Get It While It's Free
Chicago Theatres Sign Up for TCG's Ticket Giveaway Program

BY Kerry Reid

We all know people who tell us, “I’d love to see more theatre, but it’s just so expensive.” You point them to Hot Tix. You tell them about half-price previews, or pay-what-you-can nights. But still they hesitate.

Well, now there’s a way for them to experience theatre absolutely free, thanks to the League of Chicago Theatres and Theatre Communications Group. The League has joined the TCG “Free Night of Theatre” program, now entering its fourth year nation-wide. Until the end of October, anyone can log onto www.freenightoftheatre.net or at the link at the League’s own website (www.chicagoplays.org) and reserve two free tickets for a show at more than 45 companies throughout the city and suburbs. The participants range from large (Chicago Shakespeare, Steppenwolf) to small (Red Tape Theatre), and the focus is on getting new faces in the seats.

Patrons are limited to two tickets per person during the program (which certainly doesn’t prohibit someone from going one week under their name with a friend and then having the friend sign up for a different theatre the next week). And most importantly, they must select a theatre they have never previously attended.

Ben Thiem, director of member services for the League, says that the member theatres control the number of tickets they make available for the Free Night of Theatre, but that the “standard minimum nationwide is 25 percent of the house.” A new allotment of tickets will be released weekly. All the reservations must be made through the website, not at the box offices of the participating theatres.

Chicago joins more than 110 cities and 700 theatres nationwide in this year’s program. The League would have liked to participate earlier, but Thiem says, “We’re definitely a different market because of our size. It’s a lot of coordination, and the League just wasn’t in a place the last couple of years to participate.” The League threw the program open to all their member theatres, though whether or not a theatre participates is completely voluntary.

What do the theatres get out of this? For one thing, as Thiem notes, “We do make [patrons] jump through a little bit of a hoop to get their free ticket.” All the people getting tickets through the website fill out an online survey, which collects contact information and some demographic statistics that may prove useful in future marketing efforts. But more importantly, results from other cities that have participated in Free Night of Theatre since the beginning (including San Francisco, which has been on board since the beginning through their theatre services organization, Theatre Bay Area) show that the program works at getting underrepresented audiences into shows. Says Thiem, “From research they’ve done the last couple of years, what they found was that about one-third of everyone who came to a free night of theatre, who had never been to that theatre before, returned for a later performance. If we can get one-third of those people to come back and pay for a ticket, that’s the idea right there.”