8-1-08
Theatres Move Into Online Drama
“Digital” and “theatre” often seem like antithetical terms. The former is quickly reproducible and interactive (as anyone who has had fun creating a “mash-up” video can attest), while the latter requires a defined place and time for its audience—an audience that, even in shows that are dubbed “interactive,” usually has an agreed-upon set of rules to follow (no getting up and telling the performers to pause while you take a snack break, for example). Watching a movie over streaming video makes perfect sense, but it’s difficult to imagine anyone enjoying a two-plus hour video of a live theatrical performance while sitting in front of a flat monitor.
But those inherent contradictions between the forms don’t mean that theatres haven’t started coming up with creative ways to incorporate new media into their identity and their creative work. While many theatre companies still tend to use their websites mostly as a means of promoting their current shows and past history (archiving reviews, re-posting program information, etc.), and as a way of offering the convenience of online ticket sales, signs point to innovations that will change the way theatres think about the work they create, and the ways in which audiences are brought into discussions about that work.
Sometimes those innovations are based on sound business principles of brand expansion. On May 6, Second City announced that it was partnering with Los Angeles-based Media Rights Capital (MRC), an independent film/television and digital studio, to create short pieces specifically geared for online distribution, and that they would also be launching a new site, The Second City’s Quarantine, to showcase the new creative output.
Andrew Alexander, Second City’s executive producer, says, “We had been talking for at least two years about getting into the short film content business online. We had been searching around for what we felt would be the right mix of partnership.”
Through the Gersh Agency in New York, Second City made the connection with MRC. Alexander explains that, although the Quarantine site will be where the original online material resides, MRC will be looking at a variety of other sources for distribution, including YouTube. Currently, the planned launch will be sometime in September.
Current members of the Second City troupes in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Detroit, as well as alums, will be involved with the creation process, which Alexander says will be “very similar to how we produce a television show. There will be a head writer who is responsible for making things happen and moving the process along, and there will be producers who will say yea or nay.”
Alexander estimates that about four to five new full-time staff members will be on hand to help produce the work, with writers employed on a freelance basis. (Contracts with the actors’ unions and the Writers Guild are currently being hammered out.) Alexander indicated that Martin Short is one of the alums that have “expressed interest in an outlet for an idea that they might have.” Alexander hopes to draw distinction between the work available through Quarantine and the more anything-goes ethos of FunnyorDie.com, the short video comedy site started a year ago by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, where, says Alexander, “you get inconsistency of quality.” (Viewer-submitted videos, as well as those created by comedy professionals, are both available through the Funny or Die site.)
Alexander estimates that the initial outlay of cash on Second City’s part will be “a couple million dollars,” and the rights to the material would be retained by Second City and MRC. By contrast, the now-infamous “John.He.Is” campaign parody (embedded below) of John McCain, created by Los Angeles-based Second City alums, and based on the “Yes We Can” pro-Barack Obama video by will.I.am of the Black Eyed Peas, netted its creators nearly nothing, despite going viral almost immediately and hitting all the major media outlets.
“The big challenge is how to monetize these sites.” says Alexander. “[MRC] had a handle on it and they had the infrastructure to sell the advertising.” Alexander further notes that the business model “won’t just be banner ads. The message will be integrated into the piece. The content will come first and the advertising will come second.”
As a model of what he is looking at, Alexander cites an online ad that Amy Sedaris did for Microsoft Office, featuring a supporting cast of rabbits in her cupcake bakery. “For us, it’s a way to reconfirm the [Second City] brand and get a chance to really define it by the kind of material you’re putting up at the site,” says Alexander.
As reported in the May 9 issue of PerformInk, Collaboraction is one company that took digital audience participation seriously in this year’s Sketchbook Festival. Sketchbook Submit allowed anyone to respond to “14 inquiries” inspired by the pieces in this year’s festival (sample questions include, “What is your first memory as a child?” and “How do you feel about the American economy?”) via video, text, sound, or still images. In addition to culling through the responses and using them as “interludes” in between pieces on stage at this year’s Sketchbook (which ran through June 15 at the Steppenwolf Merle Reskin Garage), many of the submissions can also be viewed at the Collaboraction site.
Timeliness is key. Anthony Moseley, Collaboraction’s executive artistic director, notes, “The submissions we’ve seen have been based a lot on what is happening in the past three or four months.” Many of the submissions on the site take aim at the Bush administration, while others are more personal reminiscences of critical junctures in the creator’s life.
Not all audience input is solicited online with the intent of creating sincere art. Greg Allen of the Neo-Futurists, inspired by the conceptual artists Komar & Melamed, asked audiences to fill out online surveys to come up with “America’s Least Wanted Play” and “America’s Most Wanted Play” in 2007’s You Asked for It! (Komar & Melamed had long used the same gambit to come up with “Most and Least Wanted Paintings” and “Most and Least Wanted Songs,” broken down by various national preferences.)
“We set up a survey on Survey Monkey and sent it out to a thousand people,” says Allen of the initial process for the show. “You can arrange the data anyway you wanted. You could go in and see what women in Louisiana wanted. I could set it to see what people age 30-35 around the country want to see.” The questions on the survey yielded responses to “The Most Wanted Character” (in order from most to least wanted: The Clever Fool, The Eccentric Artist, the Inspiring God, and the Ordinary Undead) to “Least Wanted Setting” (ballpark, opera, airplane, hospital).
“The whole idea was to sort of mock this method,” says Allen. “Both America’s most wanted and least wanted elements were equally horrible. Who really wants to write the play that America most wants to see?”
That project aside, Allen notes that the Neo-Futurists were one of the first Chicago companies to have a website. Their blog features updates on the current line-up of short pieces in Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, as well as the company’s prime-time offerings and other news. Allen also notes that the Internet has been a boon in researching information for plays. For example, one current Too Much Light offering provides a running update on the number of deaths in the Iraq war and uses online sources to ensure as much accuracy in the figures as possible.
“We have plays that are centered around virtual life or spam or e-mails,” says Allen. “Since Too Much Light responds to everything, that’s an element of what we’re doing.” On the pragmatic side, Allen also notes that the Internet has made it easier for him to track down what companies are doing Too Much Light material or advertising their show as Too Much Light without obtaining performance rights, so he can follow up as necessary. “I once found seven illegal productions in one week,” says Allen.
House Theatre of Chicago had an Internet presence before they had even started producing, according to Dennis Watkins, House company member and director of marketing.
“One of the things Nate and Phil [artistic director Nathan Allen and executive director Phillip C. Klapperich] said early on was that if it’s not on the Internet, it doesn’t exist,” said Watkins.
Graphic designer Chris Burnham created the company’s first site. “We tried to make it as fun and interesting for as many visitors as possible,” says Watkins. “All of our company members were listed with information on them. There were paper doll cutouts that you could dress with different costumes. The goal was to introduce the character of the House.”
A couple years into the site, the House started their blog. “The focus of our work sort of shifted to creating community, for want of another word. We didn’t originally have anything as interactive as a blog. It was a sexy website and it was informative and it properly gave the character of the work. But it certainly didn’t allow for the great community building that the blog does,” says Watkins
For a company like the House, which produces about three or four times a year, the challenge is to keep fresh updated content online when the shows are on hiatus. Since many of the House artists are also active with many other projects around town, theatrical and otherwise, the blog has also been a tool for promoting their work. Graphic designer Burnham, for example, recently published his first graphic novel, “Nixon’s Pals,” and that fact was warmly noted in a blog entry last month. Still, Watkins admits, “Really structuring it to have a company member put something up there every week hasn’t really worked.”
Watkins says that, in addition to being a cost-effective marketing tool, compared to print or radio advertising, an interactive website “can be really useful for getting specific and real feedback that is different from when you’re doing an audience survey, where you ask them A, B, or C. They get to give feedback on their terms.” That feedback isn’t always positive, and Watkins acknowledges, “We felt it would be inevitable that if we gave people the opportunity to give us feedback on the work, there was a potential for negative commentary. But it really hasn’t been a problem that we’ve encountered on any large scale.”
One of the first big players in town to allow audiences to give feedback online is Steppenwolf, which launched its blog in January of 2006. Dave Urlakis, the digital assets director for Steppenwolf, credits the company’s artistic staff with the impetus behind the blog. “This was when After the Quake [Frank Galati’s adaptation of short stories by Japanese writer Haruki Murakami] was up. The artistic staff came around and said, ‘This is a show a lot of people have questions about and we’d like to find other ways to discuss them. What is this blog thing we’ve been hearing about?’”
Urlakis said he then told the artistic staff, “If you guys really want to do it, you really have to do this with content that won’t be found anywhere else. It’s not going to be reprinting press releases or the backstage letter, but it should really be a forum for the thoughts of artists.” Pop Multimedia created the web design for Steppenwolf, and Urlakis emphasizes that it was important for the blog to be as easily accessible as the online ticketing information (a separate tab for the blog appears at the top of the Steppenwolf home page).
The first entry, by Steppenwolf artistic director Martha Lavey in January 2006, says, “We encourage all kinds of feedback to our posts, but please refrain from the use of excessive profanity and inappropriate subject matter.” And audiences haven’t been shy in saying what they think. When Austin Pendleton encountered some line difficulties after joining the cast of The Crucible last fall, many patrons took him to task for it publicly, for example. Of course, praise is also on wide display—as I write this, congrats are coming online for Steppenwolf’s Tony nominations for August: Osage County. And as a neat example of cross-dialogue between companies, an entry from Moseley explaining Collaboraction’s “Submit” project is also on the Steppenwolf blog.
For Urlakis, the key is that the blog not just be an extension of marketing messages. “You’re never gonna see a blog post that ends by saying ‘buy tickets,’” maintains Urlakis. Keeping a diversity of voices on the blog is also important, so Steppenwolf doesn’t always use its most high-profile artistic staff to drive the blog content, nor does the content always relate directly to a current show. (Tracy Letts’ highly amusing deconstruction of problem audiences, “1% of You,” which posted in April 2007, is probably one of the most-linked items in the blog’s existence, according to Urlakis.)
Urlakis estimates that the blog gets about 7,000 hits per month, and that the readership has gone up about eight percent every month since its inception. In some cases, the blog also contains snippets of video interviews, though use of live performance video runs headlong into Equity regulations, which Urlakis says can be “a little vague and unclear.” Steppenwolf also plans to start podcasting through its website later in the summer.
Urlakis identifies one of the great advantages for theatre companies that maintain a lively interactive online presence. “A weakness of live theatre is that it’s only available for a specific period of time in a specific location. With the blog, you can read about the work whenever you want, wherever you want.” And many of those reading won’t necessarily be those already familiar with a company’s work. Watkins says that the House blog “has helped us contact people outside the immediate Chicago community. It’s a great community-building tool.”