When Amy Kaissar wrote her graduate thesis on the topic of nonprofit theatre subscriptions, her basic argument was: They’re not dead; we just haven’t invested in them. Now, 19 years wiser, and after 15 years in leadership positions, Kaissar, the current co-producing director at Bristol Riverside Theatre in Bristol, Pa., confessed, “I’m not sure I would 100 percent agree” with her earlier assessment.
The hedging is important here—it’s not that her outlook has done a 180. But so much in the intervening years has complicated her earlier certainty, including, of course, the pandemic lockdown of the past few years, which impacted every aspect of the industry. But even without that bumpy chapter and its even rockier aftermath, the outlook for subscriptions has long been multilayered. Even now, for all the public hand-wringing about the state of the theatre, artistic leaders, audiences, and a quantitative survey of 84 companies from across the U.S. conducted by American Theatre presents a remarkably multifarious picture rather than a uniformly bleak one.
The complexity begins with the very definition of subscriptions. Butts in seats is an easy number to measure (How full is the house? Down about 25-30 percent nationwide, on average), but what makes a subscription a subscription? Trinity Rep in Providence, R.I., and Shotgun Players in Berkeley, Calif., to name two examples, have embraced the flexible models that have gained traction in recent years (pay in advance for a set number of tickets and redeem for the best available seat for any performance on any day in the show’s run), while 4th Wall Theatre Company in Houston and Oregon Contemporary Theatre in Eugene are leaning into what many in the industry refer to as the “standard” or “traditional” model (pay in advance for the same seats on the second Thursday of every run, say). The REV Theatre Co. in Auburn, N.Y., has ditched flex passes entirely.
