The Brother/Sister Plays Website Designed by Dimple Parmar

After months of planning, I’m thrilled to say that we’ve finally launched the website for The Brother/Sister Plays, which you can visit at www.mccarter.org/tarell.  We’ll be adding new content regularly, including streaming video and audio, press links, and additional feature articles on the plays, the production, and the playwright (Tarell Alvin McCraney).

Here at McCarter, new play development takes many forms.  As a new play nears production, part of its development path is about building an audience for the work.  Often, this takes two different forms: marketing (persuading audience members to purchase tickets); and audience development (preparing the audience for the production, so that they can enjoy it as fully as possible).  For us, audience development is multi-faceted and can include a wide range of activities, programs, and publications that will help contextualize the production and guide an audience’s expectations and understanding of the work.  Of course, audience development and marketing go hand-in-hand; if the marketing materials prepare an audience for a laugh-a-minute comedy, they’ll be disappointed by a beautiful, quiet and sentimental memory play, and the converse is true as well.

For a world premiere like The Brother/Sister Plays, audience development is of even greater importance—because the play is new and the writer relatively unheard of to the general public, a theater cannot count on any received knowledge of the play, the work or the writer.  For The Brother/Sister Plays, we’re pulling out all the stops.  Our audience development initiatives on this project include:

• The Trilogy website (www.mccarter.org/tarell)
• Community Events (we held our first one on March 24th, and another one last night at the Princeton Public Library).
• A letter from our Artistic Director to our current ticket buyers (going into the mail this week).
• A lobby display in the Berlind Theater Lobby.
• A statement from Tarell in the playbill for The Brother/Sister Plays.
• This blog.
• A “Coming Next” article about Tarell in the playbill for Twelfth Night.
• A series of interviews with local and national press.
• YouTube videos about the trilogy.
• A video trailer (coming soon!)
• A series of conversations that surround the plays (Dialogue on Drama and post-show discussions).
• A set of discussions celebrating the “marathon days,” when you can see all three plays at once.

So I urge you to visit our Trilogy website—a lot of us here at the theater have worked really hard to make it possible, and I think you’ll find a lot of interesting material there.

What do you think?   Have a comment?  Post it below by clicking on the “Comments” link!

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 3rd, 2009 at 1:25 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.