Comps
Friday, December 6, 2024
No, I’m not talking about the freebies we give to family and friends who come to our show. I’m talking about the way book proposals use the term: “comparables,” books that are similar to what you’re writing, books that yours could be compared to.
Theater has been comping the wrong competition for over a century.
At first, theater saw movies as the competition, which made total sense because once the Theatrical Syndicate abandoned most theater buildings on “the road,” theater owners began scheduling movies into their now-empty spaces. When theater was competing with silent movies, we focused on the fact that live theater had actors who talked; when Al Jolson and The Jazz Singer arrived in 1927, that argument no longer worked. Movies could provide entertainment for a much lower cost than live theater, while telling stories in the same way theater did: actors pretending to be characters. Ever since then, we’ve been trying to catch up. We hitched our wagon to “liveness,” especially if there was a national star in the cast. That worked a little. Then we tried to sell prestige–theatergoers were among an elite. Except that theater needed to sell a lot of tickets to make ends meet, so we couldn’t be too elite. At the same time, commercial theater tried to keep up with the spectacle that film could provide. That was harder, because film had more money and better technology, and once green screens and CGI started to appear, theater was on the ropes. Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark was (or at least should have been) the last gasp of that competition. One wonders how many actors have to be injured before our quest for theatrical spectacle will be abandoned.
TV was movies squared.
If movies killed theater with spectacle, TV stole all the non-spectacle stories: situation comedies, doctor shows, soap operas, domestic dramas, legal dramas, cop shows. All to be consumed without having to leave the comfort of your home. Then TV started comping movies, and the race was on. Meanwhile, theater kept on comping both of them (hey! see Hugh Jackman In Person in Music Man!), and kept getting it’s ass handed to it. Finally, streaming services and the internet delivered the coup de grace. Everything everywhere all at once without getting out of your jammies. Game over.
Now what? Comping Local Restaurants
The thing is that theater never should have been comping movies, TV, or streaming services in the first place, because all of them are mass media whereas theater is a local medium. Local in the sense that, at any one time, only the people present in a particular town in a particular building at a specific time can participate. This is so obvious, and yet it is usually ignored. No matter how popular the live version of Wicked is, the Gershwin Theatre can only hold 15,464 people a week, compared to the $165M the movie version brought in on the first weekend. To make the comparison concrete, the live theater version would have to sell every ticket for $10,669 to match the movie box office take. That illustrates the difference between “local” and “mass,” and we should take it seriously.
So if film and TV are not appropriate comps for theater, then what is? Well, I would argue that something like a local restaurant might be a good starting place, at least as far as scale is concerned. It is something that requires people to leave home to partake of a unique experience in a particular town and a specific space that has a limited capacity. People are eating something that might be conceivably cooked at home, either by themselves or in a frozen or delivered version ala Hello Fresh. So what is the “value added” that can make a local restaurant viable? Why are people willing to leave the comfort of their own home to pay considerably more for food than they’d pay to make it at home? Yes, if it’s a fancy restaurant, it sometimes has something to do with celebrating a “special event,” as a commenter argued about theater in a previous post on Creative Insubordination entitled The Value of Liveness. But a restaurant would have a hard time making ends meet by relying on Valentine’s Day and anniversary celebrations. Sometimes, people just head out to their favorite pizza place, even though they could just as easily cook up a frozen pizza at home faster and more inexpensively.
The point I’m trying to make isn’t really about what makes people go to a local restaurant (although I think people in theater would do well to think hard about that topic), but rather that the scale of a local business like a restaurant matches that of a local business like a theater, and so could serve as a more appropriate comp than a mass medium like movies or TV. This involves a real transformation in the way that we think about theater, and of artists’s place in the theater, which might be more of a sticking point than we’d like to admit, because we’d have to abandon fantasies.
Nobody becomes a “star waiter” working at a local restaurant; in fact, the idea of becoming a waiter in order to acquire international fame and fortune is patently absurd (Hollywood “discovery” myths to the contrary). Sometimes a chef might make the jump to celebrity status, I guess, if they end up on the Food Channel or publishing a bestselling cookbook, but for the most part being a waiter or chef or cook is an end in itself, something you do because you like the work or need the money. Someone starting a restaurant may have a vision involving its atmosphere and decoration, the type and quality of the food served, the friendliness provided to regular customers (“your usual, Norm?") or any number of things that will give the restaurant a special identity. But the goal isn’t mass fame, it’s local appreciation. And that, ultimately, is the first transformation in our thinking that needs to occur in order for theater to thrive.
What is it that Biff begs from Willy near the end of Death of a Salesman? “Will you take that phoney dream and burn it before something happens?” There are better dreams to dream than fame and fortune, one that focuses on the day-to-day enjoyment of making something artistically nourishing for people you care about and who care about you.
As Apple famously said, Think Different.