Well, some folks called it "Pay What You Can" or "Pick Your Price" and one newspaper came up with "Pay As You Go", which sounds like a whole other bizarre and interesting idea. (Pay $X for the first act, if you like it, pay $X more for the second act.) Anyway...

Dead City was - by a long shot - the most popular show we've every produced. We beat our previous record for a run by almost 200 people. And we actually had fewer performances of this show than most. Wow.

However, instead responding by playing it safe on other fronts to compensate for the big risks we're taking, we've decided to try another big experiment. We're making all tickets to all shows for everyone all the time "Pay What You Want". That's right, just like Radiohead,Trent Reznor, Saul Williams, Paste Magazine, and a small crop of restaurants.

Of course, I know lots of theatres have done this for a couple of nights in each run, and our local Shakespeare in the Park is free, meaning "donate what you want." And I have heard gossip that a few theatres on the west coast have gone completely PWYW.

For us, it's really about two things. First, it's about serving the community. We figure it's a better world if good theatre is really, truly affordable to everyone, so we're putting our money where our mouths are, so to speak. The second is marketing. The space we're in has many more seats than we're used to, so we might as well make them available for next to nothing, otherwise, they'll just sit empty.

Has anyone out there tried this? What success have you had? What made it work or not work? What are your thoughts?

When I put that in the title of a post, it automatically gets way more popular. Hmmm ...

Anyway, it sounds like Prince Gomolvilas, Brandon Patton, and Impact Theatre have figured something out. Check out these posts from Tim Bauer AKA Direct Address and Marisela AKA Variations on a Theme.

Click through for the trailer.

What I thought I would do to keep us honest in this discussion about financial models is to tell you about Berkeley Rep's dark night of the soul, our moment of crisis--what we've perceived of as being action-steps to address that; and five or six years later, what we perceive as being the outcome at this moment; and then to raise a question.

You on the East Coast felt that 9/11 was really your crisis, but it was in fact a national crisis, and it certainly had ripples throughout the country and at arts organizations throughout the country. We found out that not only did 9/11 have an impact but it came, unfortunately, at the same time as the dot-com bust. And I was fond of saying, at that point, that every dentist was more invested in technology in San Francisco than they were anywhere else in the country. And so the impact on organizations in our part of the country was pretty devastating.

We immediately began cutting our budgets like crazy, trying to anticipate how bad it was going to be. And we realized that no matter how bad we thought it was going to be, it ended up getting worse. And for a few years, we found that we just couldn't figure out what was the right thing to do. I responded in one way; Tony Taccone, our artistic director, responded in another way; and I think neither of us felt, for a few years, that we could get a handle on what was going on. And one of the things that happened was that we all got very internal. Our programming got very internal and, frankly, our programming was not as strong as it had been for many years before or thankfully as it has been since then.

Okay, you need a teaser? Here.

We keep talking about finding ways for people to connect with our particular art form.

But people don't want to connect to art . . . they want to connect to other people.

So instead of a theatre company seeing their performance on stage that night as the point of the evening, perhaps they should just see themselves as the hub . . . as the thing that connects all the people in the audience to each other.

I was reading a bit of American Theatre online - specifically this article by Celia Wren that summarizes and slightly analyzes this year's Theatre Facts insert - and I came across this quotation.

Jorge Z. Ortoll, executive director of New York’s Ma-Yi Theater Company, frets over the fickleness of theatregoers today. “If it’s a rainy day, they don’t come,” he says. “If it’s hot outside, they don’t come. If it’s a nice day to go to the park, they don’t come.”

Is there ever a good night to do theatre?

Last night I met with a guy who has a real passion for Our Town, his name is Artie Isaac and he runs America's Favorite Ad Agency, Young Isaac. He also has a blog that's a great read - check it out.

Well, it was Thorton Wilder who brought us together, but we spent about half of our time talking about marketing theatre. I'm hoping to pick his brain for more, but for the moment, let's focus on two key questions. (Somebody warm-up the comment-o-tron, please.)

The first is the longer. Someone very smart wrote that if you can fulfill one of three needs, people will do anything for you.

• Aid their health.
• Make them richer.
• Do something for their kids.

So, how does theatre address one of those needs? And, as a caveat, can you answer the question without referring to spiritual health or something silly like that?

Second question. What is the promise that theatre makes?

Your thoughts?