So you want to produce your own play (Part 3)

3. Choose a good venue

And by that, I don't mean a venue that will provide the best environment for your play. I mean one that will make you the most money.

After all, your single biggest expense is going to be the rent on your venue. And if your play is any good, your audience won't care if they're sitting on folding chairs, if the place is non-air-conditioned on a blistering hot summer day or if trains rumble past at regular intervals (all of which happened during my production).

Of course, if you have free access to a usable venue, then more power to you. You're already well on your way to profitability. The rest of us, however, have to make some compromises.

When I went theatre-hunting for Kill the Critic!, I quickly found that most theatres won't rent at all and of those that do, many charge exorbitant rates. I ended up with two that charged a reasonable flat fee.

The first venue was a 50-seat black box theatre that offered me their space for $500 a week (Sunday to Saturday). Even though the performances were only on Friday anbd Saturday, my director was adamant that the cast be able to rehearse on the actual performance stage the full week before opening night.

The performance space was intimate, so the acoustics would be a dream, but you have those awful folding chairs. And while it was located in Colorado Springs, it offered only limited parking and was unlikely to steer any of its regular clientele my way (the theatre company that owns the space does mostly serious dramas, while my play is a farce with no socially redeeming value whatsoever).

The second venue was a large art gallery. They wanted $1000 for 8 days (Saturday to Saturday), giving us an extra day to set up. The space nominally holds 100 chairs (folding, again), but if the crowds got too big I could set out another 50 seats or more.

The stage was tiny, it was tucked away in the corner of the room, and we had to contend with those annoying trains rumbling by just across the highway (about five per 90 minute performance!).

Also, it was located in a small town about 15 miles north of Colorado Springs. That means I couldn't count on a lot of my friends and neighbors attending.

But the art gallery had it own contact list of 1200 members, many of whom would love to see a farce, a drama, a Kabuki performance or, really, just about anything (they're seriously starved for culture up there). In fact, they had sold out the place for an original musical production of Sense and Sensibility just the month before.

Oh yeah, and the art gallery's insurance covered our group, so we didn't have to buy any of our own.

Guess which one I picked?