Letter to the Editor from Donald Weyer:
Act one. My, my, wasn't it quite recent that a senior citizen's price of admission to a theatre play at Batavia's amateur Main Street 56 Theater, formerly Harvester 56 playhouse, came to $16.00? And presently, it is $20.00 (even more if one pays with a credit card, and who doesn't). According to my basic arithmetic, that's a stratospheric 25% increase in one fell swoop! In my theatre-critic opinion, a fine bit of stagecraft, or should that be a review, in deference to the shades of Vincent Canby and Brooks Atkinson? Or is the additional premium just another humdrum iteration of inflation, as I'm sure its defenders will aver? (I believe the regular price of entry, for those humans, neither senior citizens nor students, skyrocketed from $18 to $22, only a little less whopping increase of 22.2222%. And foolish me, here I understood that general inflation in the past year or about was in the 5-10% range)! So it seems it's an equal opportunity soaking of the theatre-going cohort, young and middle-aged and old, all rolled into one.
Act two. And yet. And yet. Don't get me wrong. I'm all for theater, literature, culture in general, and the salutary impact of each on the average citizen, including me (a frequent ticket-buyer and goer to Buffalo's Studio Arena Theater in its heyday of the 1960s and 1970s, as well as an enthusiastic reader of Shakespeare's works).
Act three. By the by. Also, didn't I just read in the local media of April 13 that the theater management is blithely sweeping and theatrically sashaying across the boards to the U.S. Treasury Department, accompanied by the writs of various city of Batavia government officials, a coterie of sorts of supporting actors and actresses in the cause, exeunt stage-door left, not right, politically speaking, with top-hat in white-gloved hand, seeking $95,000 in public assistance in this current matinee-playing piece of a classically-conceived tragicomedy? (It's always all about the dollars and cents for all your characters in the world of entertainment, isn't it)? May I also suggest tap dancing to a pow-wow with the painted-on and primped-up poohbah of state politics, none other than Kathy Hochul, wearing the mask of, masquerading as, playing the part of, take your pick, what we call the Governor? She always seems to have a lot of cash to fling hither and yon. Hi ho, hi ho, off we go to two capitols, Washington and Albany, in a simulacrum of a Broadway musical conga line!
Act four. And yet. And yet. The audience is calling out for an encore, or maybe I should write a surprise appearance. And who will join them to meet the actress supreme (Hochul) in Albany? None other than that old thespian, the original song and dance man, now performing in the role of first supporting actor, seemingly conjured, as if by a genie, from the bright stage-lights of some Catskills venue or other, still slurping from a bowl of borscht, U.S. Senator from N.Y., the hoofer, er honorable, Charles Schumer! Never a shy stranger to the circling white spotlight of celebrity fame.
So now we have the entire array of performers in this 4-act stage piece (I didn't even insert an intermission for your benefit), ready to take their bows: there's Erik Fix, understudy to Rachel Tabelski from Batavia's City Manager Office; various incognito and mysterious apparatchiks of Batavia's Downtown Revitalization Initiative materializing from the wings, for those of you not in the know, the DRI (incidentally, wasn't it from this acronym that the theater received most of its original funding? And that money came from the state [Kathy], not from the federal [Chucky]? So, are we currently seeing an instance of playing both sides of the street or pitting one side of the street against the other? Just saying.); of course, Hochul and Schumer, holding hands, and being presented bouquets of roses in congratulation for their tax-dollars largesse with the audience's monies, mine and yours; and last, but certainly not least, the vaunted impresario, as well as artistic director and playwright, sine qua non, of Main Street 56, Patrick Burk, who makes a nice Sol Hurok-like impression on us all! Let's hear some hands! What more can I add to this scary, yet stunning, performance? What's going on here with our long-revered and highly-respected local theatre, its funding, and its pricing? Please don't enunciate to me that community theatre in Batavia is well worth it, the question of any and all price of admission be damned!
Epilogue. And please don't come after me with that old chestnut of the Philistine versus the arts intelligentsia. I'm ready for you. I'm trying to impress upon my readers that theater, as we know it in Batavia, is coming dangerously close to "pricing out" its audience and supporters!
