Theater Tickets for Movie Prices: Behind the Dramatic Reductions

When Scott Fortier proposed reducing ticket prices for his company, Catalyst Theater, to the fire-sale level of $10 for all seats at all times, his board took a great big gulp.

Everyone knows, after all, that the costs of putting on plays go up, not down, every year, and that apart from cajoling deep-pocketed foundations and patrons for gifts, the only way to pay the bills is to charge more at the gate. But what Fortier coveted more than checks were fuller houses for the modern plays and revitalized classics Catalyst stages at the Capitol Hill Arts Workshop -- an aim that was not being met at the company's regular prices of $25 to $30 a head.

Fortier's cheap-seat strategy has proved enormously popular: This past season, its first full one at $10 a pop, the company performed to an all-time high of 76 percent capacity, and this fall, annual subscriptions have doubled. On a larger scale, though, what Fortier's daring move taps into is a growing acknowledgment that to attract diverse age groups and income levels, theater and other performing-arts organizations must come up with more radical approaches to pricing that address, among other things, the competition from less expensive nights out.

"We wanted as many people to see our shows as possible," says Fortier, Catalyst's founding artistic director. "It's about sharing the artistic experience. We didn't want to perform to 40 percent audiences. So why not a night of theater for the price of a movie?"

The notion of a theater ticket as affordable as one at the local Cinema One-Too-Many is, in fact, becoming more of a reality in Washington. From steep-discount-ticketing Web sites to new policies targeting audiences up to age 35, the affordable options open to many of the region's theatergoers are on the upswing.

These new attempts at luring the age group that theaters desperately want to cultivate -- those fretting more about first jobs than retirement -- are cropping up even as top-tier ticket prices continue creeping up as well. Last season, for instance, the top single-ticket price for Saturday evenings at the Shakespeare Theatre Company was $76.25; this season, it's $79.75. A high-traffic night for a Broadway-style musical can cost you even more: A revival of "My Fair Lady" at the Kennedy Center this Christmas could run you $95 a ticket on a Saturday night, and the return engagement of "Spamalot" at the National Theatre around the same time lists a top-ticket price on Saturday evening of $96.50.

Perhaps this is why even some longtime fans feel as if theater is becoming out of reach for a lot of its audience. "There are so many people who can't get to see plays because of the expense," says Ralph Yodaiken, a physician from Bethesda. "They're pricing themselves out of sight," says his wife, Naomi.

The Yodaikens were waiting last Sunday outside the Shakespeare's Lansburgh Theatre for tickets to go on sale for that day's preview matinee of "The Taming of the Shrew." It was a rare pay-what-you-can performance for the company -- its first in about five years -- occasioned by an unusually long preview period for "Shrew."

And the public response attested to the extraordinary appetite for cut-price quality: The line for the 2 p.m. show started forming at 11:20 a.m. and by 1 o'clock stretched all the way down Seventh Street.

Many Washington theaters traditionally use pay-what-you-can -- a tool pioneered locally two decades ago by Woolly Mammoth Theatre -- for outreach and marketing. It attracts people at the start of a run and can help build word-of-mouth. It's clear, though, that companies are trying to come up with other strategies to accomplish the dual tasks of filling as many seats as possible and targeting the segments of the population they are finding hardest to attract.

Take, for instance, recent developments at the District's two best-known resident companies, Arena Stage and Shakespeare. This year, Arena expanded its rush-seats program so that now, every Tuesday, anyone 30 or younger can buy up to four $10 tickets to any performance for that entire week -- provided they do it by phone or at the box office, and that each of the ticket holders satisfies the age limit.

The Shakespeare Theatre, which is opening a new 775-seat main stage this month, has put together an equally ambitious policy, setting aside 20,000 tickets at a price of $10 -- or roughly 10 percent of what it expects to sell this season -- for playgoers 35 and under. One facet of this policy means that at the beginning of each week, 20 pairs of $10 tickets will go on sale for 35-and-unders.