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I must disagree on a couple points
by
Hi neighbor (I now attend OSU),
I enjoyed your posting and was glad to hear about the COSI program. Your suggestions for counting your audience, encouraging comment cards, and soliciting responses from the general museum audience are good ones. Any museum theatre program ought to be doing these things as a general rule. And I agree that we shouldn't play the numbers game, as it will often overlook transient audiences.
However, I would disagree with your date analogy, as often people can provide very rich data following a play, positive or negative. Questions should encourage positive and negative feedback. The researcher asking the question cannot be one of the actors who has just performed, which would indeed skewer the response. It would be even more interesting to call a month later to follow up on the initial interview to see what has stayed with a visitor. John Falk's Meaning Mapping could be one evaluative tool for doing so.
I was also struck by the idea of actors reporting audience response. This might be one way to collect data, but it would not stand alone. It is very difficult for any actor (and I'm one) to evaluate how an audience is taking in a performance. I've been surprised often - when I thought they were dead and not enjoying a show, people would come up to tell me how much they loved it - and the opposite can also be true.
Finally, I question whether we should focus on visitors' enjoyment of museum theatre. Large scale studies at the London Science Museum and the Canadian Museum of Civlization have proven that audiences like museum theatre when they encounter it. As a field, we need to take that to the bank. They like us. Perhaps we can ask specifically whether a show works and enjoyment certainly comes into it, but let's move beyond to find out why a visitor enjoyed it. What do others think?