THEATER BOOM: IN SEARCH OF AN AUDIENCE

This is a scene that happens here day after day:

The young executive comes home and turns on his answering machine. The messages are short and to the point--Julie at L.A. Theatre Works wants him to call her back. David at L.A. Public Theatre needs to talk with him, too. Likewise Kerry at the Center Theatre Group.

But these callbacks lead to highly sophisticated, often incredibly tenacious, sales pitches for season subscriptions. It’s a clever scheme of our times--telemarketing.

It works: By blitzing through list after list, making call after call, Los Angeles Actors’ Theatre marketing whiz Bill Bushnell and his troops claim to have boosted their subscriber membership from 1,800 in 1982 to 14,400 last season. Bushnell is forecasting more than 25,000 subscribers for his new Los Angeles Theatre Center by the end of this year.

“Bushnell has probably called every home in Los Angeles seven or eight times, and it ruins it for the rest of us,” complains producer Susan Dietz of L.A. Stage Co.

Adds L.A. Public Theatre artistic director Peg Yorkin, “If it is true, and I’m beginning to believe it is, that there is a finite audience that goes to theater, unless we all get together and do something about audience development, we’re going to kill each other off.”

It can only get worse. Currently under way is a boom in theater construction and renovation that will pour thousands of empty seats into what many perceive as an already crowded marketplace. More than 20 additional medium- to large-size theaters are planned for the Southland over the next several years, and many people question how producers expect to fill all those seats night after night.

“The No. 1 problem I hear expressed by our theaters is developing and maintaining audiences,” says Michele Garza, executive director of the Los Angeles Theatre Alliance. “I hear everybody complaining that attendance has dropped off, and people are very concerned about keeping their doors open. . . . The theater community has to come up with a viable marketing plan for theater in Los Angeles.’

They’re certainly trying. The alliance recently initiated Dramatix, an informational phone line, and the League of Producers and Theatres of Greater Los Angeles is scheduled to begin Friday a similar 24-hour phone line. The League, which hopes to advertise its hot line on billboards around town, is also talking with potential funders about setting up half-price ticket booths in Los Angeles-area shopping malls. And on Wednesday, producers at five major small theaters have scheduled a press conference to announce a joint subscription program to promote ticket sales.

In many ways, producers here are attempting to catch up to their own success. Los Angeles has both profited from and contributed to a national flourishing of regional theater, and expansion requires adjustments.

Arts groups tend to promote themselves at a smaller scale than their needs require to start with, says Danny Newman, the Chicago-based consultant and writer who has made a specialty of helping arts groups develop audiences. “And if you go into a larger capacity playhouse and you increase the number of performances,” continues Newman, “you obviously must promote ticket sales on a much larger scale.”

Nobody knows exactly how big the Los Angeles theater audience is, and attendance estimates range from a high of nearly 10 million to a low of less than 2 million annually. The latter number, which excludes smaller theaters, appeared in a study last year by the Harrison Price Co., which analyzed the proposed Music Center expansion and concluded that attendance at live theater here was “already very high, and probably has modest growth potential.”

Executives at more than 115 Los Angeles-area professional theaters are hoping that conclusion is wrong. Audiences at many theaters have been down since summer, and producers attribute declines primarily to a burn-out following the 10-week Olympic Arts Festival. Yet nearly all of those producers also point to the festival as proof that people will go to the theater again and again if the fare and prices are right.

“If I thought the audience here was truly finite, I’d quit now,” says Gordon Davidson, artistic director at the Center Theatre Group/Mark Taper Forum. “I think the key to the future of our theater, let alone anyone else’s theater, is to keep that audience growing and changing. I don’t think we’ve done all we can do. We have to know more about who’s out there and how to attract them.”

Others are skeptical. “I think it’s a mistake to overestimate the audience,” counters Joseph Stern, producing director of Actors for Themselves at the Matrix Theatre. “When the average person goes out, he doesn’t look at the theater section to see what’s playing. He looks to see what movie is playing. . . . It’s better than it was, but I think you can overestimate the consumer.”

You can also underestimate other Los Angeles draws, adds Thomas Mitze, producing director at La Mirada Civic Theatre. “I think our competition isn’t really other theaters. It’s a life style of going to the beach, having a barbecue or visiting a theme park. Most people don’t think of the theater as one of their primary leisure activities. They go sailing. . . . There’s such a small percentage of people in any city who go to the theater, and the problem isn’t finding enough people but finding the people who don’t go and (finding out) why they don’t.”

Bushnell feels the only way theaters can build committed audiences is to build subscribers: “Why do you think the Broadway theater is going in the toilet? It’s a hit-or-miss operation. It was its own institution for a while. People don’t magically appear overnight. Without subscribers, you’re totally dependent on the critical community, have to rely on massive ad campaigns and rebuild your audience every time you come out of the box. Audiences identify with the product and not the theater and you don’t build permanent arts institutions without subscribers.”

And, he adds, those subscribers establish a base for small and medium contributions.

That’s where telemarketing comes in. Bushnell says his telephone pursuit of potential subscribers costs him about $288,000 annually and last year brought in nearly $1.3 million in new subscriptions. At the Center Theatre Group, Mark Taper Forum audience development director Robert Schlosser says last year’s telemarketing campaign there doubled the number of new subscribers, noting that the institution plans to double its effort next year.

“We expected great resistance,” confides Schlosser, “but the product is one that deals with human values, not an object like vacuum cleaners. They talk about theater, not only at the Taper but around the country and if you have a friendly telemarketer, it’s a soft sell but a very successful one. One of our callers ended up going to the movies with someone she became acquainted with over the phone.”

Telemarketing has its critics, however, and both producers and potential subscribers complain of overkill. “It’s an ongoing full-year thing that is probably aggravating a lot of people who are on several lists,” says Ted Schmitt, producing director at the Cast Theatre, who says he has been called six times over the last four months by the Los Angeles Theatre Center alone. “The most aggravating part is that this acclaimed telemarketing team isn’t courteous enough to take ‘no’ for an answer.”

Bushnell, meanwhile, figures that telemarketing has almost run its course and is already analyzing the next technique. Asked about going door to door, he smiles and says that he’s certainly not going to rule it out.

Community support doesn’t hurt either. In La Mirada, for instance, Mitze says “90% of our audience comes from within 10 to 15 miles of the theater, and one reason they come is they don’t want to go long distances.” Adds Laura Zucker, producing director at the Back Alley Theatre in Van Nuys: “Which theaters survive will have to do with which have communities to support them.”

Apparently so. “A significant portion of our audience comes from our neighborhood,” says actress Barbara Beckley, general manager of the Colony Studio Theatre in Silver Lake. “Our resident company of 40 theater artists does everything, and that creates a family feeling which is communicated to the audience. The person who takes a ticket may have starred in the last show, so coming to our theater is like seeing old friends. I would be willing to bet that every couple subscribing five years ago has brought in at least two more couples.”

It is thus no surprise that producer Don Eitner at the Hollywood-based American Theatre Arts is planning an interim home in the San Fernando Valley before ATA moves into the proposed four-theater North Hollywood Cultural Center there. He’s hoping to be in a 175-seat house within 18 months to two years, says Eitner, to have time to build a “stronger identity out in the community” as well as a subscriber base.

Not that everyone thinks subscriptions are the only ways to build audiences. Garza, for one, says many people don’t want to plan their lives six months in advance anymore, and even CTG executive Schlosser admitted to a California Theatre Council meeting recently that he doesn’t want to know himself what he’ll be doing a few months from now.

What that means, say producers and others, is an equally big push for single ticket sales, and many theaters attempt to provide other discounts in addition to those offered subscribers. The Taper has many discount programs, from same-day Hot-Tix to discounted tickets offered to government agencies as a public service, and nearly every person in the audience for Schlosser’s CTC talk either took notes or ran a tape recorder.

One reason given for New York’s Off-Broadway boom is lower ticket prices for what is often Broadway-quality fare. Similarly, an attractive feature of Los Angeles’ many small professional theaters is that in contrast to the $20 to $40 prices at their upscale counterparts, their tickets nearly always run less than $15 each. Tickets for such hits as “Bleacher Bums,” beginning its fifth year at the Century City Playhouse, run just $8 to $10 apiece, for instance, while “Rap Master Ronnie” at the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble goes for $10.50 to $15 a seat.

In an effort to draw even more people into the tent, the League of Producers and Theatres of Greater Los Angeles hopes to launch what would be Los Angeles’ third try at half-price ticket booths. League executive director Sharon Baumgarten says she has received commitments from at least three shopping malls for free space--one shopping center would even provide free retail space, she says--and the California Community Foundation recently hosted a luncheon to drum up funder interest.

The booths, whose initial year of operation is budgeted at about $150,000 annually, would begin next fall and be modeled on a similar program in Chicago. There are booths operating today in more than a dozen cities, “and they’re nearly all successful,” says Henry Guettel, executive director of New York’s Theatre Development Fund. “It’s a matter of moving unsold tickets and filling seats. It expands the audience and helps the theaters at the same time.” The New York program, which began 12 years ago, also maintains a mailing list of 150,000 low-income, proven discount-ticket buyers and sold nearly $30 million worth of tickets last season alone.

The booths do more than just sell tickets, adds Diane Gallert, executive director of the League of Chicago Theatres. “They build awareness. The booths also provide the funding source for other programs, and become the cornerstone of a marketing plan.”

Gallert was out here earlier this month counseling Los Angeles’ nearly two-year-old Producers League. The 32-member organization will monitor calls to its new telephone line, and Baumgarten says that if it proves successful, the league may one day add a centralized ticket-purchase line as well. The five Equity Waiver theaters announcing their joint subscription program this week are also planning to maximize publicity for their effort through direct-mail and other advertising techniques.

Guettel estimates that nearly 40% of the buyers at New York’s booths are tourists, and Los Angeles producers also hope to attract what many consider a largely untapped tourist market. Many of the projected new theaters are to be built near existing or planned hotels.

“Active and aggressive promotion of the arts by the business community and governmental agencies is the key to raising the city’s cultural profile for the thousands of visitors who come to Los Angeles every year,” says league co-chair and producer Susan Loewenberg of L.A. Theatre Works. “Where would New York theater be without the tourist audience? If New York depended on its indigenous population, the theater community would be in trouble.”

Promotion could also help here at home, says Loewenberg, who is among those encouraging American Express to repeat a TV and print advertising campaign it did here last year promoting local theater. “We need to create a sense of cachet about the performing arts in Los Angeles. If you did a survey of the people who bought tickets for the Olympic Arts Festival, you’d find many weren’t regular Los Angeles theatergoers, but people who go to New York and London to the theater. We need to capture that audience and make those people feel like going to the theater in Los Angeles is the thing to do.”