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Matthew Freeman is a Brooklyn based playwright with a BFA from Emerson College. His plays include THE DEATH OF KING ARTHUR, REASONS FOR MOVING, THE GREAT ESCAPE, THE AMERICANS, THE WHITE SWALLOW, AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR, THE MOST WONDERFUL LOVE, WHEN IS A CLOCK, GLEE CLUB, THAT OLD SOFT SHOE and BRANDYWINE DISTILLERY FIRE. He served as Assistant Producer and Senior Writer for the live webcast from Times Square on New Year's Eve 2010-2012. As a freelance writer, he has contributed to Gamespy, Premiere, Complex Magazine, Maxim Online, and MTV Magazine. His plays have been published by Playscripts, Inc., New York Theatre Experience, and Samuel French.

Tuesday, September 04, 2007

How irrelevant you are, Mr. Freeman

So, Martin Denton posted the top searched venues on nytheatre.com, which covers more Off-Off and Off-Broadway than pretty much anyone else on the planet. What do we see?

Disney. Disney. Disney.

Certainly one might hope that the site draws casual theatergoers and then maybe exposes them to more of the scene. But I suspect that, at the end of the day, even at a website much of Indie Theater in NY views as its great defender, Disney has us all beat.

This drives me back to beating the same dead horse, if you'll pardon the cliche. (This horse is glue by now.) The biggest challenge of smaller theater is to expand its audience and reach out to new audiences in new ways.

That's why, like it or not, it behooves places like Playwrights Horizons to reach out to the blogosphere and try new platforms for creating buzz and generating ticket sales.

Happy September.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Can I say something about dead horses? This is not intended in any way to be antagonistic to Freeman, who's obviously being humorous, but there seems to be a lot of "That subject AGAIN? How TIRESOME" rhetoric going around, and I don't get it. If a subject is still of relevant interest to practitioners of theater, if it refers to a unsolved problem, it's not a dead horse, right? One can bring it up without being accused of tediousness, right?

Freeman said...

Good point, Mac. I mean, it's not like the problems are all solved after they're brought up once.

I feel, though, oddly challenged. Let's start a flame war which will end when I compare you to Goebbels.

Anonymous said...

Come on, Matt. Like your plays couldn't benefit from just a dash of Magic(TM).

Anonymous said...

Boys, boys, you're both pretty. And you're both just like Goebbels.