Attracting the youth audience

A British blog explains an effort by the U.K. government to attract more teens and young adults to theaters.

If they're complaining about the paucity of government support for the arts in general (and theater in particular) -- and about the woeful state of arts education in the schools -- even over in Merrie Olde Englande, then whatever are we to do here in the red half of a blue state?

NEW, Sept. 30:
Charles McNulty of the L.A. Times — Bobo's writing instructor in February — suggests that a) if anyone deserves free theater tickets, it's "the AARP crowd" who have loyally attended theater all their lives, and that b) a better goal would be to strive for government art subsidies that seek to establish an audience of _all_ ages for theater. You can't _force_ a video-on-demand generation to take the time to go out and attend a hand-crafted, time-intensive art form like theater. But you _can_ attract more of them with lower ticket prices and more accessible content.
Maybe folks just need more life experience (disappointment in love, several relationships, marriage and kids and mortgages, a pissy boss or two) to be able to relate to the concerns of adult drama. (As the heavy-set high school student in *The History Boys* complains, "Most of what happens in poetry hasn't happened yet to us yet.")