TOM REED

Hi Fletch. There is no lack of conversation about Milwaukee theater and we owe you thanks for prompting and hosting the most productive side of it here. I’d like to toss in my vote.

In spite of my deep respect for some of the people who want these awards, I am against the awards themselves and feel that our whole community would be better served by other marketing innovations.

If someone can show me data that proves that awards, voting for awards, or awards ceremonies themselves bring in new audience members, I would be willing to reconsider. To move forward without actual data, though? I doubt that the awards will serve to prompt enough people to part with their money to justify the damage. Being able to vote for restaurants to receive the Shepherd’s Best of Milwaukee awards has not made me more likely to eat anywhere that I’m not already predisposed to eat. On the other hand, I have been directly contacted by people actively campaigning for those awards, which is in my opinion manipulative and not reflective of anything substantive. Which of us wants to be the equivalent of Olive Garden winning Best of Milwaukee Italian?
Hashing out the details of how to administer and police this will overshadow more urgent conversations.

Bringing in new audiences is one of the two core concerns that we should discuss. Right now we all need to put our heads together to come up with something innovative and uniquely Milwaukee to bring new audiences to the performing arts. The same old, same old, and more of it with more money behind it is not going to pay off, especially for those of us fighting to create new jobs in new spaces. We don’t need better ways to hijack existing audiences and relocate them from one theater to another. We need to find people who don’t already have season tickets and one foot in the grave and get them to start buying tickets all around the city. We need to come up with a comprehensive, collaborative approach that will protect the jobs we have and even make some new ones.

My feeling is that we need to start by really asking everyone to define a niche, promoting those defined (but not restrictive) spaces, and figuring out how to connect new audiences with the stages that suit their needs and tastes. Once we’ve got them, we can encourage them to branch out, probably through open partnerships between one theater and another that encourage audience movement. We also need to question the strong divide between performers and audiences. How do sports teams get people to feel so included in what they do?

In addition to figuring out how to create new audiences, we need to talk about appropriate stewardship of our collective performing arts workplace, too. Some of the resentment on various blogs may relate to a couple of hard realities involving under-the-table casting and the transfer of a painfully small pool of coveted jobs, jobs that, I argue, should be considered our collective job pool, not the exclusive property of those who’ve already marked territory. Who owns a non-profit? Every job here should be considered to belong to us all, and the people chosen to fill those jobs need to have more than their own best interests at heart. When someone takes a job away from other qualified people and then either misuses it or eliminates it, we should all be concerned. I include administrative as well as artistic jobs in this comment.

Until we take a hard look at the distribution of paying jobs in our profession and until we accept that we do have responsibility to one another, awards are a band-aid on a deep laceration. It would not be in my best interest to promote a system that promotes the existing and excludes the new. I am dealing with the financial bruises of another such conversation as we speak, so I don’t pass these thoughts along to you carelessly. We’ve got something that other cities envy and I don’t want to see us ape what they do to our own destruction. Let’s make what we’ve got better starting with some open conversations.

With Love to the theatre community
Tom Reed