislike surprise,” writes Butler, “which is why many previews now intentionally ruin the plots of movies. Boomers are among the least loyal of customers and it takes very little to lose their business etc.”
Full article here.
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