This is How it Goes concluded it’s 3-week run last night. It was a high artistic success, and as with Books (abridged) before it, we simply wish more people would have seen it.
Here’s some feedback from some folks who saw it this weekend:
Just wanted to let you know how much we enjoyed “This is How it Goes”. Sandy and I caught the afternoon performance today and couldn’t believe how fast 90 minutes went by. Keep up the excellent work. – Brendan McLaughlin, ABC Action News
I thought This Is How It Goes was a powerful production – uncomfortable at times, but I believe that’s what good theater does: It raises publicly thoughts and attitudes and actions that would be reprehensible in real life and forces us to confront them. I don’t condone any of “Man’s” purported actions or words, necessarily, but the distancing effect of not knowing what is true, what is imagined and what is perspective makes it tolerable. – Michael Kilgore, TBPAC
Clare and I loved the show! [Ami] did such a great job directing and the performers and production were fantastic! Thank you for a wonderful 90 minutes of thought provoking and compelling theatre. – Alvin Jenkins
As I’ve said plenty of times before, all the artistic success in the world is difficult to be proud of when you look at the lost potential in reaching people with it. Plays open and then they close. There’s no catching it on DVD. Even a recording of a play lacks the punch being in a live theater with all the magic that accompanies it. It’s ephemeral.
So it’s just on us to work that much harder at getting people in the theater. We obviously can’t get pissed off at people for not coming, well, not publicly anyway, because that’s never going to help us get people to drop money on a ticket. We simply have to work harder in all areas.
We felt a show like this one, with the age of the characters, the creds of the playwright and some of the core artists we had working on it would really appeal to a younger demographic and the theater-types. That the topics of racism, sexism, love and marriage would get people talking and carry this thing like The Pillowman did. Again, some of it was I think out of our hands. We had simply amazing feedback on the show. We need to leave the entire duration of Gasparilla alone. We need to avoid the latter end of the NFL playoffs and the Super Bowl. We can only compete so much, and we were a gnat swarming an elephant with all of that. We just have to do better next time. We know that in order to grow, we’ll always need to do better. It’s a little tiring at times, but until we can get the season ticket holder numbers we need, and until we can get the financial support from our community that’s going to hold us up a bit better to weather a show that might not sell – this is all we have.
Some of us will be taking a week or two off to recharge and relax. Some of us are already starting to move on to new things. We have about six weeks until we bring The Great American Play back to Tampa in a new incarnation that will hopefully launch this thing into some sort of spotlight. It’ll be an exciting time for us. We’re also announcing our new season then, and beginning our season ticket campaign. I hope you can all join us for this very, very special opening weekend. I’m only telling you now, because I know how things get. Put it on your calendar. Save $3 a week from now til then and you don’t even have to sweat the price of the ticket.
You won’t be disappointed.
