Butts in Seats
A side-quest
Good evening šš¼ If you hang around theater people long enough or somehow end up on the theater side of TikTok, eventually youāll hear an age-old sentiment: Theater is dying.
So who decides? Whatās the barometer?
Not surprisingly, I donāt think itās black and white. There are a million ways to parse through the limited public data and a million more ways to interpret it. Which is likely why thereās no consensus on the health of The Theatre.
So while I wouldnāt call buttsinseats.xyz my āsolutionā or even my āanswer,ā I might categorize it closer to an attempt at conjuring a small dose of optimism in a culture that seems to get high on pessimism.
This week, I want to break down the what, why, and how of this small, strange side quest.
Here we go.
The Why
Pessimism is easy. Headlines about theaters closing or audiences dwindling practically write themselves. But if thatās the only story we tell, it becomes self-fulfilling.
Theater has always been measured by presence more than profit. A century ago, Broadway attendance rivaled baseball. During the Depression, ticket prices dropped but houses still filled. Even today, the NEA tracks attendance per capita as a marker of civic health.
And it isnāt just symbolic. Science keeps showing us what happens when people gather. Heartbeat literally syncs with the people around us. Sociologists call it collective effervescence. What we feel is a steadiness: proof that weāre not alone.
Optimism itself works the same way. Psychologists call it the broaden-and-build effect: hope and joy expand our perspective, fuel our creativity, and strengthen our resilience. Negativity narrows, optimism widens. Without hope, we shrink. With it, we risk. We make. We show up.
Thatās why optimism mattersānot as a mood, but as a condition of possibility. Pessimism curdles into despair. Optimism ripens into hope.
Which led me to the next question: how do you actually give people optimism in a culture hooked on pessimism?
The How
What our brains crave isnāt detail. It isnāt completeness. Itās coherence.
A story simple enough to hold.
Thatās why the phrase ātheater is dyingā sticks. Itās easy to say, easy to share, easy to believe. Complexity muddies the signal. Completeness overwhelms. But coherence cuts through.
And coherence isnāt owned by pessimism. The same mechanism can work in service of optimism. A single numberāhow many people sat in theaters last weekāis just as coherent. Just as easy to repeat.
It may not capture every nuance, but thatās not its job. Its job is to remind us that people are still showing up. Buttsā¦.in seats.
Last week I wrote about how bandwagons thrive on simplicity. This is the other side of the coin. If bad news can travel fast because itās clean and coherent, then so can good news. One number can carry just as much weight as a headline, only instead of feeding dread, it offers a spark of hope.
The What
Thatās why I built buttsinseats.xyz.
It isnāt a dashboard. It isnāt a data dump. Itās one page, one big number, updated every Monday: how many people sat in a (Broadway*) theater last week.
(I also included how many shows were running because it made me smile āŗļø)
Itās not meant to be comprehensive. Itās not meant to be a solution. Itās meant to be simple. A smile.
And for me personally, it was also a small practice of hope. I built the entire site from scratch!! Iām pretty proud!!
But this is only Broadway. What if we could tally touring houses, regional theaters, community black boxes, college and high school auditoriums?
What if there was a single figure, every week: this many people saw a show.
Not competition, not comparison. Unity. A reminder that whether itās New York or Nebraska or Northern Ireland, weāre all working toward the same thing: more butts in seats.
Kinda fun, right?
One Last Thing
Writing about āDrama at the Drama Schoolā a few weeks ago got me thinking about being a theater kid in high school. I made a list. Made a video reading the list. It was half joke, half nostalgia. I didnāt think much of it.
Well. My comments exploded with hilarious anecdotes from fellow thespians. The Couch š
And that in itself felt clarifying. I am in a constant sea of questions. My Instagram handle is @whoismattrodin. I love pulling things apart, dissecting the complexity. I love using a prism of history and science and philosophy to understand concepts more deeply. Thatās reeeeally fun for me. But as weāve seen, sometimes simple labels cut through in a way that complexity canāt.
Theater kid. It was funny, but itās also true. Because, as cheesy as it sounds, a theater has always been a home for me. Watching, working. Just being in the building.
And I know Iām not alone in that. A lot of you reading this were (or still are) theater kids, or at least carry that piece of yourself somewhere close. Thatās part of why I built Butts in Seats: because as long as there are butts in seats, there will be theater kids.
Long live us.
See you next week ā„ļø
āMatt