Pittsburgh audiences are way more sophisticated than you'd guess from city's image

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

On the Arts: Pittsburgh audiences are way more sophisticated than you'd 
guess from city's image

Sunday, November 09, 2003

By Lynne Conner

Remember the Image Gap Committee -- the group of local experts who last 
summer told us that out-of-towners still regard Pittsburgh as a smoky, 
sports-obsessed, Rust Belt town with a working-class mentality?

Grrrr. If you were born in Pittsburgh and made the choice to return and 
build a career here, you don't need a commissioned report to tell you the 
above. When I was growing up, I heard those comments from friends and 
family in other cities. Now I hear it from transplanted professionals. 
Since I seem to pass as a non-native (I work in a field where it is assumed 
that everyone comes from somewhere else), I am subjected to conversations 
filled with jokes and slurs about Pittsburgh and Pittsburghers. I used to 
take some pleasure in revealing my shameful birth secret about 
mid-conversation. But by now I've learned not to take it personally. I 
understand that for many of my artist and academic colleagues, leaving home 
is the prescribed first step in the "how to achieve success" myth we've all 
been fed.

But here's some information the Image Gap Committee may not have collected 
during its yearlong investigation: Pittsburgh has been suffering from an 
image gap for 200 years.

I began researching the city's theater history a few years ago, and in that 
time I've read many reductive references to Pittsburgh audiences in history 
books, newspapers and memoirs. We've long been accused of being 
conservative, hard to please and easily offended. And apparently we still 
are. How else to explain why the producers of "The Producers" decided to 
excise a well-known four-letter word for part of the show's Pittsburgh run 
last year? I don't know about you, but I hear that word on a regular basis 
in Pittsburgh theater (and on television and at the movies and in the 
classroom and occasionally in my own automobile) and manage to avoid 
marching off in an offended huff.

We might call this an example of city profiling -- the habit of identifying 
an entire city based on a simplified (and often simplistic) set of 
characteristics. Like people profiling, city profiling provides an easy way 
to classify and thus to target (or market) something.

In American culture, the process of characterizing audiences on the basis 
of geography is a long-established practice. And so it goes with 
Pittsburgh, a city forever viewed through the haze of a smokestack.

When a touring actor named Noah Ludlow came through town in the fall of 
1815, he pronounced us a city full of "iron-fisted burghers." He was 
frustrated that local residents refused to help flesh out his cast for 
Richard Sheridan's "Pizarro" by taking on various supernumerary roles. In 
"Dramatic Life As I Found It," Ludlow complained, "Virgins [of course I 
mean stage virgins] were not to be had in Pittsburgh in those days. 
Seamstresses and shoe-binders would have as soon thought of walking 
deliberately into Pandemonium as to have appeared on the stage as 'supers' 
or 'corps de ballet.' "

This transformed into a theater industry myth that Pittsburghers were 
reluctant about theater-going in general -- a trait that has been traced to 
the stern attitudes of our Scots-Irish founding fathers and the 
hardscrabble life of our immigrant work force. In Willard Glazier's 
amusingly titled "Peculiarities of American Cities" from 1884, the author 
goes as far as to inform his international readership that theaters are 
hard to find in Pittsburgh because "Work is the object of life with them. 
It occupies them from morning until night, from cradle to grave."

Maybe that explains why the great Italian actress Eleonora Duse was loath 
to make a stop here during her 1924 tour. She called Pittsburgh the most 
hideous city in the world, though clearly her distaste for our town didn't 
extend as far as our wallets; the receipts from her sold-out performance at 
the Syria Mosque were considerable. The unfortunate fact that she died here 
a week or so later didn't help our international reputation. And even 
though she was 64 years old and was suffering from chronic lung disease, 
Pittsburgh quickly took the blame for her "untimely and tragic" demise.

Vitriol poured from printing presses around the world, including this 
passage from E.A. Rheinhardt's widely read "The Life of Eleonora Duse": 
"But she had to go on to Pittsburgh ... where the hundreds of thousands who 
lived amid this chaos of barracks shaken by the perpetual throb of 
machinery did not seem to know that there were such things as flowers and 
sunny air and quiet hills and wind filled with the perfume of violets." Ouch.

Other characterizations range from vaudeville circuit jokes about 
Pittsburgh theater audiences who "sit on their hands" to this comment in 
the New York Herald Tribune from 1941: "The city is conservative in taste 
... and prone to pride itself on being hypercritical. In this last respect, 
there is a feeling that whereas New York is helter-skelter and will 'go for 
anything,' Pittsburgh is homogenous, select and discriminating."

The most damning myth of recent years may well be the story of how 
Pittsburgh lost the American Conservatory Theater to San Francisco in 1967. 
A careful look at the record shows that wunderkind Bill Ball left 
Pittsburgh after one season of residence at the Playhouse for myriad 
reasons: political, aesthetic and temperamental. But in the years since, 
several national histories of the American stage have named only one 
villain -- that "homogenous" and endlessly conservative Pittsburgh audience.

But here's the problem with that characterization: the gap in the Image 
Gap, as it were. How could a city of only "iron-fisted burgers" spawn and 
sustain an arts community of considerable breadth and vitality for so many 
years? In fact, my research provides ample evidence that we have an 
excellent track record as eager and openminded theatergoers.

While Ludlow may have experienced difficulty locating stage virgins in 
1815, his company had no trouble finding an audience to fill the local 
playhouse's 400 seats for three solid months (and at the high cost of $1 
per seat). Or the fact that since at least the 1880s producers ranging in 
style from the Shuberts to Florenz Ziegfeld to New York's heralded Theatre 
Guild to the Living Theatre (among the most famous of the 1960s-era 
experimental companies) have used Pittsburgh as a testing ground for their 
work.

The best evidence of our audience vitality and diversity, though, is in the 
plethora of indigenous theater companies. In 1935, there were more than 50 
theater companies operating locally, from Jewish theaters to workers' 
troupes to the brand-new Pittsburgh Playhouse. In the 1910s there were 
several "art theaters" on Penn Avenue (and they weren't showing nudie 
films, either). The proof of the pudding is in the eating -- these 
companies and these playhouses could not have existed without a diverse and 
adventurous audience base.

Which brings us full circle to Mel Brooks and the "f" word. Why is it that 
Pittsburgh can't seem to get over being "Pittsburgh" in the national 
perception? The real issue here might be little more than a numbers game. 
In a place such as New York, where there are lots and lots of people, it is 
easier to see diversity among audiences, artists and arts organizations. In 
Pittsburgh, with fewer numbers all around, we become homogenous in the eyes 
of outsiders, even though we are a diverse city with demonstrably diverse 
audiences.

Anyone who goes to Pittsburgh theater knows, for example, that the 
Pittsburgh Irish and Classical Theatre crowd is different from the Quantum 
crowd, which is different from the CLO audience, which shares some members 
with the City and Public audiences, which in turn is different from the 
Little Lake crowd. And so on.

Pittsburgh audiences are not and have never been homogenous, nor is it 
possible to describe the city's collective taste, since there is no such 
thing. Some audience members would surely be offended by a swear word. 
Others are hearing it regularly without complaint. Some relish the new and 
unusual. Others look for traditional plays and familiar performers. Some 
are truly conservative. Others truly are not. Much the same as in New York 
City and Cleveland and Rome and San Francisco and Little Rock and London 
and ...


----------
Lynne Conner received a 2003 Arts Commentary Fellowship from the 
Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. She is a playwright and professor of 
theater history at the University of Pittsburgh.

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