How to Select a Play for Community Theater

"On behalf of expertvillage.com, my name is Stan and I'm here to tell you about theater resources for community theater. How select our plays. The past season that we just went through was typical of our play selection process. You need to be very strategic about selecting your plays. You want to have some variety in your season. You want to incorporate different elements into different plays that will help build your audience. That's one of the reasons your board should really make the final play selections. Let me tell you about the ones that we had this past season. We started the previous season with a show called The Ransom of Red Chief. We selected that show because it's a very funny O. Henry play, very heart warming, and it has several children in the cast. Casting a play with children is important for community theaters because when you cast children in a play you involve their parents and their relatives and your audience builds tremendously and you get a lot more volunteers involved in your theater, people that want to come see these kids perform. One of our board members if very strong on us having a play with children in it and that's the main reason we chose this one. It was a big success for us and we had a huge audience and we got a lot of new volunteers because we did that show. The second show that we did this past season was a suspense drama called Wait Until Dark. It's a very taut suspense drama. The last act is performed totally in the dark on the stage with the audience totally blacked out too, and you're just hearing things happen for a while. That was difficult play to do, difficult set, difficult acting challenges, but fortunately, our members were up to it. It was a lot of hard work but it was a big success and the audience just loved it. It's not always a mistake to do something that's challenging. People appreciate it when you do a challenging play. The last show we did was a forest called Run For You Wife, a British comedy about a taxi driver with 2 apartments and 2 wives and trying to keep those wives from finding out about each other. That was a very show and it was a lot of fun. The trick there was we wanted to do it with a British accent if we could because it's just funnier that way. It's written for British dialect. Luckily, we found local actors who could either do the accent and in one case was an Englishman. We were fortunate in finding the people who could act in that play. We could have done it with just American English and it would have been very funny as well, but I do think the English accent made it funnier and we were lucky to be able to do that. We had a sort of a comedy involving children, we had a suspense thriller and we had a comedy. That's a pretty good balance for a season if you're doing 3 shows."