Arts Activities Support

256 people attended. Artists indicated the show was a good opportunity for them and they enjoyed working on a team of predominantly women. Our artistic goal was “to create a production that does justice to the ferocious comic energy of the script, and that appeals to both liberal and conservative audience members.” We feel our production of The Taming achieved this goal. Jill Shafer of Cherry and Spoon blog praised its “political satire, humor and wackiness.” Art Dorman of Talkin Broadway noted its “exaggerated, winking energy” and its ability to rock his usual political stance: “My own bias usually favors the liberal in a policy duel—not this time.” Audience members called it “timely and relevant.” Wide-ranging Twin Cities theatregoer Scott Pakudaitis included it in his list of favorites from 2016. The main challenge of our process for this show was that we were unable to hire a contract production manager early enough, so production manager duties were split among artistic director Stacey Poirier, executive director Anne Bertram, and technical director Brittany Pooladian. On occasion, responsibilities were not clear and efforts were duplicated or missed, for instance when both Ms. Poirier and Ms. Bertram brought artist contracts to the first read-through. In the past, we have given stage managers the responsibility for scheduling production meetings. The Taming’s design team had unusually hectic schedules, and when the Stage Manager was unable to find a time that all designers could attend, no one made the call to go ahead with the meeting. Consequently, only one in-person production meeting was held. Designers felt they were somewhat out of the loop as to the director’s intentions. As a result of this experience, we have made scheduling production meetings the responsibility of the production manager, with the mandate to hold production meetings if most designers can attend. (We have hired a salaried part-time production manager for the 2017-18 season.) Some artistic choices didn’t work for everyone. The theatre at SteppingStone is a proscenium arch with a red velvet grand drape, and the director chose to close and open the curtains for scene transitions, in keeping with the over-the-top theatrical tone of the script. Some audience members felt that the time it took for the curtains hurt the pacing of the show. Others felt that the performers had not mastered the Southern accents that were used (the characters are Georgians). For future productions where accents are important, we will budget for substantial help from a dialect coach. A secondary goal was to give women performers the chance to hone their skills at comedy, and we feel we succeeded here. As actor Nissa Nordland says, “I loved the challenge of being Katherine and George Washington and Martha and Dolly…this was a great opportunity for a female character actor to show their stuff. THANK YOU SO MUCH.” We serve two communities, artists and audience. Our goal for our artist community was to provide employment for 11 artists. We succeeded at this. With our audience community, we intended to attract 550 people, and attracted only 256. In part, we overestimated people’s appetite for a light-hearted look at politics in the fall of 2016. Our lack of success in attracting audience members has prompted us to learn more about our audience and what they value about Theatre Unbound. With the help of staff at Arts Midwest, where we were attending the ArtsLab development program this winter, we designed a set of questions for regular TU audience members. Board members were able to connect with a couple of audience members to ask these questions by phone. In the interests of getting a wider response, board member Danielle Schreppel, a Marketing Strategist with 3M, adapted the survey questions into an online questionnaire. We sent out this survey in a newsletter after the Taming, but made the mistake of including it as a second paragraph after other material – it got somewhat buried. Response was light and did not give us any substantive information. In the next couple of weeks, we will be sending the survey out again with a newsletter entirely to itself. Our actual Populations Benefitting did not include as many older adults as we anticipated. They were present, but according to audience surveys made up only 21% of the whole. The largest single group was adults 25-34, which was a bit unusual for us. We attribute this to the fact that most of the artists involved with the show were in this age bracket. Unsurprisingly, artists tend to attract audience members who are like them. As regards ethnic diversity, all project artists for The Taming were white, as were the majority of the audience members. We have made a commitment to employ artists of color on every Theatre Unbound production going forward. In terms of gender diversity, 60% of our audience identified as women, which is typical for US theatre audiences. The remainder identified as men or as trans*. In terms of accessibility, we stationed ushers at the wheelchair accessible entrance to assist patrons who were unable or disinclined to enter the theatre through the large flight of steps in front. We provided one audio described performance, and one patron with low vision used the service.