For a few years now I’ve performed guitar and sang in my church band in Brooklyn. This part-time music ministry means I’m not actually a layman, and have sometimes guiltily questioned: If I weren’t main the music, how usually would I really go to church and sit within the pews?

My relationship to the artwork type I cowl typically prompts an identical soul looking. As a critic and reporter, I not solely see far more theatre than the typical individual; I’m additionally blessedly insulated from ticket costs by press comps. So whereas I’ve what I feel are knowledgeable impressions and opinions concerning the cutting-edge type and the business, I do know I’m not consultant of most theatregoers. I as soon as heard a critic describe his job as “skilled viewers member,” however neither he nor I might be mistaken for a typical viewers member.

So, as with my musing about churchgoing, I typically suppose: If it weren’t my job to see theatre and I needed to pay for tickets, which exhibits (and what number of of them) would I really present up for? I received’t play favorites right here, however suffice it to say I’d be choosier. I would prioritize proximity and respectable parking; I would prize familiarity, not essentially within the sense of looking for out time-tested classics or buzzy revivals however within the sense of loyalty to artists I like and have grown up watching.

The query of which and the way a lot theatre common of us will assist with their money and time has develop into freshly pressing, even hotly contested, up to now yr, as theatres’ reopening because the Covid lockdown has confronted an ideal storm of diminishing funding, rising supplies and labor prices, and declining attendance within the mixture, regardless of some vibrant spots. In making an attempt to get my head round these daunting challenges, significantly the final one, my theatregoing thought experiment (which exhibits would I personally pay for?) can solely take me thus far.

Fortunately, that’s the place journalism is available in, and never solely by yours actually. In this particular problem centered on the viewers, we’ve bought Rosie Brownlow-Calkin’s have a look at the state of subscriptions, Amanda Finn’s examination of evolving viewers norms, Gabriela Furtado Coutinho’s roundtable with entry advocates about methods to make theatre a real dwelling for all, and Cara Pleasure David’s overview of theatres’ well being and the assorted methods to measure it. In a lot the identical manner I contemplate myself conversant with the aesthetics and operations of the theatre within the U.S. over the previous few a long time, I’d enterprise this journal has a superb observe file as a commerce publication for and concerning the of us who make theatre. With this problem, we’re consciously turning our gaze away from the stage to take inventory of the parents who all this theatre is made for. Who’re they and what do they worth? We hope to reply a few of that.

Among the many many portraits of theatre audiences on this problem, my favourite is a photograph illustrating Crystal Paul’s account of La Liga Teatro Elástico’s Beast Dance, a puppet theatre piece that was a part of Chicago Worldwide Puppet Theater Competition in January. We see an all-ages crowd in rapt consideration, some standing, many sitting on the ground of the Nationwide Museum of Mexican Artwork, sporting handmade paper headpieces that mirror the frilly wolf-human hybrids of the puppeteer-performers. I don’t find out about you, however for me this picture evokes the type of intimate, blurred-boundary viewers engagement that first launched most of us to the vivifying interplay of stay efficiency—the backyard, to cite Joni Mitchell, which all of us have gotten to get ourselves again to.

Rob Weinert-Kendt (he/him) is editor-in-chief of American Theatre.

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