Nostalgia and Familiarity Oversimplifies What Audiences Want

Cross-post with my blog Row X on ArtsJournal.com

I have no illusions that a New York Times feature in the Theater section will be able to tell the full story of the incredibly far-reaching theater sector, but I bristled more than usual at a recent New York Times article that profiles Milwaukee Repertory Theater and Gulfshore Playhouse as regional theaters that are “defying the odds”.

The article sets out to prove that success comes from leaning into familiar, upbeat programming and seeing strong attendance and financial results. Given the very real financial and participation challenges facing nonprofit theaters, it’s understandable that stories like this get traction as we all try to figure out where we go next as an arts field. Growth, stability, and survival matter always matter – and survival is a live question for many theaters.

But let’s put our critical thinking hats on and do some close reading to examine the assumptions of the article and what’s really happening. While I could dissect this from a straight arts management standpoint, since audiences are the focus of Row X, I’ll stick with that lens:

#1: Audiences know that there’s more to nonprofit theaters than sales, donations, and buildings

The New York Times journalist, Michael Paulson, sets a firm frame on the article that deserves more scrutiny: it allows for only one version of success, defined around big audience attendance, surpluses, and capital projects. Paulson tries to tell us something definitive about audiences and about what regional theater should be doing right now.

The theaters featured are doing well by metrics Paulson values: ticket sales, capital projects, and donor confidence. Those are legitimate goals, no doubt. Theaters ignore finances or attendance at their peril, and leaders want nothing more than for the theaters to stay open. But financial success and large audiences are not the only legitimate goals of nonprofit theater. They are certainly not the only ways audiences experience value.

Regional theaters have long held multiple purposes at once. Alongside selling tickets, they have supported artistic development of directors, artists, and designers, commissioned new work, employed local artists, partnered with schools, built education programs, and taken risks that didn’t always pay off immediately. Many of those activities don’t show up neatly in a box office report, but they matter deeply to audiences and communities all the same. They’re playing the long game.

When “thriving” gets defined primarily through growth and revenue, the rest of those goals get pushed to the side. It matters that Paulson puts these goals at the forefront without even acknowledging the other parts of a nonprofit theater’s mission: The New York Times is not called the “Paper of Record” for nothing; it remains highly influential in the arts, read by arts enthusiasts, donors, and Board members alike. For Paulson not to even mention the broader scope of nonprofit theaters is a painful omission that could have real consequences.

The article also leans heavily on the idea that audiences want familiar and entertaining shows right now. There’s some truth there. We’re living through economic uncertainty, political volatility, and social exhaustion. Ever since coming out of the pandemic, cozy vibes and nostalgia are trending everywhere, from film reboots to fashion to consumer brands. It’s not surprising that theaters are responding to that moment in their programming.

But regional theater audiences didn’t appear yesterday, and they weren’t built on familiarity and nostalgia alone. For decades, regional theaters like Milwaukee Rep have developed their audiences to expect a mix. A musical or classic alongside a new play. Something familiar paired with something thought provoking. Entertainment, yes, but across a season, audiences also expect a play about a tough social issue or a reinterpretation of a classic in a way that’s meant to address a current event. Audiences learned how to engage with challenging work because theaters repeatedly invited them to do so.

Have regional theaters been doing the most adventurous, provocative, cutting-edge work? No, and they weren’t necessarily designed to do so. We look to Off-off-Broadway, small companies, fringe festivals, and international touring companies for that kind of work. To have that expectation of regional theaters is to set yourself up to be disappointed. But you can expect that they will do solid, professional productions that do explore (if not “tackle”, to use another cliché) contested social topics.

To suggest now that audiences only want to be reassured flattens that history and the work that theaters have done across the years. It turns a temporary trend into a permanent trait.

More importantly, it treats “the audience” as if it were a single, unified thing. It isn’t.

#2: There is no one audience. Never has been. Never will be.

Audiences differ by geography, culture, politics, age, race, class, and local context. Berkeley Repertory Theatre won’t have the same season as Dallas Theater Center or as the Huntington Theatre, though they are all “regional theaters”. They respond to their local audiences, their histories, their on-the-ground conditions. Some audiences want escape. Some want to be challenged. Many want both, depending on the night, the artist, or the moment they’re in. Any claim about “what audiences want” that isn’t specific, localized, or backed by data is, at best, incomplete.

Generalizing from a few theaters in particular places, with particular demographics and donor bases, doesn’t tell us what audiences across the country want or need. It tells us what those audiences in those places are responding to right now.

There’s also an assumption baked into the article that theaters just blindly respond to audience preferences as they currently exist. But agency doesn’t run in only one direction.

Audiences have agency. They choose what to attend, what to skip, what to support, and what to advocate for. They always have. If a theater’s programming no longer aligns with what they want, they can go elsewhere, support a different organization, or push for change.

Theaters have agency too. They get to decide what kind of organization they want to be and what goals they prioritize. Not every theater needs to serve every audience, and not every audience needs to like every theater.

That pluralism isn’t a problem. It’s a feature of a healthy ecosystem.

The Times article gestures toward this complexity near the end, when Chad Bauman, Milwaukee Rep’s Executive Director, talks about balancing entertainment, provocation, and inspiration. That’s a far more accurate description of how regional theaters have historically operated and how many still do. The problem is that Paulson’s article only includes this approach to balance at the end of the article – AFTER it has three quotes that pick at an open wound in the theater industry about lack of representation in programming*.

None of this is an argument against familiarity, nostalgia, or popular work. Artists like making fun, crowd-pleasing work. Audiences enjoy it. Theaters need it. Artists also like making challenging work. Audiences also enjoy that. Again – there is no one audience, and we shouldn’t generalize about artists either.

The issue isn’t that some organizations are leaning into familiarity during a difficult moment. The problem comes when we let one response to one moment harden into a story about audiences in general and success writ large.

If we care about audiences, we owe them more than generalizations. We owe them specificity, nuance, and honesty about the many different reasons people show up to theaters in the first place.

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*Check out Nataki Garrett Myers and her extensive analysis and critique on the priorities and values of regional theater on her Substack.

Bauman also posted on his LinkedIn with some further thoughts.

Finally, if you want the real inside baseball, read this lively discussion in the Facebook comments of American Theatre Magazine including comments from some recognizable names from regional theater leadership.