Building Audiences, One Corporate Dollar at a Time
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

When theater professionals contemplate the declining influence and popularity of the theater ––serious theater, not jukebox musicals –– they talk mostly about one thing: high ticket prices. And once they get going on possible ways to offset them, the next topic that comes up is corporate sponsorship.
It may be slightly unsettling to old-school bohemians who believe that true art always stands at an angle to mainstream culture, but recently the most promising strategy to emerge for making performing arts affordable is corporate partnership, in which businesses buy, or subsidize, a whole run or season of tickets, which can then be offered to the public at a discounted price.
In this country, a leader in the practice has been Time Warner Inc. The corporation has been for three years a leading sponsor of City Center’s Fall for Dance series, for which all tickets are $10. It also subsidized the 15th anniversary season of the Signature Theatre Company, allowing all seats to be priced at $15. (August Wilson’s “Two Trains Running” began previews Tuesday, having already extended its run twice.) Last night at the Hudson Theatre, the Business Committee for the Arts, a nonprofit organization dedicated to spurring business support for the arts, honored Time Warner, along with nine other companies around the country, for its innovative forms of support.
The other companies honored were: Advanta, in Spring House, Pa.; Bison Financial Group, in Lafayette, Ind.; Boeing, in Chicago; the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, in Fort Worth, Texas; HCA, in Nashville, Tenn.; I.W. Marks Jewelers, of Houston; Lincoln Financial Group, of Philadelphia; the PNC Financial Services Group, of Pittsburgh; and Sabroso Company, of Medford, Ore.
Businesses adopt these practices because it benefits them. “It helps them attract and retain employees, which is a big issue this days,” the president of BCA, Judith Jedlicka, said. It’s good for their relationship to the community; they’re seen as responsible and civicminded. And a relationship to local cultural organizations stimulates –– or, at least, executives convince themselves that it stimulates –– creativity and innovation (those buzzwords of the late 20th century) in the workplace. Just as corporations bring in best-selling authors to instruct their employees about how to “think outside the box,” they believe exposure to opera or theater or classical music or a museum will awake their employees’ inner innovators.
Time Warner’s vice president for marketing and arts development, Dan Osheyack, explained that the corporation decided recently to refocus its arts philanthropy around three major goals: broadening public access to the arts, supporting arts education (including funding 17 after-school programs for teenagers from public schools), and strengthening diverse voices in the arts, by giving general operating support grants to small, community-based theaters, like the Classical Theater of Harlem, the Billie Holiday Theatre in Brooklyn, and Manhattan’s Repertorio Español (which presents plays in Spanish).
Mr. Osheyack said Time Warner’s arts activities are closely connected to its purpose as a business.”There’s a solid business reason for everything that we’re doing, and that’s tied to developing new audiences and developing new talent,” he said. “We are a company that produces content and that disseminates that content. We have to make sure that the audiences are there, and that the talent exists to tell the stories that these audiences want to hear.”
This is not to say that the programs are strictly results-oriented. “What we’re talking about is a long-term investment in community,” Mr. Osheyack said. “I don’t know that there’s any way we could guarantee that the next Spike Lee or Tony Kushner is going to appear based on something we invested in. [But] simply by helping create an environment where art can be perpetuated, where art can be nurtured, that benefits a company like ours.”
The term that’s always thrown out, by the sponsors and often by the arts organizations, is “audience building.” The president and chief executive of City Center, Arlene Shuler, has said that audience surveys show that people who come for the $10 series come back during the regular season and pay full price.
The artistic director of the Signature, James Houghton, expressed a slightly different view –– describing the $15 season as a “home run” in terms of bringing in new, excited audiences, but, in some sense, only a temporary step.
“The economic equation of theater is impossible, especially in the nonprofit world,” he said.”It costs so much to produce it that, even if we were to sell out every single seat, we barely get to 50% of what it cost to make it. We’re stuck in this ridiculous equation, which forces the ticket prices up and up and up. And there’s a fundamental issue with that equation that is contradictory to engaging people in the theater.”
Still, he said, the $15 season is “not about trying to lure people in, and we’ll charge them more later.” After all, lots of people, even if they really enjoy a $15 play, still can’t afford a $55 one (the Signature’s regular price). “It’s trying to deal with the condition itself,” Mr. Houghton said, “to say, ‘Wait a minute, this system is incredibly broken.'”
Other theaters in the city –– like the Public Theater, which is offering $10 tickets to Thursday performances of its current production, Julia Cho’s “Durango” –– are confronting these issues and coming up with proposals, many of which will no doubt involve corporate support.
“Fortunately for us,” Mr. Houghton said, “we found a partnership with Time Warner and with folks there who bought into that vision” of making theater accessible. “How that evolves and grows has yet to be determined.”