You Know, For the Kids!

After finishing up work on Isabella, we thought we'd do a quick survey to learn a little bit more about our audience, thus enabling us to better tend to your experimental theatre needs. We learned a lot of interesting stuff, not least of which was this:

3. In which one of these age ranges do you fall?

Under 18		0.9%
18-24		15.3%
25-35		52.5%
36-44		12.7%
45-59		10.2%
60+		8.5%

Now, we won't lie - we make a lot of claims about ourselves having a youngish audience, but up until now, these have been primarily based on anecdotal evidence. As it turns out, over 2/3 of the folks who came to see Isabella were under 36 years old - a rarity in the ever-aging performing-arts world.

There's been a lot of talk recently about brain-drain and the role of culture in stopping it - to be less wonky about it, the question is: how do we keep the tens of thousands of college kids in the Philadelphia area from leaving after they graduate? Isn't culture - rock shows, contemporary art, and yes, cutting-edge, affordable theatre - one of the things that keeps the young folks around?

And - if that's true, which we think it is - can we humbly suggest that Pig Iron's model seems to be working? One of our favorite quotes from the open-response section of the survey was "I didn't like theater until I saw Pig Iron stuff"; we like the idea that experimental theater isn't just for the hard-core theater specialists - it works, too, for younger audience members who value the idea that theater doesn't have to rely on second-hand stagings and plotlines to tell its stories.