Episode 7: Sean Daniels and Arizona Theatre Company
Lacey: [00:00:00] Hi, Sean Daniels, artistic director of Arizona theater company. How are you doing today?
Sean: [00:00:06] I'm wonderful. Thank you so much for having me on the show.
Lacey: [00:00:08] I'm so excited to have you on the show. And our mutual friend Carissa made a shidduch, as we say in Yiddish. And we'll talk about Chrissa because I know that you are producing her one woman show.
As you told me, before we started recording on your first live in person show
Sean: [00:00:25] she will be our first show back, which means that who knows how those first couple of previews will go, because we will all just weep through them to be back in a room, to have music playing
Lacey: [00:00:37] I've had the great pleasure of seeing a run-through of that show My 80 Year Old Boyfriend. And it makes you weep anyway. So it'd be like double weeping.
Sean: [00:00:47] Those first couple of nights back, I think we all just imagine them now, but I imagine that there'll be really beautiful rituals of the first time you sit in your seat and you get your program, or you look at your program on your phone and the first time the lights go down and you hear the piano start and these are, these will be, probably the closest to spiritual experiences that many of us will have in our life.
Lacey: [00:01:06] You just made me want to get on a plane to Arizona. So I'm going to have to put that in my back pocket and think about it. Okay, so let's back up a little bit and we can talk more about that and but I would love to back up and talk about the Arizona Theater Company what its history is.
If you want to tell us that and your mission and the nature of the community that you serve.
Sean: [00:01:24] Arizona Theater Company is in its 54th season coming up. So it's been around really one of the longer regional theaters to be able to do it. I fell in love with theater at Arizona Theater Company. I grew up in Mesa, Arizona, just outside of Phoenix, which is like a, like very charming middle-class suburb of Phoenix.
My parents were subscribers and donors, which we feel like everybody should be. And they brought me to every show that they went to, which at the time I thought was that they were just like really forward thinking. But now I realized they were just lazy and they just bought subscriptions and they just took us because looking back, many of the shows were not appropriate for us at any given age.
They took us to Private Lives, which is a show about married people having affairs and the comedy of that. And, I just laugh when the rest of the crowd laughed. But I, they took me to see Our Town there and it changed my life in terms of what it was spoiler alert,
they're all dead. And they're trying to figure out like what parts of life need to be celebrated or we don't celebrate because we don't realize how precious it is. And I just remember just being blown away by that and why, and to talk about it afterwards and be a part of it. And so it's a real honor to have come full circle and to be able to run the organization that so effected my life when I was a kid to really be able to change me and to, make me want nothing but a life in the theater. Which worked out well because I started in May of 2019. So I was here for about eight or nine months before we shut down. So it was good to have a deep love of the place in you to be able to figure out what's going to happen for the next, which we didn't know at the time, but the next 16 months afterwards. One of the things that we have done in this time is really tried to use it. Two things that we've done, one is to really just examine who we are and try to figure out, what kind of organization do we want to be? We all work at theaters, which are under-resourced right.
So when we say we're going to do a deep dive into anything, what we really mean is we'll work on this over the next several years to be able to get at it because we just don't have the time to be able to do it. And if it wasn't for this I would have stepped right in. I would have gone straight to it.
We'd make some changes, but really it takes you like three years to begin to make changes, because you're just doing so much. Because we have to produce a certain amounts to be able to bring income in and we're under resourced and we don't always have the staff to be able to do it. So what's been amazing about.
this time is really using it to figure out like, what type of organization do we want to be? And actually then it's great to be a new artistic director. It's great to be able to come in and be like, here's the place that we're going to go. And be able to work on that. So the thing we came up with a new vision statement, we have a vision and mission statement and people call them different things.
But we were really inspired by in the eighties. I think it was IBM said, a computer in every home and at the time it was like that is crazy talk. The thing we have really set out for ourselves.
our vision statement that we're working with right now to be able to push forward with that, we want the lives of every Arizona to be transformed through the power of life theater, which sounds large
but we think it's the same way to be able to say in 30 years, we'll be able to say, yeah, every Arizonan's life is not just touched, but is transformed. One of the things that we've started doing along those ways, that has been helpful. So right when the pandemic started, we had this fear, which I think everyone did, like, how are we gonna communicate with our subscribers? How are we gonna communicate with our donors? We were like, we'll do digital offerings. And we were like every other regional theater, like before this had happened, we were terrible at it.
We put ads on Facebook and no one responded. And that was the end of our thinking. We're like I guess we tried. And so we even started like a weekly talk show to be able to say every Friday at four, let's just connect with our audience to be able to say how are you doing?
How are we doing? And all of our digital offerings really took off. We have some episodes of our talk show 14,000 people ended up watching it.
Lacey: [00:05:10] That was my mouth open jaw dropped because that's really incredible. Congratulations.
Sean: [00:05:15] thank you. We had a concert from London that a friend of ours recorded and 17,000 people watched. And we did the thing with 24 Hour Plays, Mark Armstrong's really brilliant organization, worked with us to be able to do it. And 24,000 people watched. And so we were like, Oh my God, we did it.
We so awesome. And then we did some research into the numbers and found out that almost none of our subscribers and donors were part of those digital people that were listening. Our subscribers are, it's yeah, I subscribe subscribers. There's many of them are right in line with the average ticket buyer in the country.
Which is like a late fifties in terms of age at the young end of it. And so they love theater. They love being live. When we returned to having live performance, there'll be there, but they don't need to have a digital offering every week to be a part of it.
So what we accidentally stumbled upon, which I feel like is a little bit like finding penicillin, which was not originally intended as a, the thing that we use it for now is that we have discovered a real new audience which I think is a much younger and much more diverse audience and who is game to experience art in a virtual way or was game before.
But they just thought we were too, we thought too much of ourselves, or we were too expensive, or you had to dress up to come to the theater, or you were going to feel dumb or, our online ticketing software required you to register and you didn't want to register. You just wanted to buy.
And so I think we've stumbled upon connecting to this new way
Lacey: [00:06:45] I'm so curious now because you have a new audience and first of all, are they mostly in Arizona?
Sean: [00:06:52] They are, there are mostly in Arizona there is some from all over, and there's definitely some like industry people, from all over, but for the most part, they are Arizonans
Lacey: [00:07:01] Okay. And then secondly, you said as you were going into it, you thought it was for your donors and your subscribers and your patrons. And so the choices that you made in terms of the material that you presented, were they, because I was going to ask you a follow-up question about the shows that you said you saw as a child.
There were really in the classic cannon of what regional theaters do. And of course, everyone should see Our Town. No question. As the theater moved along in its history, had its offerings changed. Certainly a one woman show that is new is different from Our Town. And so it sounds like you were moving in maybe different directions or diversifying your offerings, but then all these young different people are watching.
Were they watching something like Our Town or what were they watching?
Sean: [00:07:44] No. So we were, it's a great question. Arizona Theater Company, even before I got here had already moved away. It was not a classics theater. When I applied for the job, the thing I had said to the search committee, it was like, you're doing the hardest thing possible in the least sexy way you are doing sort of new plays.
But you're doing plays that your audience still doesn't know. Cause we all know, really how many plays does the average person know? 40 50. And then there's all these plays that are within the last 15 years that are regional theater staples .
But the average audience member has no idea what these plays are. So you still have to announce it. You still have to convince them, you still have to have a graphic and a plot that sounds like they're interested in coming to be able to do it, but because you're not doing like world premiers.
You're doing a play and you have to convince your audience really hard. And nationally the field doesn't really care that you're doing. They're like, they're glad that you're doing it. They're glad that somebody is doing it and that people are working, but the playwright doesn't come.
It's not thought of as one of the central productions and how we think about it, they were already doing that, they were already doing Sarah Ruhl and they were already doing things like that, where it's like a average audience member in Arizona doesn't know who that is.
But Sarah Ruhl isn't coming out to the production out here. So the only tweak that I have made is to try to move us to the top of the food chain and say we should be premiering these shows we should be developing them. We should put them out. Cause I feel like development is a, such a great way to bring an audience into how a show happens, to be able to let them be a part and root for it. In Arizona we really understand spring training. We really understand the idea that you can see the best in the world up close before the season starts before anybody else for a quarter of the price. Like we understand that idea perfectly, right? All of March, everybody comes here and we do it.
And theater could be the same way you could be seeing shows before the rest of the world for a quarter of the price and get like a level of access that you would never get. Last year I went to a Dodgers spring training game and Tommy Lasorda was like hanging out in the audience And saying hi to people.
It's that's what new plays are to be able to do. The playwright is there, the director is there, the actors are there, they're in your community. And so by the time that you eventually gets to see the big thing, whether it's on Broadway or at a theater, or you see the Dodgers in a real game, you can no longer go talk to Tommy Lasorda, but you can, but you can tell everybody how you saw them earlier.
So that's the only tweak that we've been doing. I will say our digital season was wildly more diverse than I think the offerings that we'd had before. So that might've also been part of what attracted people to it. But I think for the most part, it was just meeting our audience or this new audience where they're at and for them to be able to do it.
Lacey: [00:10:35] I can't remember who I was talking to, but this idea that, during the pandemic, there was really nothing to lose. So what you said made me think about that, do something wildly different than what you might otherwise do because we're doing virtual pandemic theater.
We don't know who's going to come watch it. There's literally nothing to lose.
Sean: [00:10:56] well, and it was like, how do we support artists? So we paid every artist that was a part of our online offerings. If we produced your work in a reading you got paid. And so part of it was very much that same thing with like, how can we be of service to a playwright?
Who's moving a play along because I don't know who's going to watch. Nobody may watch. So I at least hope that you get something out of it, whereas not to keep harping on Private Lives, but if we did an online reading of Private Lives, like on some level, who cares? Like I'm glad those actors got to work, but that money is just going to go to whatever company now owns the rights of that to be able to do it. And so at least if we're developing a play and the playwright gets some time , gets to move that play along a little bit, it gets a little bit of money to be able to help it's all. It's it's how we can help because the toughest and all of this, even though theaters will fold, the toughest in all of this is individual artists and freelance artists who, had counted on, I always do a show here,
I always do a show here and they didn't have a suddenly that backup.
Lacey: [00:12:00] Yeah. You're so right. And as terrible as it is, a lot of staff has been furloughed
Sean: [00:12:05] Yeah. And we had I know some places that haven't closed, but have laid off their entire staff, including the artistic director. So maybe they'll come back, not today
Lacey: [00:12:15] yeah. How have you been doing on that front?
Sean: [00:12:19] So we had, at the beginning of last March, I believe we had somewhere between 97 and 107 employees. And we had 27 employees by the end of the month. So we laid off the majority of our staff to be able to do it.
And the tough part of that is not, part of it is financial, right? It's that, at that point, you're just trying to say we need to survive. How can we do this? But so much of it is, going into a pandemic and figuring out like how we do things digitally online. We don't need bartenders and we don't need carpenters and we don't need a front of house staff.
And we don't, we don't need a five-person costume shop. That's just been, the toughest part of our industry is suddenly these things that were such staples we had to cut back on because that was just not what the need is.
We needed kick-ass digital. We needed a sound department. We needed all of our development and marketing to be able to do it. But that's been, I think the tough part is that the artists have taken it the hardest.
Lacey: [00:13:17] and in terms of the audio and the visual components that, you did need, were those people you already had on staff or did you have to go out and find those people?
Sean: [00:13:26] So it's a great question. So we have now on staff two different visual kind of engineers in terms of being online producers, one of which we had to go out and find and steal from another theater, somebody who works in that same position for a big theater in New York. And we just said do you want to work for us also, on the side?
And they said, yes. And then another was a person who was in our artistic and marketing department, who was able to say I'll learn how to do video editing. And somebody who was able to read the writing on the wall and say I'm going to learn a skill that you're going to need because now everything we don't put out, anything that doesn't require video editing
everything at least gets a little bit at the beginning and a little bit at the end to be able to put it together. And some of our bigger things, like we're a theater that prides ourselves on quality in terms of saying that you may not like everything that we put on.
I promise you actually, you will not like everything that we put on, but I promise you that it will all be done well. And it will all be done in a world-class way for us to be able to support the artists. And so online needs the same promise , If we're putting out a video, we're putting out a reading, it's not just going to be zoom on at the beginning.
And then everybody leaves the meeting at the end. That may be worked last March and April. That is no longer what people expect in
Lacey: [00:14:41] for sure. For sure. And did you start out that way and then, have a big learning curve or did you wait until you could put something out, at the standards that you were used to.
Sean: [00:14:52] We that we did an online reading of a play that we really invested in production value, but our talk show is actually amazing to watch because the first time we did it was just like, we all got on zoom and that we clicked live to Facebook. And that was our very first episode .
And then we figured out like what works and we booked too many guests and now we have one guest per hour and we have a kind of very slick opening and stuff like that. But yeah, we learned along the way because, and I think we're still learning and, people, what they're interested in right is also shifting,
like how much online fatigue people have, I think people are still game to watch things online, but they're only game to watch something that really interests them because of the content it's, at the beginning we were all just so hungry.
We were like, Oh my God, Stephen Sondheim is having a birthday. I'm going to watch the whole thing. I don't care if it's a tech disaster, I just want to see. And now we'd be like, why don't you get your shit together? And then you can, let us know when you have it. So I just think we're also trying to learn what are people responding to at the same time, we're trying to figure out how to do it.
Lacey: [00:15:50] How do you price your offerings and how it, obviously it can't maybe it can, I'm not going to make any assumptions. Can it be anything like the kind of income that you were bringing in from having live people in your theater
Sean: [00:16:03] It's a, it's the question everyone asks, we told them all our numbers. They're like, that's wonderful. So how are you monetizing that to be able to move forward?
Lacey: [00:16:10] And assuming that you even have, that monetizing it is even the right thing to do? People are taking different tacks on it.
Sean: [00:16:15] yeah so, we decided we made a choice early on to not monetize it that we really felt like we're just trying to connect with people. We're just trying to be relevant. Like we're we're our whole thing we do is gather people together and we can't do that right now. And so just to be say let's just stay connected with people. Let's let them know, here's the work that we're doing. We would love for you to be a part of it. Now we have a reading coming up, we're doing Lauren Gunderson has an autobiographical play called the Heath, and she's doing it with John Laroquette who, I love from Night Court.
But as you know is a Tony award winner
is fantastic. That's right. And for that, the only way we're gatekeeping it is that we're asking for people's email addresses for them to be able to see it, because we just figured, you know what, we could make $10,000 off this. We could make $30,000 off this, really what we need as an organization is like 5,000 new emails.
That's really what we need in terms of what's going to pay off over and over again, down the line.
It just because it's just like that's what we need in terms of going forward. You can make a donation. And this happened on a couple of them. Like the vast majority of people do not make a donation.
And then a handful of people donate like $50 and then a few people donate 500 and, someone donated a thousand dollars because, I think people appreciate effort also. So there's people that are just like, don't just ask me for money over and over again, have something that's going on.
And when it does, I'll be able to support you, in a way that, makes sense. So I just think like we've chosen not to monetize it. It's, it hopefully aids us in terms of we were fundraising now all the time to be able to do that. So I just think it also aids us in that for us to be able to say, this is the type of work that we have going on.
Will you support this?
And it's an audio play, right? So that's that's what we're excited to share with everybody.
Lacey: [00:18:01] Yeah. I am very well making a podcast. I am very excited by audio these days.
Sean: [00:18:06] Yeah and it's autobiographical of Lauren's, but it's also about King Lear, and I was just like, there's no version of people in the zoom boxes where someone's playing King Lear and Thunder's wailing and, they're just, it just feels silly.
So it's okay, but in an audio play, you could record the audio from your house. And a sound designer could put the sounds of the Heath on top of it. And then you could do in your mind the ability to understand what it is and do it. So we just felt like in the medium, let's not be silly. Let's not have people in boxes acting like they're Shakespeare, listening to it, your mind can do the rest of it.
If there's a silver lining that we even heard from people in doing zoom theater, everybody likes to say Oh, it's not the same. It's not that. And then we have lots of people that are like, Oh my God, like I'm looking at actor's face, like right there, I am up on them to be able to watch what they're going through, as opposed to my seat that is normally 450 seats back
like you're really with them.
Lacey: [00:19:01] Yeah. How do you think that changes the medium though.
Sean: [00:19:06] I think this type of zoom theater will be with us forever now. Like I don't think it's like, Oh, we did this for a year. And then we're just going to go back like we have so many people that have found us or we found them through it that I think we need to figure out, like, how do we continue to do it?
And we all have reading series and like third spaces and stuff like that, where we do readings for 20 people. And we're like, that was a success. But now we could do it for such a larger group of people that are interested. So I think like that's going to be a part of our lives going forward.
Lacey: [00:19:37] And how does it affect, when you approach a piece of theater that you're going to do, where everybody is in, close-ups on their faces versus you're thinking about it for the person who's 27 rows back. Now we're saying theater is essentially like film, I guess that's the, not that I disagree with having it or having it exist or doing creative things with it, but I just wonder about that switch, how does that affect the art.
Sean: [00:20:04] We've noticed that are the performers that do both have had an easier time, right? Because there's a size question, right? Like how big is your performance? And if you're outdoors, trying to make sure that the people, a thousand seat away, like you point with two fingers for people to know where it is that you're going and suddenly we're on zoom and it's like right up front of you and, so many of my favorite, friends that are TV actors, they're trained to almost do next to nothing, right?
Like the most subtle this movement is what gets communicated, anything bigger than that feels like aggressive. And so I definitely think we've had to figure out how to do it. I think also I know so many actors that are physical that are comedic actors, and it's less about the timing of a joke, but like how they use their body.
And that has totally been robbed from them in terms of like how they would interpret it. There's no way through zoom that you understand, physical comedy, unless you're really staging something and filming it
Lacey: [00:20:59] no. And even if you can have somebody from the waist up when you're talking about physical comedy, for example it still doesn't. You don't feel free enough to really engage in it in the same way. So that is interesting. So I want to ask you about your reopening plans, you are planning My 80 Year Old Boyfriend, which is written and produced by our mutual friend Charissa Bertels.
Sean: [00:21:18] correct. Yeah. We, in terms of thinking about, it's a funny, it was always going to be the start of our season, the season that we didn't have. And when we were trying to figure out okay, we're coming back and four months. Okay. We're coming back in six months. We're okay.
We're going back in 16 months. There was a real question of what stories do people, what are they going to want to hear? What is going to interest to them? And. I've always come back to this piece because it's about learning. Like how do we heal, but how do we learn to love each other?
And I think that's going to be such the question of how do we return and how what's it. Like the first time we can see people and, reconnect with them. And so it feels like it's such a, the perfect piece to be able to get back there again. And also just like Carissa, I think is such an amazing performer and such a generous person that I'm so excited for that.
Oh my, God, it's we're theater people, right? And so I just often think about that first meet and greet when everybody's like there in the room that we're going to do it. And that first day of tech when everybody's there and the first preview audience, we're just gonna, just going to be weepy messes to be able to do it, but because we've been so hungry for it, and God bless our subscribers, we have subscribers who have been calling us for two months to be like, I got my second vaccine.
Let's go, what do you have playin? And we're just like, it's none of the staff and our artists have been vaccinated, but I'm glad that everybody over 65 has gotten it. And I just think I want the piece to be something that is celebratory, something that is beautiful, something that is theatrical, , a soprano standing center stage who can fill a 600 seat theater with her voice is something that no matter how well produced a zoom reading is you never get that feeling of hitting you in the chest. And so I think that's going to be something very particular to those performances coming back.
And I think we're ready for a message like that it's going to be, there's going to be positive and that good things can come from horrible things, which is so much the message of My 80 Year Old Boyfriend.
Lacey: [00:23:19] you told me , right before we started recording that we realized that we had probably been in the same room together in New York, watching a run-through of My 80 Year Old Boyfriend, maybe four years ago. So I didn't realize that you were involved with its inception.
Sean: [00:23:33] I wasn't involved in its inception, so they worked on it for a while and then they brought me in at some point to say okay, let's go ahead and figure out how to keep, developing this further at that point. So I came in and I was the artistic director at MRT. And so I
programmed it
in that's right.
So I programmed it there and it was a huge success for us in terms of doing it. And so to be able to program it again and to be able to take the lessons that we learned from the first time and hopefully improve upon it has been a real gift.
Lacey: [00:24:07] So talking about your subscribers and their eagerness to return after being vaccinated, what has it been like in Arizona in particular? I feel like Arizona was in the news a lot it just seemed to have been held up a lot.
How was it for you and have you been in touch with other theaters in Arizona and how did you get the information that you needed to make the decisions that you needed at the state level, and then did it differ for you from what was going on at the national level or what was going on in other regions of the country.
Sean: [00:24:37] Arizona is a, like every place I'm sure, very particular to itself. So Arizona never shut down in any way. That's a bit of its claim to fame and for many weeks was I think it had like the highest rate per hundred thousand of new cases in the world. A couple of different times. So that, that was challenging. That said, Arizona is like, you can go for a beautiful walk and not encounter anybody and that's even on a normal day
there's plenty of open spaces. My wife and I joke that we really picked the right quarantine home because, you, we could have been still back in Massachusetts, like avoiding the plague and digging our cars out of snow, as opposed to like sitting by the pool where it's too hot, the worst thing that could be said about it.
And then I will say the other thing that's been the other end of that, but I think I didn't expect as well, wonderful. Arizona has been fantastic about the vaccine rollout. We're already at 18 plus anybody who's 18 or over can go ahead and get vaccinated. And just the efficiency and the way it's been rolled out. And the way it's been communicated has really been wonderful.
But I think we're like, we're like any state, like everybody has been making the best decisions that they could with the information that they had at the time. Now for us, so we're the only theater that operates in two cities. We operate in Tucson and in Phoenix, which means also that we have two different mayors in terms of that D deciding, and, one thing, definitely a frustrating thing early in the pandemic is we had a governor who very much said.
Like he was going to leave the decisions to the mayors to be able to make, he was not going to decide if there needed to be a mask mandate. It's up to the mayors, which I think is fine. Except if you operate in two different towns,
there was going to be like a shelter in place in Tucson, which is where a lot of our staff is, but not in Phoenix. Whereas the other part of our staff is, so we definitely had some unique challenges. Whereas if we just been in one city or the other, you stay in contact with your elected officials and you find out what it is, we're definitely dealing with two mayors and two city governments.
And those types of things to be able to figure out what is going on. But, that said everybody was making the best decisions they could with the information they had. And of course, looking back now, none of us knew what we were in for how long we were in for at the time.
Lacey: [00:26:55] That is pretty secretly complex. And somehow is making me smile as just, wow. Talk about a little bit of a
Sean: [00:27:05] well, and even as we think about reopening, there's a question of what if one mayor decides that we so actually, so the governor has already said, there's no limits, everybody can open back up. There is no limit in terms of gathering . And the mayors will say something differently.
What if one mayor says something different from another? So I just think that's what we're going to have to deal with coming back now that said we've positioned ourselves. We normally do three shows in the fall. We're going to do two this fall and four in the spring so that, our first show Karissa's show will open October 1st.
So there'll be some previews at the end of September. And then we'll open October 1st. So with kind of the idea of, we're like a not-for-profit organization, like we're not built for extreme risk-taking in that way. So that way let us not go first. Let's, let's let both universities start back.
Let's let their football team start back. Let's be, let's let people get used to, being a little bit back in, regular life and then we can be there to be a part of it.
We've only announced I think three times and been wrong. So this time we thought let's just play it safe in terms of what it is, but, listen we're a not-for-profit organization, which is considered to be a healthy not for profit organization means that half your money comes in through the front door.
So suddenly every healthy, and this is not even the unhealthy organizations are dealing with, what if only half your budget came in
four that's right. That's right. Which is about right. So as we come back, there's a certain amount of expense to turning the lights on right. Of adding people back in.
And so we're just gonna, we're going to be a little cautious. We're going to be a little conservative. We've been wrong before and we would not like to be wrong again.
Lacey: [00:28:49] It's interesting with Arizona that you've had, the opposite of New York you've had this sort of open policy and we've had a very closed policy, particularly in New York City and other Northeastern States have also been, like you mentioned, Massachusetts. In some ways it's easier to plan when you're in a closed state because you can't open and you have this sort of
Sean: [00:29:13] yeah. So a lot of our conversations were about what is our responsibility to our audience because and, part of the equation, is there's no stricter organization than Actor's Equity. So we couldn't have done things with Equity actors. And but it, what's tough about being in a state that has never really closed down is that a lot of people have been going to restaurants have been going out the whole time for a year and a half.
So it's hard to be saying like, as soon as we can possibly return, we'll be with you but donate in the short term so that we make it back. And they're like, what are you talking about? I go out every weekend to clubs, to restaurants, and listen, we have some non-equity theaters in town that never shut down and did different ways, and did it outdoors, or did it with social distancing and actors in masks. Our audience doesn't understand the difference of LORT theaters and Equity theaters. They just understand that like some theaters are going and some aren't. And so I think that's the confusing part is where in New York, it's nobody's doing anything you're at least kind of part of the pack.
And we're because we're the only LORT theater here committed to, being a part of unions and paying actors a living wage, or, barely a living wage and so we can't come back until we can, if we just can't afford to do theater at socially distanced rates. But we also had a lot of conversations about what's our responsibility what's, especially in the beginning and it's flipped now, but in the beginning, when it says like it's disproportionately affecting people that are over 65, are we really gonna do that Sunday
matinee? What are we risking on behalf of our patrons? What type of community organization are we, if we're putting profits above people. And so that's been the trick in Arizona.
The cool thing about Arizona that I really love is that our audience is not any one thing. And so we have Republicans, we have Democrats, we have, all types of people that are out there. And so we have people that believe that we should just have kept going.
We have to be able to convince them why we have to stop for 16 months, even though their steakhouse, that they'd they go to, they've still gone to,
Lacey: [00:31:20] Have any of your donors, have any of them approached you and said, I don't want to donate anymore because you closed down and you didn't have to. Has there been anybody who's pushed back in that way?
Sean: [00:31:31] No, none of us, none of our big donors, they've all understood what it is. And we did, I gotta give them credit. We did a campaign where we asked people to donate their season subscription back to us. And we had almost a million dollars worth of people that said we get it
and we have a lot of people that said I can't do that. I need a refund, which I also understand it just in terms of what it is, but no people have been amazingly supportive. And the fact that we're just, we're still here now is really because of the generosity of our community. And people have really stepped up in terms of donating and and we're doing online events for doing everything to hustle, but really it's from the generosity of people continuing to donate in the hopes that we're able to come back.
Lacey: [00:32:10] I think one of the, maybe small silver linings of the pandemic seems to be that we, as theater people are being told that we matter by people that maybe we weren't sure I think we all worry so much about our audience and will they stick with us and how do we grow them and how do we keep them wanting to come back?
And no, as you said, not everybody has continued to be supportive. I talked to somebody recently who lost half their subscriber base. They just, even though they offered a membership season they lost half of their subscribers. So no, not everybody, but a lot of people care a lot
Sean: [00:32:52] And this is to bring it back to Our Town, if there is like a silver lining that comes out of it, we are all going to appreciate everything so much more in terms of what we get to do. And so I think the theater is the same way in terms of like, how glorious is it that we get to gather, and we get to hear this fantastic music and this wonderfully trained singer come out and, share this heartwarming story with us.
Like we probably would have before been like, ah, did I like it? Or did I not? Like it, very much the kind of thumbs up, thumbs down. We're trying to move everyone away from. And now, we're hearing from people they're like just make it through this so that we can come back and that we can enjoy it again.
And that we can sit in the theater and that we can, be moved by the material that's on stage.
Lacey: [00:33:34] That's just such a perfect button and we could leave it there, but I'd love to hear from you, how you and Arizona Theater responded to the push for anti-racist practices in the theater.
And do you feel that you were able to make more progress because of the pause? I also like to say when asking this question to my audience, that I acknowledged that we are two white people having this conversation.
And if we inadvertently trip over ourselves and say the wrong thing, I would really love to have some feedback from people who might have been hurt by our words. So I like to say that before we start.
Sean: [00:34:10] that was great. I appreciate you bringing this conversation up. I think we've been able to make so much more progress because of the pause in terms of what it is that I don't know that we would have been able to before, so we had already started when I got here making adjustments in terms of our programming and kind of color conscious casting
and I think if there's a change that's happened, I do think I have like several audience members who were a little exhausted by our efforts beforehand to do that, that over this pause have really actually suddenly now turned the corner and are proud of the work that we were doing beforehand because they suddenly think Oh, we were we were in line with what the conversation was in the country, maybe I just didn't realize what it is, and let's be honest. So my board now has a cultural diversity committee where board members work to figure out how can we work to be more culturally diverse? What are the steps that we can do? What are the barriers that have been part of stopping us from being diverse,
we didn't have that a year ago. And so I think for so long, often boards and staffs are in different places when it comes to where they feel like that the organization is moving. And we're no different, probably like our staff is probably, more aggressive and farther along than our board is.
But the fact that our board is there is huge in terms of where it is and. We were invited to be, there's a foundation called the 10 Chimneys Foundation and they wanted to have a summit on how to make a more anti-racist theater. And I asked our board president could be a part of it and she was great and she was fantastic.
And so that type of time, that type of dedication to it that never would have happened in regular times for be able to do it. When we switched to our online digital season, maybe this would have happened anyway, but we were of course, more aware of it. 60% of the artists that we hired were artists of color
For the most part that is just the work, I think, that is exciting to us and is exciting to me. And but we definitely able to clock that great. This is something that Arizona theater company is doing. These are the artists that we're supporting. This is the type of work that we're putting out.
And I think, I think we probably, from a programming standpoint would have done exactly the same thing in regular times, but I think our audience was more willing to take it in because they were aware of what was going on in the world. I think every theater is at a different place in terms of its journey
and I've definitely worked at theaters who are much farther along and you look at theaters like Wooly Mammoth that are like, wow, they are doing it. They are ahead of us to be able to do it. And then you look at theaters that are in the Arizonas Texas' and Florida's of the world. And, trying to move an organization along is at a different speed.
And so if in many ways, this moment, a silver lining of it has given so many of us cover to be able to continue to do the work that we've wanted to be able to, program the artists that we're excited by and our audience I think is interested and is game in a way that they weren't before.
But I think there's a new found understanding because we say all the time, right? Like we have to reflect our community. And I think like our board and donors like love to hear that. That sounds good, but what does that really mean in terms of doing it? And so now when they see it, they have a better understanding of what it is, the work that we're doing and how we're trying to make sure that we really reflect the community that we live in.
Lacey: [00:37:30] Is there a difference between Phoenix and Tucson in terms of
Sean: [00:37:35] There's a huge difference in those two. And both cities have like things that other people believe about them and they believe about themselves, but any two cities are different. In terms of what it is.
I will just say also this like Phoenix is the fifth biggest city in the country. It just passed Philadelphia
Lacey: [00:37:52] did not know that. Oh, I'm so sorry for Philadelphia, but wow. That's
Sean: [00:37:56] I know poor Philadelphia, like I now it's just been downhill since Ben Franklin. And but so it's a, and Tucson is a very kind of smaller, charming, near the border, artists and art focused town. So they're like any two downs. It's San Diego to Los Angeles . So I think part of the joy is when we do new plays and we talk about this as a plus, is that your play will get done in terms of two very different audiences in terms of what the reactions are.
Karen Zacherias did, when she did Native Gardens with us, she was like, they laugh at different things in Phoenix and they laugh at, in Tucson and it's yeah, of course they do, because they're there, there's a different person that lives in a giant metropolis than a person that wants to live in a kind of artists friendly amazing Mexican food place down in Tucson.
So I think that's part of the joy. It's like
we're, every show is in two very different audiences
And I think for us as an organization, that the truth about Phoenix is there are literally millions of people who have never heard of us. So at other theaters I've been a part of you're like we're everybody knows and they're coming. And probably even in Tucson, like most people know about us.
And our job is either to bring them back or to do something that's exciting to them. In Phoenix, like never heard of you, never heard of the arts, never. So it's okay, that's such opportunity for growth. And listen, I grew up in Mesa, which is not even Phoenix. It's a city next to Phoenix. We say Phoenix when we leave the state, but really there's all these other little cities next to it, that are full of people so it's like, how do those people have access to the arts in downtown Phoenix?
Lacey: [00:39:38] I'm just so fascinated by the fact that you're in two cities.
Sean: [00:39:42] we are the only theater that's in two cities. Yeah. Yeah. Most it's so interesting. It's like most people think it's a terrible idea. Because all theater is local, right? And so it's like how to really invest into your community. But I think it's our, I think it's going to go from being our weakness to being our strength, because first of all, when you're an actor and you come work with us, it's an 11 week contract because we're going to rehearse then we're going to do it in one city, and then we're going to go to another, I don't know what it's going to end up being, but it used to be the 12 weeks got you your health insurance. So that's one gig that can do the majority of the work there . I know they changed the rules but so I think that's exciting in terms of what it is, but I just think also when we develop any shows, right?
When you develop new work, the fingerprints of the town that you're in have such an effect. You do three previews and nobody laughs at a joke that joke is gone by preview four. These authors that have their work in two different cities are going to get two very different audiences to be able to see what works and what doesn't
Lacey: [00:40:48] It's like somewhere in the middle of obviously your typical regional theater that has one location and some kind of tour. And also there was something really cool about the idea of. You're in the same state the entire time. And so you're still serving a community it's maybe a community of Arizonans and not just, to Tuscon-ites I made that up.
But
Sean: [00:41:11] two Sonian is what they say and Phoenicians.
Lacey: [00:41:14] it. Phoenicians.
I feel like this could be a model that actually could bring theater to more people, especially in large state, lots of open space population spaced out. I think it's a really cool idea.
Sean: [00:41:26] And I will say, even, but this from a digital standpoint, so we have two readings coming up online that were, are going to be streamed into 32 different schools across the state. And and that's because we're in two different cities. So there are two different sets of high schools and there are two different sets of towns that are right next to them that currently have no arts education going on.
We're able to reach. 32 schools, not just because we're awesome, which is part of it, but it's also because you're right, we are in two different counties. We are in two different school districts. We are, there's a lot more people to be able to serve. When I was at MRT, we were in Lowell and it was like, we, we were getting everybody, we were getting all the school.
We were like that. I think that organization will never grow to be any bigger. And that's okay. Because it was probably that's what that area could sustain and keep going at a healthy level. We are not that we have nothing but potential in terms of how we could grow.
Lacey: [00:42:20] Yeah. In States with the same kind of, like I said, lots of space people spread out. It seems like something that's really worth looking at in terms of a, not a business model per se, but maybe a a mission model.
Sean: [00:42:32] Yeah, no, we're so we were named the state theater and sometimes we ask what does that mean? And some days I know, and some days I don't, but on days that I know it has a lot to do with like we're charged with supporting not just our town and not just these streets. It's no, we're charged with how to make Arizona a hub of creativity in education.
Lacey: [00:42:53] Okay. That's a button. That's amazing. I do love to ask just as we were we're wrapping up what's giving you joy right now.
Sean: [00:43:01] What's giving me joy these days is that because we're hoping to go, I've been having these zoom calls with artists and composers and actors, and, we're all like a little gun shy to be like, it's going to happen. But we're getting excited about plans to get back in a room.
And it really feels like it's going to happen. And so that has been the part that is really mind blowing to me is Oh my God, like we're calling actors. And we're seeing like, are you available to start December 20th? Cause if you are, we think it's going to happen. And they say of course I'm available.
I've had nothing for two years. And we're like, great. Write it in, not in pencil, let's do it. Let's and I think that all really exciting at this point, to be able to say that those conversations with artists that aren't me calling to say, your show has been postponed or your show has been canceled or,
we're yeah.
And, just to talk about the work for a real moment and not in the context of let's work on it so it's ready for some day to be like, no, let's work on it because people are going to see it
Lacey: [00:44:09] I'm so thrilled that as we sit here in April, that we can say that, and that you can say that, and that you have a season that you're know gonna bring to life any minute now. So congratulations, and thank you so much. This was a great conversation. I think people are going to be fascinated
Sean: [00:44:27] Oh, thank you. I just appreciate you for continuing to lift up artists' voices. We need this more than ever.
Lacey: [00:44:33] thank you. Yeah, we all do so let's lift them up.
Sean: [00:44:37] Thank you for having me on the show and thank you for everything you do.
