In this quiet week between Christmas and New Year’s, the American Theatre Wing reaches a small milestone: the 300th interview on our podcast, “Downstage Center,” which will be released on Wednesday. I have to confess, when John von Soosten, who ran the “On Broadway” channel of the now extinct (I’m sorry, merged) XM Satellite Radio, and I began the program, I don’t think we were considering posterity. John wanted high caliber guests for his channel and the connections the Wing could bring to the table; the Wing was looking for an inexpensive way to create new content for our website and any national platform beyond our annual exposure via the Tonys.

John and my plunge into Downstage Center (which I’ll now refer to by our in-house shorthand, DSC) was simultaneously sudden and protracted. It was sudden because it didn’t take us very long at all to agree on a format, but then we experienced months of delay thanks to lawyers working out what was ultimately a rather simple agreement. So when everything got ironed out in April 2004, we then leapt to get the show started – but despite our fairly extensive experience in our fields (John in broadcasting, me in theatre) we did just about the worst thing possible. That is, we didn’t rehearse. If you go back to the very earliest DSCs from April and May 2004 (please, please don’t) you’re really hearing John and I working out the program on air with such guests as Bernadette Peters and Bebe Neuwirth, to whom I am eternally indebted and perpetually apologetic.

Over time, John and I evolved out a rhythm, which usually involved each of us asking two or three questions in succession, then ceding the microphone to the other. We worked things out as we went along, learning that if two hosts was often challenging (which it was), then having two guests at once proved even trickier, which is why you’ll notice that convention having slipped away rather quickly. Because we were working live to tape (well, digital file, but you know what I mean), we developed our own idiosyncratic series of hand gestures through which we could communicate during the program, a system about which we ultimately warned our guests. All of them were fine about it, save for James Earl Jones, who would stop speaking the moment our hands made any movements, even when we tried to do them out of sight. He later admitted he was just having fun with us, but when Darth Vader bellows, “What are you doing,” it rather stops the flow of conversation.

When we began the program, it was broadcast on XM – which had less than 1 million subscribers – and streamed from the ATW website. Satellite radio was only starting to gain an audience foothold, but even it was more established than the initiative The Wing undertook beginning in August 2005, something called podcasting. Vague language in our contract with XM permitted us to distribute the program in this new form via iTunes and as a result, those who didn’t want to pony up for an XM receiver and a monthly fee could hear the program for nothing. This was cutting edge five years ago, if that’s possible to believe.

It is safe to say, DSC was not a high priority inside XM. Our original recording space was handed over to the team of Opie & Anthony; we were banned from using it when we had the temerity to obscure some naked pictures prior to interviewing Dana Ivey and didn’t properly restore them. It’s probably just as well, as the studio under their reign featured an awful lot of Purell bottles and Lysol wipes for my comfort, suggesting what might have been going on at other times of day. We ultimately used, I believe, six or seven different studios over the course of the show’s run on XM.

The end of the XM era began in 2007, when it was announced that Sirius Satellite Radio and XM would merge. But then a funny thing called regulatory approval proceeded to delay the merger for some 18 months, a time during which employees of XM (and I’m told, Sirius) had no idea what would happen when the two companies were conjoined. No word on programming, no word on employment. Limbo.

So John and I just kept turning out DSC every week, always wondering which one would be our last. The end, when it came, was fairly swift, and was every bit as unfortunate as the kind of corporate downsizing we see portrayed on film and TV (and for too many, I’m sure, in real life). John and DSC both went off the air in November 2008 after an interview with Jan Maxwell. 227 editions wasn’t a bad number, and they were all safe in the files of the Wing and perpetually available to the public via our site.

Over the next few months, there were intermittent conversations with the folks who held sway over the Broadway channel at Sirius/XM. Despite the urging of fans and some inside the Wing, I was holding out hope that we could retain our broadcast berth, but after a series of occasional talks, we finally got the word that there was no place for DSC on the Broadway channel. “Too much talking,” I was told. In a Catch-22, I was also told we would not be considered for any of the talk channels, because they wanted to keep their theatre programming exclusive to the Broadway channel. Other broadcast outlets declined our hour-long conversations with theatre pros as well; we simply didn’t fit the mass media model, which was definitely about sound bites and rarely about theatre.

Now by this time, podcasts were common, coming from basements and bedrooms, as well as studios, all over the place. But because the studios of XM had given us a really high-quality aural experience, I was loathe to settle for something less than optimal. I was also concerned as to whether we could retain the caliber of guests we’d been enjoying if DSC became something recorded in our office conference room. But thanks to the opening of CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism and our longstanding relationship with CUNY TV, which managed the technical facilities of the J-school, we were afforded access to a fully equipped radio studio and an expert tech staff, so we could restart DSC with the same level of professionalism that characterized the XM experience. Taping began in July 2009 and the show returned, podcast only, in August.

We didn’t come back exactly as we were. John, as our listeners know, was not part of the reconstituted program (he’s fine though, by the way; we spoke last week). Our lack of budget and what had been an ongoing challenge of working out the various schedules of two hosts as well as those of guests and the studio dictated that we keep it as simple as possible, so I would fly solo. But as the theatre insider of the original pair of hosts, I often think of John as I record the show now, remembering that not everyone will know, when a guest mentions the choreographer “Jerry,” whether they’re referring to Robbins or Mitchell, and I should clarify for them.

It was gratifying to find that our fans hadn’t unsubscribed from iTunes, as so as soon as we returned, so did the downloads. Now, 73 programs since our return, we will have served out just under 1 million mp3 files of DSC in 2010 alone, and more than 3 million since the podcasts began.

As for guests, we’ve had no significant problems. The podcast format is now a recognized platform for publicity and exposure, and the artists seem to revel in having an hour to discuss their work in-depth. Our 300th guest is, fittingly, someone of great stature in the field, the composer John Kander, following our previous milestone programs: #250 with Stephen Sondheim and #200 with Hal Prince. While our 301st program will feature a return guest, Sir Alan Ayckbourn, we strive to avoid returnees, and the field of theatre is sufficiently vast and filled with talent that we don’t expect other return guests for a long time (unless there are other major playwrights who have 75 plays under their belts).

Personally, I had the opportunity to interview my “most wanted” guest, a goal I set when we began in 2004: Sir Ian McKellen, back in October. So now I have set an even more challenging, but not necessarily insurmountable, goal. Sam Shepard, I’m after you, sir. Please?

For all who have listened to and supported Downstage Center, thank you. Please don’t hesitate to suggest future guests, and we’ll do our best to get them talking. Best wishes for the new year.

This post originally appeared on the American Theatre Wing website.

Early last week, my attention was drawn to two separate blogs about arts audiences, one extremely current, the other some 10 months old. Our friend the Internet is not always a linear purveyor of information, but I am not a linear consumer either.

The recent blog, by Barry Hessenius on the website of the Western States Arts Federation, concerned the issue of whether we should be “cultivating connoisseurship” in our arts audiences. It was provoked by a fascinating monologue by the author Fran Leibowitz, captured by Martin Scorsese for the HBO documentary Public Speaking, which I highly recommend for its subject’s incredible insight and wit. The particular statement discussed the devastating loss of high culture audiences due to the scourge of AIDS, and how the loss of passionate, devoted, educated audiences had an impact on the many organizations they had patronized.

The older blog coincidentally turned up on my radar at about the same time, via the invaluable 2 AM Theatre site. In it, Tricia Mead wrote about “curating audiences,” so that shows are received by the public most likely and best equipped to appreciate them. Each piece is provocative and together they’re irresistible in the intellectual challenge they pose to those concerned about and dedicated to theatre audiences.

Ironically, however, as much as I appreciated both of them, I actually take a contrary position, not because I fear charges of elitism, but because I am at heart a populist. I really don’t understand why theatre isn’t considered part of popular culture, since it sits alongside Star Trek, runaway train movies, Stieg Larsson novels, The Beatles andEntertainment Weekly in the jumbled warehouse of my worldview.

Yet, my copious consumption of popular culture aside, I am, to most, a theatre connoisseur. Though I am not formally trained in theatre, and have no academic underpinning to my enthusiasm or career, I have at this point in my life easily seen several thousand productions and I can recall them, discuss them and debate them with the same passion that sports fans have for their team’s achievements. Much as I wish to be, I am not the average theatergoer, nor will I ever be again.

But I am a firm believer that our greatest efforts must be spent on cultivating new audiences, and so Hessenius’ extrapolation from Leibowitz’s comments strikes me as unnecessary. I believe that connoisseurs are self-made, possibly even genetically coded. We can expose audiences to theatre (or any of the arts), but so long as their early exposure is at a minimally proficient level of quality, it is something within them that ignites and makes them (to use the marketing term) “avids,” which then leads them to consume the arts with ever-greater frequency, seeking out more knowledge of the discipline and more like-minded individuals, ultimately arriving at the level of “connoisseur.” I can only use myself as an example, but if exposure and knowledge were sufficient, I would be an opera buff, but as I have confessed before, I am unmoved at that form of musical drama. Also, despite a memory that easily recalls who did the special effects for the flop Broadway Frankenstein in 1981, I am unable to discerns most pieces of classical musical from each other, despite many trips to the symphony. Fundamentally, I believe connoisseurs are either hard-wired or self-made, not created; I also think we have to remember that there is a fine line between the true connoisseur and the aesthetic boor, so we must be careful that we don’t lead people over that line.

As for Trisha Mead’s musings on “curating audiences,” I think she has taken the language of connoisseurship and used it to elevate the work that every marketing department, every p.r. department is doing every day; if there’s a target audience for a certain piece, they’d better be going after it, or they’re derelict in their jobs. Her admittedly appealing fantasy of an “audience designer,” notwithstanding, shrewd promoters are forever curating audiences, but that language is what brings me up short, not the actual effort. “Curation,” like “connoisseur” carries a dose of elitism that must forever be guarded against, except on those rare occasions where we are truly toiling in the fields of rarified culture.

Our ability to truly curate audience lies in direct proportion to the singularity of our organization’s artistic vision, and the availability of alternative visions in the same market. If your company is in a major city with a variety of established and diverse theatre companies, your artistic director is free to “narrowcast” in their program, just as the marketing team (and the development team, for that matter) then have the latitude to seek a select audience to see and support that work. But if you are one of the very few choices in your market, you cannot afford to be precious or exclusive about the audiences you seek.

Both of these theories are fundamentally based in the actual artistic work of the company, and must not be pursued simply for the sake of marketing ingenuity. But the bottom line is that in order to find the true aficionados, in order to draw in the idealized audience for each work presented, you must be working from the largest base possible, and that returns us to my argument for populism. Let’s face it, unless your work is profoundly narrow and specialized, you need to cast a wide net for each and every outing. That’s not to say that when you have work that may be of particular interest to a particular group, you should not pursue it with every tool in your arsenal, but to focus on such a defined constituency to the exclusion of all others is suicide. The connoisseurs are simply one such constituency, and the wide net will not only drag in the next generation of connoisseurs, but in many cases, the next generation of artists as well.

We are long past the era of Danny Newman’s call to “Subscribe Now,” the basis of most every arts organization’s long running efforts to find audiences who would commit to a season of programming up front. We have watched arts subscriptions, overall, drop from their levels of the 70s and 80s, and single ticket sales, as a result, are a renewed and redoubled focus in order to fill the seats left vacant by departed subscribers. So the job is to find audiences of every stripe: novice, casual fan, avid and connoisseur. But that simply follows the pattern that every arts organization needs: single ticket buyer, repeat ticket buyer, subscriber, donor, major donor. We must focus on the early steps – the first time attendee and how we get them back a second time – or else we’ll never find those who will be our greatest fans and supporters.

This post originally appeared on the American Theatre Wing website.

My parents were not theatergoers. That is not to suggest that they didn’t enjoy theatre, but for reasons of time, finances and priorities, I was taken to theatre (at least that I can recall) only twice by my parents.

Consequently, it was once I began working in this business that my parents had their most consistent opportunities to see theatre. That is not to say they were omnivores, gorging on complimentary tickets; I had to choose rather carefully for their tastes. I can best sum that taste up by explaining that they saw most every show produced at Goodspeed during my four years working there (and for many years after), while I’m not sure they saw even a half-dozen during my eight years at Hartford Stage.

The great plus in this was that I had my own two-person focus group handy whenever I needed them, and they would often prove instantly insightful without any provocation. “This isn’t a review,” commented my father one time, reading a particularly non-committal piece of ostensible criticism in a major Connecticut paper. “It’s a book report. I can tell he saw it, but have no idea what he thought.”

That said, my parents were just happy to enjoy a show, and for many, many years, when I would point out some aspect of a production that I didn’t feel was quite right, I would hear their endless refrain, “You’re just too picky.”

On one rare occasion, my parents had the opportunity to see a new show in workshop when I was running The O’Neill. When that musical was later produced at Goodspeed at Chester, they asked to see it again. Why did less-than-die-hard theatergoers opt to see the same material a second time? Simple. They had liked it so much in the barn at The O’Neill that they wanted to enjoy it once more, but this time with sets, costumes, props and a proper rehearsal period.

When the performance was over at Goodspeed, they carefully waited until no one could overhear, then my mother leaned in and whispered, “Why isn’t it funny anymore? It was so funny at The O’Neill.” They were disappointed and clearly stumped, since in fact the show had undergone little revision, but it was, in fact, just laying there on the Goodspeed stage after soaring at The O’Neill. And that’s when I tried to explain to my parents the difference between a play and a production. I don’t recall what I said, but I think they got at least some of it.

I wish I could have that same sort of conversation with everyone who goes to the theatre, because I think it is a concept that is central to the creative work of theatre, but least understood by the audience.

Admittedly, understanding how to differentiate between play (and for the sake of simplicity, please know I include musicals as well) and production is difficult for almost anyone when seeing a world premiere. When a text is in progress right up to its opening night, when artists – director, designers, actors – are interacting with the playwright’s words for the first time, it can be very difficult to know exactly how they have impacted upon each other when every element is brand new. It is entirely possible that the director invented a piece of stagecraft that the playwright never envisioned; actors’ personalities and skills may cause their characters to evolve a certain way; their suggestions may inform the writing as well.

On premieres, even those of us in the business don’t always know. After all, we may also feel something is amiss in a debut production, but it’s not always possible to tease out what feels wrong, since we have no yardstick with which to measure the relative success of the text (the play) or the production (the direction, the acting choices, the design).

This is a shame, because many a new play that receives a less than optimal production can have its future life derailed. I vividly recall the physical production of the originalLa Bête on Broadway in 1991, but when I heard it would be revived, I was blank on the play. After this revival, I now believe I have been able to truly see (and will remember) the play. And not to harp on Matthew Warchus productions, but having found the film of Boeing-Boeing unwatchable, an opinion apparently shared by the press and audiences upon its Broadway premiere in 1965, I can only think that the blame lies with the productions, since the Broadway revival was a riot.

Revivals, or simply subsequent productions, are where the distinction between play and production come into greater relief. If we have seen Hamlet in full 17th century regalia, we understand immediately that the play remains Hamlet even when we see it again, but with our hero in a hoodie, or a business suit. We begin to see where a director’s vision has acted upon a text, and if you see multiple Hamlets, it also becomes clearer how each actor’s interpretation changes our impression of this young man.

Why is this important to me? Because I think there are too many times where a play can get a bad rap because of its first production – and that as a result, audiences can be scared away from new plays.

Inside of a theatre, we are all excited by new plays. The opportunity to be there at the inception of a new work (maybe even get our name in the printed edition), is a heady, thrilling thing. It’s why we got into the business, to experience creation. As a result, we believe that the audience shares our enthusiasm.

Au contraire.

At Goodspeed, whose work is as audience-friendly as you can get, we were confounded when audience members told us that Goodspeed at Chester, our second stage, was where the “experimental” work was done. Experimental? In progress — yes. Receiving its first production — sure. But experimental? This work was as far from the avant-garde of Richard Foreman and Robert Wilson as I am in looks from Hugh Jackman. So where did that impression come from – and linger – after well over a decade of productions?

When I was up at Geva Theater in Rochester, I noticed a peculiar tic on the part of the audience, even of the board. If an unknown work was produced and proved popular, then people remembered its name. If it was generally disliked, it was shrugged off with the pejorative of “that new play,” a vague plot synopsis substituting for a title.

New is not a good word for many audiences. It’s a warning sign flashing “Danger – ahead lies the unknown,” and not everyone likes surprises.

There’s a corollary to this, which takes me back to the issue of play and production. That’s the frequency with which, when a new work doesn’t fully succeed, a certain phrase recurs in conversation with theatre patrons: “Why on earth did they ever pick this play?” Complete dismissal of the project and the process, incredulity that anyone had found value in it.

No artistic director or commercial producer chooses work with the intention of it failing. But sometimes it does, in part or whole. Maybe the play doesn’t truly work, or maybe the production doesn’t develop it and further reveal it. However, no one set out to produce something unsatisfying. Those are the moments when I wish that audiences could better ascertain the distinction between play and production, giving the author, and the producers, the benefit of the doubt and understanding that the artistic process is imprecise. It is not manufacturing, it is creation.

So how do we tackle this problem? It cannot simply be explained. I believe we can never put ourselves in the position of explicitly educating our audiences, lest they see theatre as a chore to tolerated – or avoided. The distinction between play and production must be demonstrated, and I suspect artists are better equipped to devise a means to do that than anyone.

Once at Hartford Stage, Mark Lamos conducted a master class, in which over the course of 90 minutes, with two actors who had just met, he set about to do a cursory staging of a mere 14 lines from Romeo and Juliet, explaining bits of the text to the actors (and audience) and suggesting some rudimentary blocking. Then with a bit of time left, he took the same actors through the first 24 lines of Act V, scene i of The Merchant of Venice, where Lorenzo and Jessica have just spent the night together. Mark had the actors play up the sexuality of the scene, the post-coital bliss, forcing these strangers into immediate intimacy, which they literally embraced at his direction. And then he asked them to do the scene again, giving them only a single note of direction to alter the approach: “Now do it as if the sex was bad.” And they did so with all of the awkward pauses, avoided glances and disappointment they could muster. The audience gasped, then broke into applause. The infinite variety of play vs. production was laid bare.

For those of you reading this who are members of the audience, I hope you will take every opportunity to discern the difference between play and production, as I think it will give you an even greater appreciation for the performances you enjoy, as well as the ones you don’t. Unless you have a script in hand (easy when in England, all too rare in the U.S.), you can’t work apart the intertwined strands. I offer no easy prescription, no declarative key that will unlock these mysteries, only the hope that they can be increasingly understood, especially so that formative work with be taken in its true context, not viewed as a final, immutable product, and supported even when it comes up short in your eyes.

This post originally appeared on the American Theatre Wing website.

Had I seen any one of the following items over the past week or so, I probably wouldn’t have thought anything of it. But, as I say, each of the following has caught my attention over the last 10 days:

• A major institutional theatre featured on its blog of a series of overheard audience conversations which I shall refer to as “rather unenlightened” regarding the nature of theatre
• A talented composer sent a tweet seeking to incite use of the hashtag “Dumb Audience Comments”
• A theatre employee tweeted the title of their current production in the form most mangled by a patron
• Theatre ushers endlessly shouted at patrons outside a theatre as to which lines to get into and to “keep it moving” in a manner that reminded me of airport security
• A newspaper critic sardonically tweeted and later blogged a letter, almost inexplicably routed to them, from a theatre patron dismayed at the updating of Shakespeare

I don’t provide this litany in order to embarrass or criticize any single person or institution. Frankly, I think these are a) just the tip of the iceberg and b) entirely typical of the kind of conversations and interactions that go on within producing offices and non-profit institutions all the time.

I do not hold myself blameless, though I think after more than seven years in which I am more a member of the audience than I am a theatre staffer, I have moved beyond the mindset exemplified by my first paying theatre job. That was in a box office in which we were extremely polite to the patrons on the phone (in those pre-Internet days), but thought nothing of putting a call on hold to finish a hand of gin rummy (a card game, just in case I have used an archaic reference). But that was the first of many box offices I know of where, just out of sight of patrons, a pinned up list of mangled play titles was studiously maintained for the hilarity of the b.o. staff, and would on occasion be shared more broadly within the theatre’s administration.

But taken together, the minor incidents above indicate an inherent disregard for the audience. Even when it remains largely out of sight and earshot, an insider’s game for those in the know, I have grown concerned about the “us and them” quality of these ostensibly funny moments which occur, no question, all too often if you work inside a theatre.

Something people rarely stop to consider is how little human interaction a patron can have when attending the theatre, especially now that ticket buying has become predominantly an Internet based activity. Think about it: you can buy tickets, or even a subscription, via computer; enter a theatre where your ticket (or to my dismay, your 8.5 x 11 printout from your home computer) is scanned by someone whose conversation is usually limited to “please have your tickets out and ready for scanning”; a brief exchange with an usher, who is either an employee eager to keep traffic moving or a volunteer who is handing out programs in exchange for seeing the show for free; and perhaps a bartender at intermission when speed, not cordiality, is most prized.

So let me say first how vitally important it is that the front of house people feel a part of the theatre, and understand that they are – aside from the performance of the play, which is of course at a bit of a distance – the primary personal interaction the audience has while at the theatre. They are, quite literally, on the front lines of how patrons experience a show, and just as surely as a surly waiter can effect one’s perception of a finely cooked restaurant meal, a condescending usher can immediately color a patron’s perception of a play. Even calm, swift professionalism can have a distancing effect.

But I am not writing to indict those on the front lines, who probably encounter a wider range of human interaction than you might think possible. Rather, I am writing to address the sentiments that take place higher up the org chart, in which the foibles of and frustrations caused by the audience become part of the lingua franca of theatre operation. It is that attitude which either trickles down to those we charge with serving our audiences, or which can fail to arrest such behavior when it occurs.

In an era where there is constant talk about declining audiences, rising prices and the need to attract “the next generation of theatre patrons,” I think it undermines those efforts when the staff (or our critics) take the opportunities to make sport of the people WHO ARE ACTUALLY GOING TO THE THEATRE. Sorry for shouting, but considering how hard we must all work to inspire audiences to visit for the first time, let alone return again and again we cannot afford to foster any activity which diminishes respect for the theatre patron. And even if the sheet in the box office is never seen by the audience, it is dangerous to have such a document maintained and shared, be it by samizdat or intranet, because the next time a patron flubs a show’s title, the sales representative may quickly focus on retaining the malapropism, rather than taking care of the needs of someone who has bought, or wishes to buy, a ticket to that show, whatever the heck it’s called.

Let’s face it, if we work in theatre, our knowledge of the form, of the literature, of the practice of theatre is almost immediately head and shoulders above that of many patrons, even if one is a novice in their first professional job. Our audiences haven’t made theatre their life’s work, and in many cases it’s not even a deep passion, but merely part of a menu of entertainment options. They aren’t necessarily going to know how to pronounce Marivaux, distinguish Ivanov from Platonov, remember which Rapp brother writes plays or which one was in Rent, or appreciate that the tradition of placing classics in alternate time periods is hardly new (even Shakespeare refers to a clock in Julius Caesar, set in an era when no such device existed, but that’s actually irrelevant). They’re in our theatres because they want to be; they’re calling us because they’re curious; they’re discussing drama in our lobby not because they’re experts, but because they’re engaged; they’re sending tweets, e-mails and even letters because they care and have something they need to say – and need to have heard.

Every human being can be the source of good natured fun, but when it becomes pervasive, judgmental or sport for those who make their livings off of the enthusiasm of audiences, a line has been crossed, and we have institutionalized elitism in a way that will prove damaging, no matter how innocent any single comment, tweet or blog may seem.

Let me close with a story.

For many years, I would visit the Glimmerglass Opera each summer, to see the work of a friend who was a regular director there. I went solely out of friendship, because I am not a fan of opera; it does not speak to me personally, and certainly I don’t have the emotional connection that the aficionados feel deeply. Simply put, when I am at the opera, I feel dumb, left out, and ill-at-ease. Nonetheless, I would go out of duty and dedication (which are not, admittedly, the motivators one hopes for from their audience) to my friend. I counted on the story (which I did not know in most cases) and the staging (which is of course the most “theatrical,” and therefore familiar), to carry me through.

Each summer, a small informal dinner party/picnic was thrown by one of the opera’s patrons for my friend, and he would assemble the guest list, mostly the other directors and designers, and his friends who had made the trek for opening night. One evening, some 90 minutes before Tosca was to begin, the small group began reminiscing about other Tosca‘s they’d seen or worked on. I, the novice, could do nothing but listen, as I had never seen or heard the opera. The conversation began to focus on the climactic moment of Tosca and (spoiler alert!) the group began recounting the many hilarious incidents they remembered of less than effective Tosca death scenes. After much laughter, a calm descended, and I was compelled to ask the group, “Excuse me, but did any of you consider that some of us may have never seen Tosca, and that you just destroyed the ending for me?” The speed with which they virtually shouted “No” at me and fell about laughing at my ignorance was stunning. To them, Tosca’s death was a given, known to all, and I should have known it already.

So there I was, in my annual outing, hoping once again that I might enjoy a stage work outside my knowledge base, and I became a source of humor when I spoke honestly about it. If you want people to share your love of theatre, whether you’re a professional or an avid fan, just remember that as much fun as it is to talk to those already in the tent, our peers, our real need must be on inviting more people in, on their terms, not ours, and always with respect and signs of welcome.

This post originally appeared on the American Theatre Wing website.