How to Turn the Upper West Side into a Focus Group

Perhaps it’s my secret longing to be an advertising executive, but I always highly anticipate receiving the artwork for a production. It’s one of my favorite parts of the producer process.

When I began collaborating with our artist, Katherine Miles Jones, I told her that our starting point would be Tribute in Light, the memorial of the World Trade Center we New Yorkers see every anniversary of 9/11.  (Mel came up with the title for the evening when I suggested this be the show’s image.)

  
Riffing off this idea, Katherine submitted three art concept proposals:  
Katherine heavily favored the first. It was clearly the most artistically striking, the most visually powerful — and while it evoked the religious themes in the show, it also subtly forms the outline of the Twin Towers. If you’ve seen anything about By the Dawn’s Early Light, you already know that this is eventually what we went with. 

However, while we pretty quickly eliminated the third concept (we worried it’d look too much like a Christmas card), I spent a lot of time considering the second image. To me, it represented the before and the after, the towers and the light replacing the tower… the dark and the light. It also allowed for the possibility of a subtle red-white-and-blue motif. I loved how clean it was. Its very simplicity attracted me.

However, I was concerned that it may be too subtle. Would it look like the Twin Towers to people who didn’t know what the show was about? 

So I decided to tap my inner advertising executive to find out. On a muggy June evening, with nothing more than my iPhone and my keys, I traipsed around my neighborhood, the Upper West Side, and asked people what they thought.

My speech to random strangers:

“Hi, um, excuse me… may I ask you a quick question?” [If they seemed or looked suspicious, I threw in “y’all”. New Yorkers find Southerners very non- threatening.] “I’m a theater producer and I just got the possible poster for our next production.” [Then I showed them the image on my phone.] “Does this look like anything to you? Or is it just an abstract image?” [If they didn’t answer immediately, then…] “Does it evoke anything? Or is it just art?”

Keep in mind that unlike the advertising execs I yearn to imitate, I wasn’t taking diligent notes and I wasn’t approaching an equal mix of men/woman, older/younger, white/black/Latino/Asian/etc. I literally was just asking people who looked like they’d be friendly enough to respond to this totally weird request.

So I asked about two dozen people, and I’d say 70% of them immediately said it was the “light from the Towers”.

• The Spanish guy working the Mister Softee truck said very hesitantly, after I told him that there were no right or wrong answers: “Well, to me, it looks like… well, it looks like the light from the towers.”
• A Greek gardner said after a few moments, in very broken English, “It eez the… the tow-ers” and then when I confirmed that’s what it was supposed to be, he said “Eez very nice… good luck!”
• An older couple raised their eyebrows, and the wife said, “Well, yes.  I know what it is.” What? “The World Trade Center,” her husband said. She nodded.
• An NYU graduate student said, “Oh, oh, I mean, yeah, it’s the [took two fingers and made upward motions with an uncomfortable look on his face]… yeah” to which I said, “The what?” and he said, “You know, the… the Twin Towers.” (Side note: it fascinated me how many people were genuinely uncomfortable identifiying the image.)
• Another person said that he was in the film business and that we should move quickly on this image because he’s seen a lot of these kinds of images in the industry and he doesn’t want us to get buried.
• Another guy in the Riverside Dog Run with his wife and friend said: “It’s the World Trade Center. Looks like you’re turning us into a little focus group! Where’s my check?”

But then some people just plain didn’t get it at all. They stood there, looking quizzically at the image on my phone, and said something vague about it being “pretty” or having “nice composition”. One person wanted to know why the text was all in lower case.

Either the audience got it immediately or they didn’t get it at all, and no amount of staring at the image was going to change that. And as much as I loved the image, that issue worried me too much.

We went with the first because even if someone didn’t get that the image evoked the Tribute in Light, it was powerful enough to stand on its own.

12 July 2011 ·