The audiences for live theatersimply aren’t back,the conventional wisdom goes. Same for season subscriptions, on which the industry has long depended. They’d already been waning for decades, and then the pandemic sent them plummeting.

A superficial look at the data for the Bay Area seems to confirm that notion. Almost across the board, subscriptions — the purchase of tickets to a whole season of shows in advance, giving the theaters upfront cash in exchange for discounted prices or other perks — are down steeply from pre-pandemic levels.

快速的调查当地各种si的影院zes shows subscription declines ranging from 23% to 61% from July 2019 to today, with one outlier: San Francisco Playhouse is holding almost steady.

Any comparison, though, has caveats. Four years ago, San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater had started selling partial subscriptions earlier in the year, and TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s season had already begun by now, while this year’s season commences in October. Meanwhile, Oakland Theater Project and Berkeley’s Shotgun Players run on calendar years, unlike the other companies’ seasons, which proceed from fall to spring.

Yet despite these bleak numbers, subscriptions are here to stay, say Bay Area theater leaders, partly because the basic numbers don’t tell the whole story.

At Aurora Theatre Company in Berkeley, subscriptions are down from 2,140 in July 2019 to 880. Yet interim Co-Managing Director Robin Dolan doesn’t believe the model is dying. “I actually bristle at that,” she said. “I think people like to doom-say.” Aurora, she points out, has more first-time subscribers now than it did four years ago — an encouraging sign.

While subscriptions never account for a majority of a theater company’s income, they are the pipeline for individual donations, its largest source of revenue.

“Nobody gives you a big donation after coming to see one show,” said Shotgun Players Founding Artistic Director Patrick Dooley. “When you start to have fewer folks subscribing, you have fewer folks that cultivate that strong sense of loyalty to an organization, and then they’re going to be less inclined to give donations.”

Subscribers are a theater’s best customers in still other ways, said Tom Parrish, managing director at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, which has sold 8,000 subscriptions of its 9,000 goal for this year (in contrast to a pre-pandemic 12,000).

“It’s cheaper to retain someone than to attract new customers,” he said. “The ‘profitability’ of a patron increases the more loyal they become. We may lose money, actually, selling an individual ticket because of the promotional cost.”

Parrish added that many theaters have considered a membership model where, for a fixed fee, patrons could come as often or as infrequently as they like. But that poses its own problems.

“You have to sell the membership and then sell the show, so there’s the added cost of basically promoting a show twice,” he explained, noting that if a theater can’t convince a customer to use their membership, they might simply let it lapse, like a gym membership purchased in an optimistic mood.

Subscriptions aren’t just about the money, pointed out Lisa Mallette, executive artistic director at San Jose’s City Lights Theater Company. “It’s so much about audience members self-identifying themselves as folks who really believe in your organization and have faith in your future, especially when so many are closing or downsizing,” she said. Without subscribers, she went on, “we’d be throwing more spaghetti against the wall,” not knowing whether choices were resonating.

During the pandemic, when consumers were forgoing travel and other suddenly moot expenses, subscriptions in other industries thrived, and not just at juggernauts like Amazon, Netflix and Spotify. Now one can buy subscriptions to just about anything, frompastato bouquets of flowers to healing crystals. Amy Konary, founder of the Subscribed Institute, the think tank of Redwood City software company Zuora, said she “subscribes” to a boat to avoid the hassles of owning one.

Several conditions, she said, can predict whether a subscription model might work in a company or industry. One is continuous improvement over time, i.e., offering new content or added value.

“Another key element is personalization,” Konary continued. “Things that I care about should be easy to find. If I can’t find the things that I’m going to get value out of, I’m not going to take advantage of those, and I might not renew.”

Finally, there should be some “special sauce” or source of delight. In theater, she added, that could be a sense of community (think the picnic tables at California Shakespeare Theater’s grand Bruns Amphitheater in the Orinda hills) or VIP meet and greets.

The personalization factor might be one area of growth for the performing arts. Of course, theaters can’t know when individual audience members have stopped paying attention the same way Netflix knows when a user stops streaming a show. Nor can they afford teams of data scientists to crunch numbers and design algorithms — not that we would want performance lineups planned by robots anyway. And a six-show season, say, isn’t going to offer audiences the same array of choices as a library of films and TV.

But that doesn’t mean theaters can’t do more to highlight what might interest you. For instance, if you loved Madeleine George’s“Hurricane Diane,”at the Aurora, you might want to know that it’s going to cast Luisa Sermol again in show X, offer more whimsical sex comedy in show Y or host a meetup with drink specials for patrons in your age bracket for show Z. Gardening and HGTV fans would be a great affinity group for “Hurricane Diane,” for example.

The proliferation of subscriptions elsewhere makes Susi Damilano, co-founder and producing director of San Francisco Playhouse, believe that theater can find its own way to make the model work. Still, she attributes the success of her company, one of the few local outfits that haven’t seen a big dip in subscription numbers, to the same qualities most theaters believe they have: a welcoming staff and a mix of well-known and less familiar plays, though the playhouse might haveleaned more heavily on familiar titlesthan other companies for the coming year.

金属氧化物半导体之前Damilano说,在窗帘的演讲t performances, “We let (subscribers) know that we think they’re the greatest human beings alive,” adding that when she and husband Bill English founded the theater, she gave herself a particular mandate: “I want this to be a place where even my family, who never goes to theater and never went to theater, would want to come.”

Most theater leaders acknowledge they have to spruce up subscription practices for the post-pandemic era. Adam Thurman, marketing director at ACT, said that smaller packages, where audiences can choose specific shows from a company’s full lineup, are on the rise.

“There are a lot of preconceptions of how subscriptions used to be, in their rigidity,” Parrish said, referring to how patrons would get locked into show dates more than a year in advance. Now many theaters emphasize that subscriptions are the only way to get both good seats and the option of free last-minute ticket exchanges.

To Dooley, the challenge is, “How do we make subscribing sexy?” A 35-year-old might imagine a “subscriber” as a parent or grandparent out in the suburbs and think, “I don’t want to be that person,” he said.

Damilano might be on to something in framing it this way: “It’s six chances for you to get together with your closest friends and spend the night out in San Francisco.”

Both Dooley and Thurman take a more philosophical view. When a single-ticket buyer becomes a subscriber, he said, it’s partly because they’ve asked themselves, “ ‘What does membership in this organization say about me?’ You say yes not just to the show, but to the mission and values.”

For Dooley, a subscriber is someone who says, “I want to live in a community that has places like this.”

Reach Lily Janiak:ljaniak@sfchronicle.com