By Jesse Roth and Annie Liu
See Part I of this series, “The Feast by the Numbers (Part I: Living Wages)” here.
Since 2017, during our production of Blues for Mister Charlie, The Feast (formerly The Williams Project) has been a pay-what-you-can theatre company—and that commitment has become core to our mission. When we rebranded as The Feast, our vision of a “materially and aesthetically abundant American Theatre” did not apply solely to paying artists well, but also to making our works affordable to anyone regardless of funds.
An increasing number of theatres are moving toward PWYC or sliding-scale ticketing. But embracing these models is risky (especially in a tough economic moment for theatre): it can create a much higher margin for missing our ticket goals. Thus, we want to share some data about our PWYC ticketing both to show how we’re fulfilling our mission and to offer this data to other companies looking to implement or shift their PWYC/sliding scale ticketing. Finally, we’re looking to invite you, our patrons, to be conscientious in how you make use of PWYC tickets.
Note: We’re not including 2023’s The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window in this data because it was a co-production with Intiman Theatre. They have their own excellent “free-for-everyone” and sliding-scale ticketing policy. You can check it out here.
A few takeaways from this data:
- From 2022-2024, we increased the percentage of free tickets from 15 to 34 percent.
- Our average ticket price across these three projects is $29.01.
- The vast majority of our tickets across the last several years are under $40.
Our tickets are comparatively cheap
While many similarly sized theatres charge between $45 and $80 for tickets, our average ticket price is $29.01. We do this while paying artists considerably more. Similarly, our average ticket price is a fraction of our “at cost” ticket price.
We have to fundraise much more
In order to make up for the fact that we have much cheaper tickets and much higher wages than our peer institutions, we have to fundraise a lot. We rely extensively on individual donors. We treat this reliance on individual donors as a very micro form of resource redistribution: People who can afford to are subsidizing cheap tickets for those who can’t afford them. This means, though, that we spend as much as a third of our staff capacity on fundraising.
Grant support for PWYC and reduced-cost tickets is crucial
This last year, King County passed the $782 Million Doors Open legislation, which funds arts and culture projects, prioritizing free and reduced-cost programming. The Feast is grateful to have received significant funding from Doors Open. This kind of funding makes it possible to continue our work.
If you can pay, you gotta
Pay-what-you-can means being rigorously honest with yourself about your capacity—no matter what it is. For The Adding Machine, we instituted a pay-your-hourly-wage guideline (if you make $30 per hour, pay $30 per ticket. If you’re un-or under-employed, pay $0. If you make $200k/year, pay $100). For The Adding Machine, we saw our average ticket price drop with this guideline. This shows us that we are succeeding in our mission: making theatre accessible to people who couldn’t afford it at the prices other theatres charge.
However, we suspect that there is a segment of our audience who pay more for other cultural offerings where you don’t have a choice about what to pay. Many people are likely used to paying more at bigger, fancier theatres—despite the fact that we out-pay those institutions. To those patrons, we’re asking you to choose to pay your hourly wage, or what you would pay at a major regional theatre. This both honors the high wages we pay artists and subsidizes people who couldn’t afford these higher ticket prices.
Next, we’re going to be sharing some data on anti-racism. Keep your eyes peeled for Part III of this series.