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While I believe that some of the work I created prior to my graduate studies succeeded in this regard, even in those instances I was unable to get a significant audience of young adults through the door. For example, I produced an original play entitled Igloo at the Meisner Theatre, which was multimedia, and dealt with the topic of internet pornography. The production certainly had its flaws, it seemed to me at the time to be a great opportunity to attract an audience of people in my age group due to its timely and edgy subject matter, and nifty use of video cameras and monitors, which were incorporated into the action. It failed miserably at doing so, and as is so often the case with off-off Broadway, or "independent theatre"", the audience was mostly comprised of friends and family of the artists involved, and fellow theatre practitioners who were interested in the multimedia design of the production. .
Another production that I hoped would appeal to my age cohort was "Blind Horses", a postmodern take on the legend of Jesse James, that had a visceral charge and intense energy that I was certain would promote an audience comprised of members of my age cohort. Despite positive reviews, and great feedback from young theatre practitioners who saw the play, no word-of-mouth was generated, and while the audiences for that production were larger than that of many productions I have directed, they remained comprised of older individuals, theatre practitioners, and family and friends. While the audiences for both these productions appeared to be younger than the typical audience for a major theatrical production, neither seemed to appeal widely to people my own age.
The only exception was a theatre piece I was hired to direct entitled Spurn, which succeeded remarkably well at bringing in an audience comprised mainly of people who were my own age. Spurn, a dark-humored sketch comedy show that performed at Collective Unconscious, an alternative space on the Lower East Side, known primarily for outlandish performance art created by young, avant-garde artists.
