Watching a powerful show in the theater can put reality on hold, transport viewers to a different time and place, and allow viewers to invest themselves in the lives of others.
Unfortunately, what theater cannot do is put the economy on hold and allow viewers to invest themselves in a stable financial future. Also unfortunately, the one thing most people cannot afford to do during a recession is spend money on transporting themselves to a different time and place when they really need to sustain their real lives.
“Everyone’s trying to get more hours (of work). People just don’t want to come out and see a show,” said Corwin Evans, a third-year graduate sound design student who works at the Los Angeles Theatre Ensemble, a small theater company that operates out of Santa Monica’s Powerhouse Theatre.
“You have to start relying on discounts or promotions or things like that, and you start really getting creative,” Evans said. “You have to say something important or even just entertain people for an evening.”
To draw crowds to the theater, groups such as Los Angeles Theatre Ensemble and UCLA’s own theater department must encourage crowds in creative and budget-friendly ways.
“We might, for any particular show, take advantage of what that show’s draw is,” Evans said. “We did “˜Macbeth’ not that long ago, and we reached out to Shakespeare groups, English classes and drama classes in high schools and colleges across the area to try and draw those people. It’s a little bit different when you have the chance to talk to people about the show and the inspiration for the show.”
Third-year theater student Reider Larsen, who will appear in the theater department’s upcoming production of “The Devils,” finds reaching out to audience members not much of a problem because of the built-in community interested in supporting theater at UCLA.
“(Theater students) are in an interesting position because we’re encapsulated in this bubble of a school, but in the future it’s all more uncertain,” Larsen said.
Larsen, however, shares similar concerns with Evans about the future of theater, particularly regarding his career.
“There are so many people who go to school for theater, but it’s a tough business, and the amount of people who end up making it is small. That’s something that’s tread very lightly in school because it’s a hard trail,” Larsen said.
“When I go to a restaurant, I see how many people are theater majors, and I talked to one waitress who took acting at UCLA, and she was talking about going back to med school,” he said.
The theater department chair, William D. Ward, noticed an effect on students choosing to pursue theater as well.
“The recession is one factor that affects enrollments in many theater programs across our country,” he said. “UCLA theater experienced last year some loss of excellent applicants that had confirmed their intention to come to UCLA, but following denial of their financial aid, were unable to afford UCLA.”
In spite of the obvious concerns about theatergoers and opportunities for actors, Evans, Larsen and Ward all remain optimistic about the future.
“(Theater) is a terrible, terrible business, but I feel it’s only a terrible business if you continue looking at it as a business,” Larsen said. “We’re all going to have to find a job to support ourselves in order to do what we want to do.”
Ward, too, found that the theater department continues to thrive and maintain a competitive program in spite of the overall drop in applicants who could accept their admission.
“UCLA theater continues to receive well over a thousand applications for just 65 places in our freshman class,” Ward said. “This makes UCLA theater twice as selective as Harvard.”
Many theater students also prepare for the rocky road to a theater career by studying other disciplines aside from theater. Larsen, for example, is minoring in geography and environmental studies and is considering pursuing agriculture and organic farming in addition to acting.
“I can definitely see myself trying to pursue some other line of work while just continuing to practice theater for my own benefit,” Larsen said.
In UCLA’s theater department, students are prepared to enter other fields by taking classes outside of the department.
“Unlike other (theater schools), UCLA theater offers both the excellent professional training that would be expected from these private B.F.A. programs but also a fantastic liberal-arts education that is unavailable at the conservatories,” Ward said.
But Evans assures those students who plan to solely pursue theater that the skills they learn in school can be applied to “real-world” theater experiences.
“The only difference is that there’s no centralized area to do that sort of thing in Los Angeles,” Evans said. “There’s no Bruin Walk you can stand on to distribute flyers.”
Ultimately, the creativity brought to a theater career must be applied to maintain the theater business in light of economic realities.
Evans said, “The creativity you bring to do business at the theater has never been as important as the creativity of the business itself right now.”