"Last year, just 3 percent of Americans saw live theater," West said on opening night of the show, which runs through Aug. 20 at the University of Utah's Babcock Theatre. "We spend as much money on toilet bowl cleaner as we do on live theater. If you can afford to clean your toilets, you can probably afford to donate to support theater."
Ask West for the source of his statistics, and he'll just laugh. The adjunct instructor of theater at the U. and one of three artistic directors for the company claims he heard those numbers somewhere and thinks the metaphor helps him make the case about price vs. entertainment value.
Source aside, his point is valid: Theater producers in Utah and across the country are concerned that the habit of attending live performances classical music and dance concerts, as well as theater seems to have stopped with older Americans.
According to the 2004 "Theatre Facts" report of the Theatre Communications Group, the most recent survey of the country's nonprofit regional companies, attendance was down for the second year in a row and lower than in any of the past five years. Sixty percent of theaters reported an increase in single-ticket income, but the number of season subscribers dropped 3 percent over the previous five years.
So members of the upstart Salt Lake company are gambling their own paychecks to make a point. Last year the company charged $10 per ticket; this year it's experimenting with "pay what you will" pricing, hoping to entice new people to watch theater.
It's not a new idea. For years, museums and other notable cultural organizations have used a sliding scale instead of establishing set prices. And nearly nearly every theater company in Utah is experimenting with some form of special deals, beyond standard student and senior discounts.
For the upcoming season, Pioneer Theatre Company has sold nearly 500 season tickets at a discounted $70 rate, $10 a ticket, for theatergoers who don't mind the view from the back of the balcony. SLAC offers special $18 play tickets that compares with $27.50 or $31.50 full-price seats to patrons younger than 30.
Then there's the small, itinerant People Productions, which tried sliding-scale pricing for a 2001 show of "Ceremonies and Dark Old Men" and quickly dropped the idea. "Got stiffed," says Richard Scharine, co-artistic director of Utah's only African-American theater company, with a laugh.
"I remember particularly an ex-student of mine standing there in I think it must have been a $300 leather jacket telling me he didn't have any money for the production," says Scharine, who retired from the U. faculty in 2005. The small company sets prices at $10 to $12, about the price of a movie ticket, for shows like "Intimate Apparel," which opens this weekend at the U.'s Studio 115 Theatre, yet rarely rakes in enough money to pay its actors.
Scharine says he's inspired to keep prices low by the young people he sees in the audiences at London's state-funded theaters, where tickets are cheaper than at the movies. "Why do they do it? They don't do it out of altruism. They do it for the great tourism draw, while we've made theater into an elite institution, where unless you're of a particular social or economic class, you don't go."
No matter how democratic and appealing the idea of sliding-scale pricing sounds, there's a perception problem, says Chris Lino, managing director of Pioneer Theatre, the city's largest professional company.
"Nothing has less value than a free ticket," he says. "We have worse attrition for free performances than we do for paying performances, so you have to assign a value. Otherwise the patron will assign a value."
Nationally, small companies such as Austin's Salvage Vanguard Theater have earned ink in the trade magazine, American Theatre, for the success of its pricing. The company increased its box-office take about 68 percent in the past year by suggesting patrons pay between $12 and $35, according to company manager Etta Sanders. Most people pay in the middle of the range, about $20, while those who pay $35 feel generous, not gouged, producers believe.
For Salt Lake Shakespeare, the first week of the "pay-what-you-will" gamble offered mixed reviews. Audiences have been smaller than last year, about 60 to 70 people per show, as opposed to about 100 per performance last season, West says. But the company's still on track to hit last year's take, as "Henry V" is running for three weeks, as opposed to two weeks, and some theatergoers have made donations of $50 and $100.
"There are so many people who just go to a movie on a Saturday night, and we would like to bring those people into a theater," says actor Jesse Harward, who claims he loves the idea of the experiment, even if he doesn't take home the $1,000 that the company hoped to pay each of the cast's five non-Equity actors and company producers. "I think we need a new kind of theater to draw people in."
Harward, 29, graduated with an acting degree from Brigham Young University in 2002 and has performed at Pioneer Theatre Company, as well as improvisational shows. To take on 10 rotating parts in "Henry," as well as perform his one-man Shakespeare-inspired show, "Broken Verses," Harward quit his day job at a moving company.
Harward says he's interested in the success of Murray's for-profit Desert Star Playhouse, which packs in audiences with original parody shows, such as the long-running "My Big Fat Utah Wedding." "We think of theater as if it's written with a capital T, as if theater's holy. Theater's become a badge of honor almost," Harwood says. "In Shakespeare's time, he managed to combine the entertainment of Desert Star and what we think of as Shakespeare, or high art. We're losing that sense of what Shakespeare did, combining the rough and the holy theater into one."
Contact Ellen Fagg at ellenf@sltrib.com or 801-257-8621. Send comments about this review to livingeditor@sltrib.com.
