A Small Frustration of my Job

Every job has its frustrations. Not enough pay. Not enough recognition. Our families don’t understand what we do. All in all, as an Artistic Director of a theatre company I love, I’m very lucky. But here’s one that’s bothering me this week.

One pretty well-read website and one extremely well-read daily newspaper both made the same error this week: listing the website at which folks could buy tickets for our current show, MIMESOPHOBIA, as www.chicagodramatists.org instead of www.theatreseven.org, the correct address. Anyone inspired to go online and buy a ticket after reading the newspaper review hit a dead end, and probably gave up.

Now, mistakes happen and we all make them. There’s no ill will or malice here toward either publication. But it is frustrating because we as arts makers work so incredibly hard to earn the presence of our colleagues in the press. We have to do so because they provide a very valuable service to us. In evaluating and critiquing the marketplace of currently running theatre, they provide theatre companies an outlet to advertise their work, through the mouthpiece of someone who may or may not like that work.

And the theatre press in Chicago, by and large, is really awesome. Our press colleagues see loads and loads of theatre in the face of declining arts coverage at most of their publications, and still mostly seem to love theatre. I love them. I don’t know even if these are their mistakes I’m talking about – they may very well be errors made in the copy department. But when this kind of thing happens, it just bums me out.

When we request the presence of a critic at our shows, we stagger our communications over a 6-week period. We send multiple emails, a couple hard mail reminders, and in the case of the major publications, drop in a couple phone calls as well. Every communication includes the same press release, which lists in multiple locations the single web address where tickets are available for this show: www.theatreseven.org. In fact, the incorrect address from Chicago Dramatists appears nowhere in any written materials about the show. That means someone, somewhere, is making a bad guess instead of simply reading what we’ve prepared for them. And that bums me out, plain and simple. It almost makes me happy that the newspaper review was a mixed bag instead of an all-out rave. If the piece had been a ‘don’t walk, run’ recommendation, the mistake could have literally cost us thousands of dollars in ticket revenue.

Again, no hard feelings – everybody makes mistakes. But this is the one getting my goat today.

What frustrates you about your job?