Joe Bannister & Leon Annor in As You Like It at the National Theatre (Photo: Johan Persson)

Four words. Why do four words bother me so much?

After all, they appear in one review of an As You Like It production at the National Theatre in London that I’m highly unlikely to ever see. So why are these four words – which appear in a parenthetical clause, by the way – still on my mind a week after the review, by Dominic Cavendish in The Telegraph, was published? Well, I guess we should start with the four words in question.

“Man mountain black actor.”

Have I taken these words out of context, in order to emphasize them? I have certainly extracted them from a much longer sentence, but that’s because they are so fleeting in the overall review as to pass by unnoticed many readers. Here’s the full sentence:

“A match is set up for Orlando against the wrestler Charles (man-mountain black actor Leon Annor in shiny gold cape) – this test of mettle is conducted on crash-mats with lots of flashing lights, pounding rock-music and moronic chanting by the spectators.”

My first question is, simply, does the actor’s race matter? None of the other actors are identified by their race in the review, although there are other actors of color (or to cite the UK term, “BAME actors,” referring to Black, Asian and minority ethnic) in the production. Is there any legitimate reason for calling out this one actor’s race, since it is not being discussed as germane to any interpretation of the production or the particular scene. It is, so far as I can tell, casual and irrelevant. Which makes it stand out to me all the more.

Combined with “black,” does “man mountain” mean to imply that the character is in some way more dangerous or threatening? It could certainly be read that way. Would that have been mentioned if Annor was white? Of the more than a dozen reviews I read, many of which don’t mention Annor at all, his size is only mentioned by Matt Trueman for Whatsonstage.com, who simply notes that the actor is “large,” without any racial identification. Another critic, Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail, made note of a “plump shepherdess” in the production, which could prompt its own questions about whether size mattered at all in referring to an actress, but he didn’t see any need to point out that she is white. So I think it’s fair to say that Cavendish is alone in choosing to call Annor the equivalent of “a giant black man,” a construct which I would hope would set off alarms of caution to any writer or editor on either side of the Atlantic. Though in this case, it obviously didn’t.

Set on the path of investigation by these four words, I did find one other review that touched upon the race of the actors in this production. On Londonist.com, Franco Milazzo wrote, “The colourblind casting of Wringer is a masterstroke, his austere tone providing just the right level of gravity.” His reference is to Leo Wringer, a BAME actor, as Duke Frederick, and it’s fairly puzzling as well, even though it’s laudatory. After all, if Milazzo acknowledges the casting as colorblind, why bring it up at all, and why bring it up specifically when referring to a black actor, rather than a white one? Is it possible that when Milazzo speaks of “austere tone” he is referring to skin tone? That certainly seems to be part of the construct. But I hope it’s an accident.

In the examples I’ve cited, “austere tone” and “man mountain” might not be worth mentioning on their own, but when combined with the only references to race, both implied and explicit, they seem to me wholly gratuitous, even if they were done without any deep thought as to their implications. But it is the likelihood that they were casual statements by white critics about actors of color that I find so worrisome, since nowhere along the path from writer to editor to copy editor to publication did anyone apparently suggest that these mentions or constructions might be offensive, reinforcing racial division.

I think it’s important for me to note that I was questioned about my use of the phrase “female directors” just a week ago, when writing about the casual disregard of Pam MacKinnon in the headline of a story in which she was the main subject. It was raised because I made mention of MacKinnon as “one of New York’s most recognized female directors,” which wasn’t casual, yet even in the context of an essay about equality could give the impression of setting women apart from men in a subordinate way. In hindsight, perhaps it wasn’t a necessity that I address gender at that point, and it may well have undermined the main point I was discussing. I did not remove the reference because, even with a note about such an edit after the fact, I felt it would have been dishonest. But I acknowledge that my own intent may not have come across clearly, and therefore failed.

My exploration of racial references in reviews of As You Like It in the UK are in no way meant to be attacks on the British arts press or to suggest we don’t face the same problems in the US media. Cavendish’s review simply happened to say what in my opinion was the wrong thing at the right time. That is to say, I saw it at a moment when I am on ever more heightened alert to what some define as micro-aggressions by the members of the arts press, who are hardly alone in needing to grapple with their language choices surrounding the subjects of race, gender, and disability, to name but three. There are times, especially given the limited amount of space afforded to arts coverage, when mentioning race can be at best superfluous and at worst insidious.

I find myself reverting to a sentiment that I’ve expressed before about the arts, which is that we have the opportunity, and in my opinion the mandate, to model a better world on stage, on screen and behind the scenes. To achieve that, we also need those who cover the arts to be our partners in those efforts, so that there is consistent messaging not only within the work itself but in discussions, considerations and reporting on the work, writing which reflects equality and eradicates bias, be it subtle or overt, at every turn.

Howard Sherman is the interim director of the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts and director of the Arts Integrity Initiative at The New School College of Performing Arts School of Drama.

“You can’t draw sweet water from a foul well,” critic Brooks Atkinson wrote of his initial reaction to the musical Pal Joey. I don’t know whether Christopher Hart of The Sunday Times in London knows this famous quote, but it certainly seems to summarize his approach to reviewing the London premiere of Stephen Adly Guirgis’s The Motherfucker With The Hat, which one can safely say is light years more profane than the Rodgers and Hart musical.

Alec Newman, Ricardo Chavira & Yul Vázquez in The Motherfucker With The Hat at the National Theatre

“A desperately boring play,” “an absolute stinker of a play,” “untrammelled by such boring bourgeois virtues as self-restraint or good manners,” “turgid tripe,” and “a pile of steaming offal,” are among the phrases Hart deploys about Guirgis’s Hat. While I happen to not agree with him (and admittedly I saw the Broadway production, not the one on at the National Theatre), he is entitled to these opinions. It may not be particularly nuanced criticism, but it’s his reaction. There are other British critics with opposing views (The Guardian and The Independent), and some who agree (Daily Mail), so there’s no consensus among his colleagues. But within his flaying of the play, Hart reveals classist, racist and nationalist sentiments that, however honestly he may be expressing them, prove why he is unable to assess the play on its own terms, empathizing with its flawed characters, as any good critic should endeavor to do.

Take this example: “Like the white working class in this country, the PRs in America have picked up a lot of black patois.” Even allowing for differences in language between England and the U.S., referring to residents of Puerto Rico and “the PRs” is patently offensive, and also hopelessly out of date, all at once. The statement also suggests that Puerto Ricans are in some way foreign, when the island itself has been part of America for more than a century; it’s perhaps akin to saying “the Welsh in Great Britain” as if they’re alien. When he parses “black patois” as the difference between saying “ax instead of ask,” Hart presents himself as Henry Higgins of American pronunciations, which I strongly suspect he picked up from watching American television and film, without any real understanding of racial culture or linguistics here – and he generalizes condescendingly about a huge swath of the British populace for good measure.

Hart also refers to the “very brief entertainment to be had in trying to work out” the ethnic background of the character Veronica, first musing that she might be “mixed race African American” but acknowledging her as Puerto Rican “when her boyfriend calls her his ‘little taino mamacita’.” I don’t know why he was fixated on this issue, presumably based on a parsing of the skin color of the actress in the role, especially since the play provided him with the answer (though the same problem has afflicted U.S. critics encountering Puerto Rican characters as well). Would that he were more focused on the character and story. He briefly describes the plot as being about “one Veronica, who lives in a scuzzy apartment off Times Square, snorts coke and sleeps around. Oh, and she shouts a lot.” In point of the fact, the play is an ensemble piece, and if any one character dominates, it’s Jackie, the ex-con struggling to fight his addictions and set his life straight.

After going off on a tear about the play’s profanity, Hart makes a comment about the play’s dialogue, saying, “A lot of it is ass-centred, in that distinctive American way.” As an American, I have to say that I’m unfamiliar with our bum-centric obsession, outside of certain pop and rap songs, even if Meghan Trainor is all about that bass. But hey, I’ve only lived here my whole life, and spent 13 of those years living and working in New York, a melting pot of culture and idiom. What do I know?

I don’t happen to read Hart with any regularity, but my colleague at The Stage, Mark Shenton, has noted his tendency to antagonistic hyperbole in the past, having called Hart out for separate reviews of Cabaret and Bent which both seem puritanical and, in the latter case, homophobic. While I peruse a number of UK papers online, both via subscription and free access, even my limited exposure to Hart’s rhetoric suggests that The Sunday Times is an outlet whose paywall I shall happily leave unbreached.

I was actually going to shrug off the ugliness of the Hat review, but only about an hour after I read it, I came across some letters to the editor in The Boston Globe, responding to a review of A. Rey Pamatmat’s Edith Can Shoot Things and Hit Them at Company One Theatre. While I don’t think the critic in this case, Jeffrey Gantz, was trying to be inflammatory (as I’m fairly certain Hart was), he revealed his own biases in seemingly casual remarks. Noting that two of the characters are Filipino-American, he wrote:

They make the occasional reference to their favorite Filipino dishes, but I wish more of their culture was on display, and it seems odd that they have no racial problems at school.

Maria Jan Carreon and Gideon Bautista in Edith Can Shoot Things and Hit Them at Company One Theatre

Not every character with a specific racial or ethnic origin need demonstrate it for our consumption on stage; it may not be germane to the play or perhaps the characters created by Pamatmat are more steeped in American culture than Filipino. The statement is the equivalent of saying about me, were I a character, that though I mention matzoh ball soup and pastrami, it would be nice if I spoke more Yiddish, wore a yarmulke, or waxed rhapsodic about my bar mitzvah. My grandparents were all immigrants to the U.S., so I’m only second generation American, not so far removed from another culture and schooled at length in my religion, but I don’t constantly remind people of those facts.

As for not experiencing intolerance at school, Gantz must have a singular idea of what every young person who is not white experiences on a daily basis. That’s not to say that there isn’t ugliness and ignorance directed at people of color far too regularly at every level of American life, but perhaps that isn’t germane to the story Pamatmat wants to tell or part of the personal experience he draws upon (he’s from Michigan, incidentally). It’s not as if “racial problems” for students of color are an absolute rule of dramaturgy that must be obeyed.

That said, it’s ironic that Gantz criticizes the play for taking on “easy targets, notably bigotry and bad parents.” The fraught relationship between parents and children has been the fodder of drama since the Greeks, and it seems an endlessly revelatory subject; as for bigotry, if it is perceived as an “easy” subject, then perhaps Gantz, despite wishing “racial problems” on the characters, has no real understanding of the complexity of race in America and the many forms bigotry can take, enough to fuel 1,000 plays and playwrights or more. But he’s complaining that Pamatmat hasn’t written the play that Gantz wants to see, rather than assessing the one that was written.

I can’t speak to the general editorial slant of The Sunday Times, so while Hart’s recent rant may be in keeping with the paper’s character, I don’t think the implicit racial commentary of Gantz’s review is consistent with the social perspective of The Boston Globe. That leads me to wonder, as I have before, what role editors play when racial bias appears in reviews, such as in a Chicago Sun-Times review that appeared to endorse racial profiling. Yes, these reviews are each expressions of one person’s opinion, but they are also, by default, opinions which are tacitly endorsed by the paper itself. Reading these reviews just after following reports from the Americans in the Arts and Theatre Communications Group conferences, which demonstrated a genuine desire on the part of arts institutions to address diversity and inclusion, I worry that if the arbiters of art continue to judge work based on retrograde social views, it will only slow progress in the field that, as it is, has already been too long in coming.

 Howard Sherman is director of the Arts Integrity Initiative at The New School College of Performing Arts School of Drama and senior strategy consultant at the Alliance for Inclusion in the Arts.

As the cab pulled into the driveway, I got a glimpse of a sign propped against a telephone pole, starkly gray, black and white. On it were the typical details of any theatre production: the company, the dates and times, the title of the show, the website. Depicted was a single leafless tree, suggesting perhaps Waiting For Godot, or Spoon River Anthology, or maybe even a spooky Halloween attraction. I knew the show I was headed to was going to be a heavy one, so the foreboding promised by the sign wasn’t inappropriate; it followed a dictum I believe in strongly, which is truth in advertising. I just didn’t expect this for a high school play.

The play in question, about which I knew next to nothing beyond a website marketing synopsis, was Infinite Black Suitcase by EM Lewis, a playwright new to me. It was being done as a “major black box production” at Staples High School in Westport CT, a school whose theatre program I have heard about for literally decades, knowing kids and parents of kids who had at one time or another been connected with the school. While challenges to other high school plays have taken me to other towns in Connecticut – Waterbury, Woodbridge, Trumbull, Milford – I happened to meet the head of the Staples drama program when we served together for one year (two meetings) on an advisory committee for Samuel French, the theatrical licensing company. So I’d been keeping an eye on what he was up to, even as more pressing issues in high school theatre took me elsewhere.

Had I visited the Staples Players website and found they were doing Twelve Angry Men/Women/People/Jurors or To Kill A Mockingbird, I might not have been so quick to head to Westport along with the commuter crowd on their way home on Thursday night. But the online description of the play, not out of character with the school’s past repertoire, about various residents of an Oregon town dealing both with impending death and the aftermath of prior losses seemed so incongruous in a high school setting – even a high school with a 200 seat black box in addition to a spacious main auditorium – that I had to go up and see for myself.

Jacob Leaf, Claire Smith & Jack Baylis in Infinite Black Suitcase at Staples High (photo by Kerry Long)

Before going, I looked up the playwright, wondering whether the author wrote specifically for high school productions, and discovered that she has a number of professionally produced works to her credit (the play premiered in Los Angeles in 2005) and that Infinite Black Suitcase was in fact receiving its high school premiere. This prompted me to ask Roth, who was directing the play with his wife Kerry Long, how he came to the play. He responded that the folks at French had put him on to it, as he had been looking for a relatively large cast contemporary play.

I attended the first of four performances, and until 10 minutes or so before curtain time, I wondered if anyone would be there, so empty was the parking lot and theatre entrance – as did some students who seemed connected with the show, milling in the hallway near the theatre. An audience did arrive, a bit tardy, filling the small theatre to perhaps a bit more than half of capacity. Once inside, the trappings of the school fell away and the environment resembled many an Off-Broadway house. Indeed, the fact that the theatre wasn’t completely full showed that challenging work is always a hard sell, regardless of whether it’s professional or academic. Of course, it was a school night.

Jack Bowman & Joe Badion in Infinite Black Suitcase at Staples High (photo: Kerry Long)

Obviously my intent is not to review the play or production, but I can say that it met one criteria I declared important when I first started writing about high school theatre, namely that the work challenged the students performing in it. Playing (mostly) grief stricken adults mourning or anticipating death in a series of short, intertwined scenes, the students were “punching above their weight,” rather than merely romping through an entertainment that catered to their natural, youthful exuberance. The play also fulfilled what Roth had told me led to its selection, in that the 16 actors were a genuine ensemble, each afforded at least one “moment” in the 80 minutes to showcase their abilities.

Contemporary drama is hardly unknown in high school theatre, although it was outside of my own experience years ago. A quick glance at the Staples repertoire over many years shows that, as did the most compelling portion of Michael Sokolove’s book Drama High, in which high school students performed Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s Good Boys and True. That said, in the Educational Theatre Association’s survey of the most produced high school plays, only one contemporary play makes the top ten: John Cariani’s Almost Maine (at number one). Surely Cariani’s play stands atop the list because while originally produced with four actors and lots of doubling, it easily affords the opportunity for a larger cast to play its many roles without repetition, expanding to meet the interest and needs of high school drama, where musicals with casts of 50 are far from rare. Cariani’s new play, Love/Sick, might well appear on the list soon.

The rest of the EdTA list is decidedly older plays, from public domain works like A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Importance of Being Earnest to American classics like Our Town, Harvey and You Can’t Take It With You. While I have affection for all of the plays which are most frequently seen, with a particular and deep admiration for Our Town, a play often mistaken for pablum when it is really a profound meditation on death, I do worry, as with musicals, that even as the canon of theatre literature grows, the majority of our high schools produce the same standards year after year, the experience at Staples, the popularity of The Laramie Project and Sokolove’s story of Levittown PA notwithstanding.

This may well be a byproduct of the downsizing of the American play. Ask any playwright and they’ll tell you how they have to craft their works for casts of four to six, preferably with a single set, in order to get them done; look at the most produced plays in America and you’ll find those small casts: Venus in Fur (two), Red (two), God of Carnage (four), Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike (six), and so on. So when high schools seek to involve as many students as possible in theatre outside of musicals, they’re forced back to the days when larger casts were de rigeur. On the one hand, we can say that this only reflects modern trends in professional theatre, and students should work with the same expectations, but in practice small cast plays either deny students the chance to learn about dramatic ensembles or the chance to tackle new work.

I have to hand it to Roth for putting his students up to the challenge of Infinite Black Suitcase, although I suspect it’s unlikely to be come a standard work in the high school repertory. But I’m also pleased to know that it’s not the only option out there. Student-written plays, although typically one-acts, afford high schoolers the opportunity to take on work by and about their peers, although that’s not without its challenges, as cases in Everett MA and Wilton CT have shown. Lend Me A Tenor author Ken Ludwig premiered one of his plays, a holiday show, at a high school near his home. There is also a thriving subset of writing targeting the academic market, though it is wholly unfamiliar to me.

One model that I wish were better-known or, better still, duplicated in the U.S., is the one forged by NT Connections in England, in which the National Theatre commissions new works by major contemporary playwrights specifically for secondary schools to perform. This may give the writers a chance to work on a larger canvas than they can with works seeking professional production, while letting the students take on modern plays crafted specifically for them that aren’t necessarily simplified for them or condescending to them, by writers they well might be reading about in the culture pages. Though I admire the concept, I regret knowing very few of these plays; I can, however, heartily recommend Mark Ravenhill’s Moliere riff Totally Over You.

I must come back to one last aspect of the experience of seeing Infinite Black Suitcase at Staples High. In my experience as an audience member seeing high school theatre, plays or musicals, I am always in the position of watching a show I’ve seen before, in many cases more than once, its words and music well known to me. With Suitcase, my experience was perhaps closer to the majority of my regular theatergoing precisely because I didn’t know it. I wasn’t spending the evening just seeing how well the kids managed to perform a familiar tale, I was actively engaged in watching the play itself, since I had no idea what would happen next and, for me, the Staples cast – of students I’ve never met, and so have no reason to respond to with indulgence or affection – is forever linked with the play, as with any show when one sees it for the first time. For Infinite Black Suitcase, they are my original cast.

P.S. I continue to learn a great deal about high school theatre as I see more and write more and as readers respond to what I write. If you have other examples of high school theatre giving students the opportunity to take on challenging contemporary or even new work, I hope you’ll share it in the comments section below. Teach me, and share so that other students and teachers can learn as well.

If supply and demand is a fundamental tenet of economics, then the tweet offer last summer from New York’s Soho Rep, during its sold-out run of Uncle Vanya, made no sense – “99¢ Sunday performance tonight at 7.30pm”. Why would it undermine something so desired as a seat to this show? Why wasn’t the price for this heretofore unavailable cache of seats $299.99?

As explained on its website: “Soho Rep is thrilled to offer 99¢ Sundays on selected Sunday performances to make our shows accessible to the widest audiences possible.”

The catch was that one could only buy the tickets, in person, an hour before the show. While admiring the gesture, I had visions of hundreds of people showing up and most being disappointed, because Soho Rep seats only 75.

Certainly one could look at this offer and think it is great value. That is true for those who were able to buy a seat. For those who were turned away, it was a disappointment and loss of time. And time, to use another basic economic tenet, is money. These days, however, the cost-value equation in theatre is vastly more complicated than ever before. As price has become fluid, it is hard to determine where true value lies.

When people wait in line, sometimes overnight, for the Public Theater’s free Shakespeare in Central Park, the ticket they get is indeed gratis. But if seven or eight hours sleeping among strangers outdoors results in attendance at a disappointing show, which can happen, then there was a high cost for little value (or, with a great show, a cashless bargain), calculable only by a subjective assessment of the worth of each individual’s time (although the overnight experience is its own type of participatory theatre).

While the time commitment necessary for acquiring tickets for Shakespeare in the Park is likely much greater than that required for 99¢ Sunday at Soho Rep (unless one is lucky enough to secure a ticket through the ‘virtual line’ online), the odds are also more favourable, since the open-air Delacorte seats some 2,000 per performance and every single performance is free, although the commitment to acquire a ticket carries risk through the final curtain – should it begin to rain ten minutes into the performance, the show may have to stop and all value is lost.

To go to the opposite end of the spectrum, take Book of Mormon, arguably the hottest ticket on Broadway. The least expensive ticket is priced at $69, but if you can secure one, it may well be for a performance months away. If you do not want to wait so long, you can, if you can afford it, buy a VIP seat for up to $500. This is a pure case of supply and demand, but it is not new. Eleven years ago, The Producers began offering premium seating at $488 per ticket. There were, then as now, various expressions of dismay, but desire trumps thrift.

Some might argue that the scarcity and cost of Mormon serves to make the experience even more valuable, as price can be an expression of worth. Having seen the show becomes a status symbol. In a unique move, perhaps an effort to diffuse frustration on the part of thwarted or economically constrained would-be ticket buyers, Mormon periodically holds ‘fan appreciation day’ performances, distributing tickets for free, akin to the Shakespeare in the Park model.

What falls between these scenarios? Rush tickets, sold on the day of the show or shortly before curtain, have been common in regional theatre fordecades. Somewhat newer ‘pay what you can’ performances are offered by some companies at early previews. Broadway shows have adopted the ‘ticket lottery’ model, holding back front-row seats at young-skewing shows such as Wicked or American Idiot, available at low price through a raffle two hours prior to curtain. In most of these cases, access to the theatre itself is essential. Every instance carries risk (will you get a ticket?), personal cost (time and effort) and value (cheap tickets).

In the UK, the Barclays Front Row scheme at the Donmar Warehouse is a lottery-rush hybrid, guaranteeing 42 low-priced seats at each performance, sold Monday mornings for the coming week (with a website clock counting down to the moment of release).

Discounting is rife on Broadway. All but the biggest hits usually have discount offers, sometimes as much as 40% off the declared value, that can be uncovered with an internet search, or in your mailbox if you are a regular theatregoer. Discounts not only allow, but also encourage, advance sales, with no great time investment. Producers trade savings for guaranteed money in the till.

The TKTS booth in Times Square may yield a 50% off price, only day-ofshow and it requires your time and presence, as lines can be long and subject buyers to the vagaries of weather (in contrast to the Leicester Square booth in London, where I have never waited more than five minutes). Both the UK and US TKTS booths have partially reduced potential disappointment by listing available shows online or by mobile app. The actual discount can be variable.

In another iteration of price/value matrix for theatre tickets, dynamic pricing seems the most clear-cut exemplar of supply and demand. I say ‘seems’ because those who employ such systems, in which prices shift according to popularity, tend only to shift prices upward opportunistically, such as increases during holiday weeks, or as a limited run approaches capacity. Price reductions are not usually found at the box office. Price charts in Broadway theatres are now all displayed on video monitors, the easier to alter as needed. Dynamic pricing is not employed only by commercial productions – subsidized theatres use it as well, raising for some the question of whether not-for-profit theatres are now pursuing profits, or simply maximising their income to support ongoing artistic and community efforts.

There is one more model of the theatrical price-value challenge, seen in the £12 Travelex season at the National Theatre in London and the $25 price for all seats, thanks to Time Warner, at New York’s Signature Theatre. These both offer great value at a most reasonable cost, as both are exceptional companies. The sponsors that make such programmes possible, as well as the theatre staff who secure the funds, are to be applauded. But with the stated goal of making theatre accessible to everyone, it is interesting to consider what both the short-term and long-term implications will be. When top-notch theatre is offered at an artificially low price, does it make the challenge of selling tickets for every competing organization that much more difficult? Could these prices simply be providing those who can afford market price a discount they never sought? Will patrons forgo comparable theatre devoid of subsidy?

In the jungle of discounts and rising costs, we have to look at the National, Donmar and Signature efforts, and others like them, as the start of admirable and essential long-term experiments. Since low-priced tickets are not being offered simply to fill houses, but to make tickets more generally accessible, they are bellwethers that can tell us if price is indeed a barrier to theatre attendance, and if, by removing that impediment, theatre can draw in new and younger audiences.

Signature’s can only be studied at some point in the future, as every ticket is low-priced, flat rate and subsidised for years to come. The National reports that annually, 22% of the Travelex tickets are sold to first time attendees. The very early weeks of the Donmar plan shows some 40% of the Front Row seats going to patrons new to their customer rolls.

As the means of selling and acquiring tickets mirror conventional marketplace practices, while at the same time initiatives rise up to spur sales to more demographically and economically differentiated audiences, the matrix of price and value becomes ever more complex. For producers, there is flexibility to adapt as never before. For patrons, the price points can become advantageous or prohibitive. Hopefully, in this new and perpetually evolving world, theatregoing will not be predicated and expanded solely on the cheapest access possible, but on the fundamental and incalculable premise of the art of the theatre itself having meaning for those who seek to attend.