Two Theaters Find That Innovative Child-Care Programs Help Attract Busy Patrons

BRAINSTORMS

By Kimberlee Roth

Ten years ago, administrators at Center Stage in Baltimore were considering ways to increase season subscriptions.

“We had been hearing for quite a while that our subscribers were struggling to manage a full season of theater around their busy lives, especially when their children got old enough to have busy schedules of their own,” says Barbara Watson, the theater’s director of audience development. “And the hassle of finding a baby sitter — who might easily cancel at the last minute- — made it too stressful to make a real commitment to any kind of scheduled activity, including theatergoing.”

A few years later, and a few miles to the south, the leaders of Washington’s Arena Stage began searching for reasons why potential patrons stayed away from the theater — and learned that time crunches and baby-sitter hassles played a big role. “Our education and communication and marketing staffs put their heads together, and thought there was probably something we can do to fill the need,” recalls Maggie Boland, Arena’s director of communications.

From these separate conversations grew a pair of similarly intended programs — Center Stage’s Child’s Play and Arena’s Kidsplay — which provide children with activities related to theater while the youngsters’ parents attend performances.

Child care appears to be a significant factor in determining who goes to the theater, and how often. A 2000 survey by Shugoll Research for the League of Washington Theaters found 17 percent of respondents citing lack of child care as a reason for not attending plays more often. A 1996 study by the National Endowment for the Arts found that of adults who attended at least one nonmusical stage play in the past year, 80 percent had no children under age 18.

Center Stage administrators decided that they wanted parents to have the opportunity to attend their plays, and decided to start its Child’s Play program in 1992. No funds were budgeted for the effort that first year, so the task for organizing the program fell to a staff member, Alicia Saunders, who has since left the organization. As the project’s coordinator, she turned to patrons and board members for help in gathering resources, and they donated a chalkboard, art supplies, books, and toys. Staff members explored liability issues, and learned that the theater’s insurance policy covered the program, although all parents are asked to sign a liability-release form when registering their children.

Initially, the theater offered one Child’s Play session per four-week run of each show, always during a Saturday matinee. A subscription of six sessions, one per each of the season’s shows, cost $60. The theater marketed Child’s Play through its subscription brochures and by phone when ticket buyers called to order. Efforts drew about 20 participants that season, ages 2 to 10.

An Expanding Mission

Over the years, the program has evolved. The minimum age for participants has now been raised to 4, which alleviates the necessity of maintaining diaper-change facilities and makes it easier to plan shared activities, according to Moira Sweeney, Child’s Play’s current coordinator. “That age group works well as one group,” she says. “We don’t need to split it up.” Due to demand, Center Stage has added an additional Child’s Play session per show, with a maximum of 20 children per session. The subscription price has been increased to $12 per session, or $72 for the season, and the theater budgets $2,400 annually for the program — roughly, its revenue goal for Child’s Play per season.

The program has expanded beyond its original mission of just keeping children busy while their parents take in a show. Ms. Sweeney, who now works with one paid and one volunteer assistant, has replaced the secondhand toys (donated to Goodwill) with activities more closely related to the main-stage show: Child’s Play participants have made beanbag games from old pillowcases and recycled tin cans (to coincide with a Depression-era play), pajamas (for The Pajama Game), and fake blood from dish detergent (for Seven Guitars). They have learned improvisational performance from a comedy troupe, and made music with garbage-can lids and jingle bells.

Participants also tour the theater’s backstage area and meet with performers after the show. Ms. Sweeney says the thematic tie to the show facilitates a “shared love of culture and creative theater that kids aren’t getting at home with a baby sitter. It leaves kids and parents with something to talk about on the ride home.”

Sydney Jacobs of Adelphi, Md., learned about Child’s Play premiere season when she and her husband attended a performance at Center Stage. The couple began to volunteer at the theater as ushers, and when they did, their then-2-year-old daughter went to Child’s Play. “The novelty of having child care at the theater was pretty cool, and it was reasonably priced — definitely less than if we’d hired a babysitter,” says Ms. Jacobs. “Plus we’ve always had an interest in our kids going to the theater.”

Finding the space for the growing program has been Child’s Play’s biggest challenge, says Ms. Sweeney. The location changed from session to session, depending on room availability, and locales were not always convenient, sometimes situated too far from restrooms or the kitchen or too close to rehearsal and performance spaces. “There was a lot of shushing to keep the kids quiet,” she says, and both parents and children liked the security of knowing they would be in the same spot each time. Recently though, the church next door to the theater has donated use of its outdoor courtyard and some interior space, says Ms. Sweeney.

Arena Stage’s Approach

Space has also been an issue for Arena Stage’s Kidsplay, which began four years after Child’s Play but, says Ms. Boland, took no direct inspiration from the Baltimore program, even though Arena administrators were well aware of Child’s Play. Kidsplay, which offers subscriptions only (four sessions per season for $130), began with labor provided by the then-communications director, Laura Hull, and others who were already working for the theater. The theater planned for participant fees to cover the cost of hiring outside artists to help provide activities and educational programming for the children.

From 18 participants in its first year, ranging from kindergartners to fifth graders, the program ballooned to 60 for the 2000-1 season. “We learned some big lessons that year,” says Ms. Boland. To accommodate everyone, the theater moved Kidsplay about a half-mile away, to a building that houses the theater’s education and outreach programs. Before performances, parents parked near the Kidsplay site and dropped their children off, and were then bused to the theater.

“Parents weren’t so comfortable with that,” says Ms. Boland. “We knew that intuitively going in, but it was the only way we could accommodate that number of kids.”

Kidsplay went on hiatus last season so that Ms. Boland and staff members could rethink its structure and content. This year, they are bringing it back to a room at the theater. Arena Stage administrators also decided to hire Creative Cauldron, a nonprofit arts-education organization founded by a former Arena employee who had been heavily involved in Kidsplay, to handle the program’s staffing and programming.

“We don’t believe in straight babysitting,” says Ms. Boland. “We want to offer a valuable experience for the family as a whole. With the emphasis on content, we realized we needed experts to create programming — that’s not our expertise.”

Obstacles and Results

The need for such expertise, along with other requirements, may be why more theaters haven’t created programs like Child’s Play and Kidsplay.

“It can be an expensive thing to set up,” says Mary Harpster, deputy director of the Alliance of Resident Theaters/New York, a service organization for nonprofit theaters. “There are rules to learn, staffing to arrange, and insurance to buy. Most theaters in New York have budgets under $1-million, and many don’t even have their own space. It would be an impossible situation, particularly now with the economy being sluggish and funding cuts.” And the return on the investment would be hard to predict, she adds.

Both Child’s Play and Kidsplay cover their direct costs through fees. Child’s Play has also boosted theater subscription levels, albeit “modestly,” says Ms. Watson, since it can only serve a relatively small number of families. “But we know from our interaction with these patrons that it’s the only way they could subscribe.” The program has also produced a less tangible “good will factor,” she adds, among all patrons who see the theater tailoring services to meet audience needs.

Ms. Boland likewise says that Arena Stage’s program has an effect on subscriptions, and says that the theater lost some subscribers when Kidsplay was suspended last season, though she expects them to return now that it is back. Using this coming season as a baseline, she plans on collecting data to support Kidsplay’s continued growth.

Both Ms. Boland and Ms. Watson hope “graduates” of their theaters’ child-care programs will go on to attend plays with their parents and take advantage of student subscriptions in high school and college.

“If families develop the habit of coming to the theater together,” says Ms. Watson, “we can help ‘grow’ the next generations of patrons.”

At least one survey supports that concept: According to the 2000 League of Washington Theaters’ survey, 80 percent of the area’s current theatergoers had attended plays as children, and about half did so regularly. Ms. Boland sees programs like Kidsplay having both short- and long-term benefits for nonprofit performing-arts organizations like Arena Stage. Short-term, she says, her patrons know their kids are “safe, engaged, and learning,” while parents enjoy a performance they might not otherwise attend. Long-term, she says, “eventually one of these kids might be president of our board of trustees.”

What strategies does your theater or other performing-arts organization use to boost patron attendance? Tell us about them in the Share Your Brainstorms online forum.