Guerrilla P.R.

The other night I was at the Dark Room, and before the event began some of us were chatting about that eternal question, who do I have to fuck to get people to see my show?

Default promotion, in the old days, required purchasing advertisements in the paper. The quiet part was that if the theater didn’t pay, the paper wouldn’t review your play, and it was always the reviews which drove ticket sales, not the ads themselves.

Today, with the absence of print journalism, theaters pay for ads on Facebook or Instagram. Direct mail is also still a thing, and it is important, because at the very least you need to let people who have already shown an interest in your company about what is coming soon.

But, and this is the case for every single theater, from LORT A down to that immersive storefront production with ten folding chairs, to have a successful production you must go beyond. You need to appeal to non-regular theater goers, because there are never enough of those. There certainly aren’t enough theater artists to fill the seats at any house, and they shouldn’t be expected to, anyway, because they are busy doing theater.

So, how do you get the word out? How do you, as they say, let ‘em know?

As I have recounted before, I have always loved marketing, products and swag. In high school we started an improv troupe and I was much more interested in selling the buttons we had made for the troupe (buttons were big in the 80s) than rehearsing improvisation.

And who designed these buttons? I did, of course, using my brother’s brand new Macintosh computer. They did not go very well, however, not as well as the Guerrilla Theater Company pins we made years later, those sold very well though I still have a couple hundred of them in my attic.

At college, a graduate student who was put in charge of marketing for the school of theater approved of the comic strip I drew for the daily university paper, and especially liked when I would include references to current productions. He’d made an arrangement with a local pizza place to include flyers for the upcoming production of On the Verge by Eric Overmyer, but he wanted something original, that would engage someone who had just ordered a pizza.

I created a “chutes-and-ladders” style board game with paper cut-outs of the three main characters and you would roll a die and move your piece around a cartoon globe, traveling through time and space to opening night of the show!

Guerrilla Theater Company had a regular advertising deal with the Free Times, we’d buy the smallest advertisement we could, but we’d buy them pretty much every week. Not just to keep folks aware of the show, and not just to announce the theme of the weekend, but to continually flog the Guerrilla Connection.

The idea for the Connection came from Dial-A-Song, a service provided by They Might Be Giants since the mid-1980s, a phone number you can call to this day and hear an original song. We had a designated line which would have a different message every week, letting folks know the theme of the week, hear a short play, or important announcements.

It occurs to me only right now that we didn’t need a separate line to do this. The office line as xxx-9002, the Connection was xxx-9003. The message could have been the regular office line, why did we pay for two lines? I guess we thought it was to separate “business” from “the show.” Whatever.

But the advertisements weren’t enough to fill the house. That happened occasionally when we had a review, or when we were interviewed for the radio. We had a gorilla costume, and sometimes one of us, usually Torque, would don the suit and we would hand out small flyers for the show. On college campuses. At rallies.

Once, we mocked up fake parking tickets. They looked just like real City of Cleveland parking tickets, with VIOLATION in big letters at one end, and amusing fine print which promoted the show (and the Guerrilla Connection). Torque wore the gorilla suit and went around downtown, ticketing every single car we came across. No idea whether we attracted a single audience member through this gambit, but we did get one message to our office line threatening legal action, which we found hilarious.

When it came time to promote Bad Epitaph Theater Company’s first free, outdoor production, Kirk Wood Bromley’s The American Revolution, we returned to buttons. Only this time, we weren’t selling them. Company members were asked to wear large buttons featuring the first American President and the legend “ASK ME” in large letters.

The plan was that, when someone did, in fact, ask, said company member would not only fill in the inquirer about the details of the upcoming production, but would also take the opportunity to ask for a dollar to support the production – a Washington for Washington, as it were. Mind, this was in 2004, over ten years before the Hamilton $10 ticket lottery, known as Ham4Ham.

Yes, Bad Epitaph must have pulled in over fifty dollars through this gambit, but that wasn’t the point, it was to open a conversation about the show, with a random selection of people who may or may not otherwise have had any interest in seeing a play, this play, any play. And that’s what it’s all about, to move past impersonal modes of advertising, be they print advertisements, online invitations or email blasts, to get to the point where people, lots of people, are actually talking to each other about a show.

Note: The title of this post comes from the book Guerrilla P.R.: How You Can Wage an Effective Publicity Campaign...Without Going Broke (Harper Collins, 1993) which I unironically purchased after the disillusion of Guerrilla Theater Company, when I went to work as Director of Public Relations at Dobama Theatre. It was a handy primer on the basics of marketing though this edition is now almost entirely obsolete as it was written just before the rise of the Internet. Levine also produced a revision called Guerrilla P.R. 2.0, released in 2008.