If I were a performer, I wouldn’t read my reviews. All that crippling self-doubt and second-guessing? The conflicting, exaggerated demands of a short-sighted audience who just started thinking about my show a few hours ago, while I’ve been grappling with it for months? There’s a reason why comments section have a disable button.

And yet, constant audience review is precisely the motivating force behind the New York Neo-Futurists’ latest show, The Great American Drama, playing through February 5th at A.R.T. Theaters.  Creator Connor Sampson and performers Nicole Hill, Katy-May Hudson, and Dan McCoy gathered nearly 500 surveys that gauged theatregoers’ ideal show. The survey asks participants to rank theatrical elements in order of importance, to state what would they pay to see, suggestions for making money as artists, and other questions to help make the best show possible. The performers try to satisfy as many of the audience’s demands as possible in 90 minutes (the timing’s definitely done right), attempting to create something that is crowd-pleasing in the purest sense of the word. At the end of the night, Sampson asks the audience and his co-stars whether the performance was a success. Audience members text a rating to an online poll, which gets projected on stage and gives the show a grade.

Continue reading “‘The Great American Drama’ Craves Your Review” →