We have been playing to a 70-30 black to white audience. And we are just doing what should come next, trying to attract a larger house, trying to reach an audience that's half black and white.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
It will take very sophisticated marketing to achieve our aim of bringing more black people into the theater.
As soon as white folks say a play's good, the theater is jammed with blacks and whites.
Black audiences are hard. They always think they're better than you. So you got to come with a little extra to satisfy them.
Many theaters are tackling the multifaceted work of black writers - established and emerging. Now the next step is for them to bring in audiences of color and continue to go out to our community and create a continuous connection that extends beyond the one black show in the season.
I'd like to see more crossover between white and black music. That's something I've been advocating for years.
When I first started, as long as you were a bit brown, you could play any kind of ethnic anything. Now it's much more localised and specific. I feel like a wise old woman looking back on the evolution of how much more sophisticated audiences are.
If your audience is young, it'd be youth culture, if your audience is older, it'd be older people, if it were senior citizens, it'd be senior citizen issues. So you try and hit the target audience.
The only way we are going to get diversity is if the demographics of the decision-makers change... The odd-token bone thrown is not going to do it. Don't pat yourself on the back because you made that black drama; that's not diversity. It's got to be baked into the foundation of where the ideas flow from.
As much as we love playing the small clubs, we'd really like to get ourselves in front of a larger audience. I'm not talking about arenas or anything, but nice theaters and larger clubs.
Ninety-five percent of my audience was white.