CLEVELAND, Ohio — Coaxing young people to live theater has long been a conundrum for playhouses across the country. The Cleveland Play House recently decided to try a new approach.
The regional theater now offers young people (ages 23 to 39 years old) membership in the Cleveland Playhouse Young Professionals, a group that provides discounted tickets and a chance to schmooze with the casts of current productions.
Cleveland Play House Marketing Associate Ryan Lucas emphasized that the theater has a diverse audience, but said patrons tend to skew toward older generations.
“The largest chunk is between 40 and 60 years old,” Lucas said.
Enter the young professionals group, which held its first outing at Perplexity Games in Ohio City on Feb. 6. Around a dozen playhouse patrons and cast member tried the escape room’s latest game, which involves solving a series of puzzles to steal a scientist’s invention.
Perplexity Games
“The plan right now is to do that at least once per show,” Lucas said. A show typically runs at the Play House for a few weeks.
The group will patronize the theater’s community partners at future events he said.
Young professionals and members of the cast of “Baskerville” — a play based on the adventures of legendary fictional detective Sherlock Holmes — gleefully interacted at the Perplexity Games gathering.
“Who is your favorite Watson?” Young Professionals Member Jamie Spencer asked Jacob James, who plays Holmes’ longtime partner Dr. John Watson in “Baskerville.”
“I actually love the old Basil Rathbone Films,” James said, referring to a series of Holmes movies from the 1930s and 1940s. “Because they’re so creepy, and they’re black and white and they have this historic quality to them.”
However, James admitted that he wasn’t impressed with the way Nigel Bruce portrayed Watson in those films. Bruce, James said, played Watson as an overweight oaf.
The Watson from the popular BBC series “Sherlock” — portrayed by Martin Freeman — is closer to author Arthur Conan Doyle’s original interpretation of the character, he said.
The group also chatted about Cleveland and the young professionals suggested things the cast members can do in Northeast Ohio during their free time. Both patrons and cast members said after the event that they loved the opportunity to interact with each other outside of the theater.
Lucas said the Cleveland Play House envisions future young professionals’ gatherings as “one part social gathering, one part networking event, one part glimpse behind-the-scene.”
A 2013 Ticketmaster survey found that young people are interested in attending live theater.
But young people frequently cite cost as a barrier to going to the theater. The cheapest “Baskerville” tickets available to the general public were $25 each, more than twice the cost of going to a movie theater.
That is why the young professionals group appealed to Lindgren Carson of University Heights.
The 27-year-old Carson is exactly the kind of person the Cleveland Play House is looking to attract. She’s a former executive assistant at the Cleveland Ballet and a former professional dancer who maintains an interest in the performing arts.
Lindgren said she’s attended around a dozen stage shows in the last two years. She wanted to attend more, but but her budget didn’t allow it.
So she jumped at the chance to to acquire discounted tickets to shows through the Cleveland Playhouse Young Professionals.
“As soon as they opened up subscriptions” I got one, she said. “Now I don’t know what I was going to do without it.”
Cleveland has seen an influx of young adults in recent years, and Lucas said the Cleveland Play House saw an opportunity with more young professionals taking up residence inside the city limits.
“A lot of people are coming to Cleveland for the first time, and having a group like this introduces them to the city and to some hidden gems,” he said.
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