Because of a reprint in the Utne Reader, the Ten Things Theaters Need to Do Right Now to Save Themselves story has brought a whole new round of email and comments= from people, some angry and some pleased. (This national round is significantly less angry than the first, Seattle-specific one.)

One of the more encouraging emails—especially for the nobody-wants-to-see-new-work skeptics—comes from Rob Ready, the artistic director of PianoFight, a company based in San Francisco:

My name is Rob Ready and I'm the artistic director of PianoFight Productions, a small production house based in San Francisco which manages a 55-seat black box downtown and has one simple and straightforward mission statement: new work by new artists. Period.

We will never produce anything by a name writer. No Neil Simon or Neil Labute or Shakespeare or Mamet or Chekhov or Ibsen or any of that... Oddly enough, against the great odds of the dying industry, our theater is kicking serious ass. The last time we did NOT sell out a show in SF was sometime last June.

PianoFight has taken off with a successful, three-month, short new works festival/contest called ShortLived. Writers for ShortLived are going on to gigs at the LA Comedy Festival and runs at Theater Asylum in Los Angeles. And the company itself has grown:

We've gone from a two-man producing team doing one show at a time, to a 10-person team with a musical director, a tech director, and a stable of about 40-50 nonunion actors who are constantly asking to be in whatever show happens to be running. The last weekend of April will mark the first time two PianoFight shows are going up in different venues at the same time on the same nights in the same city - we're now competing with ourselves

PianoFight also produces dramas and full-length plays. Read the rest of Ready's email about the company, and how it's has drawn a dedicated audience with a new-works festival, below the jump.

PianoFight's success is directly attributed to the fact that we opened up access to a theater to people who would not normally have it and coupled that with innovative show formats.

For example, the play-writing competition we run, ShortLived. The run is three months, from April-June. We break that into two-week rounds, for total of six rounds, with a finals best of the best weekend at the end. We do a line-up of eight short plays per round, all of which are scored by the audience via little blue scorecards. At the end of the round (two weeks, consisting of 4 shows), we tally the scores, and drop the four lowest scoring shorts from the line-up. The top four stay on to the next round, with the winner of the round earning a spot in the Championship Weekend. We also have a different musical guest every show a la SNL. We also do a live audition to open every show - we had a script submitted to us last year in which an actor comes in to audition for a blowhard director, and does so opposite a star sock puppet. The director loves everything the sock puppet does (which is basically nothing) and hates everything the auditioner does.

After reading the piece, we thought it would be fun if the actor playing the auditioner was, in fact, a real auditioner. So we put out an audition notice on Craigslist and Theater Bay Area - to anyone who answered the post we sent the script and told them to learn it. We then said show up at the theater on this night at 7 pm, we'll briefly walk you through the whole scene, then, at 8 pm, we're going to start the show with your audition. Actors who did well at it, we cast in the show. Actors who did not do well (which were most) we thanked vigorously.

The ShortLived format has a number of positive effects. The first is that local playwrights are given the opportunity to have their work staged. The second is that we stage plays from over 20 different local playwrights in the process of the run. The third is that because the competition is judged by the audience, those local playwrights who really want to win get their friends and family out to the show. Furthermore, the format is such that friends and family are interested in coming out - as opposed to "Hey, we're doing Hamlet for the 47,000th time - wanna see it?" Beyond that we never use union actors and tend to run a rotating cast, who also bring people, and because the show is constantly changing, people who see it once and are impressed are much more likely to come back because they know it will be an almost entirely different product by the time they come back. The fact that everyone gets to voice their opinions on what they've just seen also helps in that folks don't have to wait til intermission to let out scathing critical whisper to their date, and are in fact encouraged to be critical throughout the entire evening. The random auditioners usually bring out a few people per show also.

During the first run of ShortLived last year, we picked up three actor/writers from Berkeley. Their pieces routinely scored exceptionally high, both because they brought people to the show and because they were excellent pieces. After the run they came to us asking to put up a sketch comedy show to which we agreed. That show went on to sell out every performance it's ever had, including being invited to participate in SF SketchFest and the LA Comedy Festival.

The guy who ended up winning ShortLived went on to write a piece called FORKING, in which the audience voted on how the plot would proceed (basically which characters made boni macaroni or fell in love, etc). This premiered in SF to a sold-out month-long run and was invited to LA where it also sold out like crazy for a month at Theater Asylum on Theater Row in Hollywood. Heath is now writing FORKING II which will go up sometime next year and will assuredly sell like bonkers.

And while I can't tell you financial numbers, I can give you personnel numbers. We've gone from a two-man producing team doing one show at a time, to a 10 person team with a musical director, a tech director, and a stable of about 40-50 non union actors who are constantly asking to be in whatever show happens to be running. The last weekend of April will mark the first time two PianoFight shows are going up in different venues at the same time on the same nights in the same city - we're now competing with ourselves. The LA Comedy Fest shows will happen during the run of ShortLived to so we'll have a PianoFight show going in LA and SF on the same nights. We're also taking over ttwo more spaces - a rehearsal room and a larger 65-seat theater in our building with our business partner Combined Artform.

Basically, by opening up access and refusing to stage anything that's been produced before, we've managed to create a community and a fan base that loves what we do. Our tickets are cheap, we encourage brown bagging it to the theater, and we treat each show like party where audiences are invited to hang after the show for a drink in the theater or join us at our local dive bar around the corner.

Apologies for the UBER LENGTHY email, but I hope I answered a couple questions you might have about our company.