Dear sirs:
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I must also take umbrage with his statement that “comps are just free tickets” as being the “myth of the ages.” Mr. Penn is misleading here because he implies that by not charging for tickets, a theater is taking the money out of the mouths of actors, technicians, directors, etc, acting like some sort of orphanage overseers in a Charles Dickens novel. For one thing, if a theater is equity, salaries have already been determined, and the amount of comps given out will make no difference to the actors or technicians. And as for nonequity theaters, very few I’ve heard of would even think of taking a more socialistic approach and increasing the salary of those involved in relation to the box-office take.
Yes, there are serious problems in the theater community to be addressed, but I hardly think that getting rid of most comps will solve the problem. Could the difficulties perhaps lie elsewhere? For example, my experience has been that new theaters tend to put all their energy into a production and none to little into selling the play and the theater, forgetting, as a friend of mine said, that there is a biz in show business. It’s even getting to a point where I wonder who should be hired first, an artistic director or a business manager? It’s easy to understand why this could happen since everybody wants to be in a show and nobody wants to produce. But in order for a theater to survive, it must first find people who are willing to have nothing to do with a production except the thankless jobs.
W. Melrose
