Phayvanh LuekhamhanAs an actor, director, and producer working in cultural hubs such as Los Angeles and New York City, Dominic Spillane felt like there was something missing from the ecosystem of live theater. With so many cultural offerings, how would a potential audience member find out about all the shows happening in their area, he wondered? That need became even more acute after moving to Vermont, where he sometimes didn’t find out about shows until he saw expired posters for them on community bulletin boards.
“There wasn’t an infrastructure. There wasn’t a good place for a digital community for individual artists or arts organizations, or venues to grow their audience.” He’d been working behind the scenes as well, doing audience development and marketing for TriBeCa’s The Flea Theater. That problem is where the idea from which TheaterEngine grew. “I thought that if something like that existed it would be really helpful.”
Spillane moved with his wife and one-year-old daughter from the big city to central Vermont in 2014, where he set to work developing the online platform. At the same time, both of them sought out the live theater opportunities that abounded in Vermont. They both performed in and produced theatrical works with others and under their own house, Dirt Road Theater in Northfield, where they now live.
“It’s been mind blowing to see how much is happening in a market like Vermont,” Spillane said of the state’s cultural offerings. He saw the same audience problem here as he did in New York: “How desperate they [the audience] are for information services.” Once settled, he set out to solve this problem full time.
TheaterEngine was officially launched in 2017, with a website that Spillane says “barely worked.” He took part in the 2017 cohort of LaunchVT, a business accelerator for early stage startups. From then, he worked with his business partner Aaron Conklin in New York to raise funds and add improvements to the platform. On the surface, a user sees a public-facing listing and ticketing interface that displays upcoming nearby shows. There are an average of 30 to 40 different shows listed at any given time.
“What we’re hoping to build behind that is a social, professional network,” Spillane says. It’ll be “where you can discover not just the upcoming shows but the individual artists and production companies that actually make up the performing arts community.”
“We’ve found that that’s the kind of layer that your regular audience member just does not see or understand.” He explains that regular theatergoers tend to have a relationship with a particular production company or venue, and they go only to shows that they produce. But the working reality for cast and crew is that they often split their time between many different companies.
“The onstage and offstage talent are actually working all around you all the time,” he says. Being able to follow these artists and companies will allow audiences to literally follow their favorite folks from stage to stage. “The idea of TheaterEngine is to elevate access to all the different information that might be relevant and interesting to audience members.”
It’s partly an attempt to mitigate the risk of attending live theater. After tickets, travel, dinner, babysitting, and anything else that an evening out involves, people want to know they will see a good show. Following their favorite talent makes that more likely.
The business model continues to evolve over time, as when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and all the theaters abruptly shut down. They were no longer able to sell tickets online and pivoted to offer accessory services such as live-streaming, graphic design, and other media production. Now that live audiences are returning to theaters, they still continue to offer these services but are refocusing on the digital side of things. Spillane acknowledges that small community theaters do not typically have in-house designers or budgets to support producing digital playbills and updating websites. That’s where they can put their digital skills to work and be one of the “rising tides that lifts all ships,” he says.
Now that his team has built the components and are out of beta testing and market testing, they are ready for the next stage of TheaterEngine’s growth, which is to attract more users who can populate the site. More users will allow them to add more functionality to the already robust site. Spillane has big dreams: notices for auditions, classifieds where talent can attract new gigs, expansion into New England.
Anyone who supports community theater can sign up for the free monthly newsletter, which promotes upcoming shows. Anyone working on a production can create their own page and include their theatrical resume. Anyone producing a show can offer tickets through TheaterEngine’s ticketing service.
“A surprising benefit of selling tickets is that it has driven a lot of folks to the website that wouldn’t have known it existed otherwise,” Spillane says. For the producers who aren’t loyal to any one ticket platform, he’s finding that they turn to TheaterEngine because they are interested in contributing to the overall mission of the project — building out a database and community for theater aficionados.
