Is the Audience Alive?

At the beginning of the semester, I asked my Shakespeare on Film students if theatre is a dying art. Overwhelmingly, they argued it is not. These aren’t biased theatre students. These are students, traditional and nontraditional, from fields such as nursing and business who are taking the course to fulfill their arts requirement. But they see that theatre’s pulse, while occasionally thready, shows signs of continued life.

Despite their insistence that theatre’s still alive, these same students admitted they rarely, if ever, attend theatrical events. They blamed accessibility issues. They complained about the high costs of theatre tickets (they’re not wrong—I often miss performances I would otherwise see because the ticket prices are out of my range). They complained about local theatre companies’ lack of marketing; they easily know when movies are released, but they don’t know where to begin looking for locally-produced plays. Most of all, though, they complained about the inconvenience. Who, after all, would bother going out to a theatre when they can simply “click a few buttons on their remotes” from the “comfort of [their] own home”?

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