Audience Engagement

The audience engagement strategy will take a two-part approach in connecting with audience members though transforming their experience when they arrive at the theater as well as including Speakers Night and Wine Down Wednesday.

First, audience members will enter the lobby and see a photographic backdrop of a living room, like the one in the play set up in front of the spiral staircase in Vasey Hall. There will be a selection of hats, wigs and props and audience members are invited to create their own vignettes similar to what they are about to see in the play. We encourage exploring drag and gender non-conformity in this process. While this is happening, there will be music and sound playing in the background. The audio includes Assimil recordings, songs with repetition, famous French recordings, and songs by famous queer, drag and gender-nonconforming performers, with record scratches and rewind sounds sometimes cutting the audio or causing it to loop or start over. On the Lobby displays there will be the images and sequence from the V-file played on a loop juxtaposed against the audio discussed above. If possible, once or twice during the half hour leading up to curtain, the video can be played with the appropriate audio and then return to the mix above. The two vom entrances will be renamed. “It’s not that way” and “It’s over here” from the last line of the play. When ushers are giving directions, they should incorporate these phrases. If audience members become confused, they may explain as needed.

Before entering the theater, audience members must pick up their tickets and possibly concessions. The second part of the engagement strategy is to have themed ticket and concession package deals. Before opening, these details will need to be announced in a social media campaign, as well as signage for the lobby to make the audience aware of these deals. Ticket packages will include:

The Smiths - 2 Adults = $5 discount off 2 regular adult tickets
The Martins – 2 adults and up to 2 children = the price of 2 adult tickets plus one child ticket. The second child, if there even is one, gets in for free!

We will offer the following concession Combo’s

The Ducky Daddles – your choice of soda and a candy bar,
The Pompier – A Croissant and A package of RedHots, and
The Chamber Pot = Several biscuits, aka a cookie, it’s British after all, and a brochure for reading material while going to the loo.

For speaker’s night, we have invited, the most famous bald drag queen, Sasha Velour! From her bio she says, “Sasha Velour is a gender-fluid drag queen and visual artist. Through multi-media performance, advocacy, and design, Velour’s work maps out new frontiers for drag and creates new spaces for LGBTQ artists to flourish and thrive.”

She is a perfect addition to this night as, “Her live performances have been called “an entirely new level of performance art” (Yahoo) and “heart-wrenching” (Billboard). She has pioneered the use of projection mapping in lip-synch drag performances and is known for combining emotional pathos with theatrical stunts.”

We invite Sasha to talk about her works as a drag queen and talk about how she has deconstructed gender in her own life and in her work. She will also discuss how the use of Camp connects to The Theatre of the Absurd.

For Wine-down Wednesday we will create an “Anything Goes” and Absurd atmosphere, within reason, of course. There will be a healthy mix of French and British culture, Drag, queerness, and gender con-conformity. We encourage audience members to come in costume as firemen, maids, British bourgeois, members of French society. Community Drag kings and queens will be invited and encouraged to attend. French wine will be served. Staff and ushers will wear berets and French wine will be served.

We will create and distribute a bingo board with absurd phrases from the show. The back of the bingo board will indicate that only one pattern wins and it’s a random set of squares. One square will contain a line from another of Ionesco’s plays that is never said in this play, demonstrating the fact that no one wins at life!

Budget

Necessary props and costumes can be borrowed from prop and costume storage. Printing and social media posts courtesy of the Marketing Department.

Photographic Backdrop - $85

Purchase Red Hots and Croissants for concessions - $40

Wine - $50

Berets approximately 5 - $25

Total $200