Actors and techies: Buck up

Charles McNulty delivers a pep talk to theater-lovers in the L.A. Times — bloated musicals, yes, but also innovative ones; more than half a dozen promising young playwrights; and a warning that times only seem to be bad because, you know, so did the Panic of 1893 at the time.

It's time for an end-of-year shout-out to all those Spokane-area theater artists who labor on and on for less and less and nothing. When has it ever NOT been a time of crisis in the theater world? Your contributions keep a 2,000-year-old international venture going. Keep putting on the eye liner and God bless you.

[ photo: playwright Rajiv Joseph (Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo); from secondstagetheatre.com in New York City ]

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.")