AUDIENCE

“My people, humble people, strong in common sense, common goodness, and common forgiveness, because all felt bowed together under the common weight of life.”

—Whittaker Chambers

audience, N. : act of listening, group of listeners : Audentia, N. : heed

Persons of Good Will, Good Humor, & Good Manners

Niche Longs for Vigorous Cultivation

Holiness does not generally have box-office appeal. But good stories about human relations — well-told — always does. As such (and with the understanding that audience creation is just as important a creative product as the film itself), the frisson generated by our innovation to provide and successfully deliver a very good story provides a tremendous opportunity to engage an audience quite different — one woefully under-served, now starving for quality content — than the prime “18-34 Male” demographic Hollywood targets with laser-like focus.

This demographic (soon to be known, God willing, as the “Manalive audience”) — persons of good will, good humor, and good manners — is just “normal people”, regular, fair-minded, live-and-let-live, law-abiding citizens with traditional values (e.g., work hard, save your money, play by the rules, help others, don’t spend more than you have). Described another way: the “Common Man” — not an unintelligent person but one open to pleasure and surprise, found in every class and every race and religion. And whose Faith and fortitude are continuously besieged. 

Specifically, as common sense and the common man are under constant attack — and in light of the suffering and awakening humanity has undergone recently — this patron group (such as those described in the following sub-sections) is sizable, perfectly primed for our story, and utterly fits within our distribution model scenarios for successful capture and on-going cultivation.

Poets, Prophets, & Pacifists

Admirers of Aesthetics, Authenticity, and Amity

Echoing C.S. Lewis, when an artist is in the strict sense working, he of course takes into account the existing taste, interests, and capacity of his audience. While this certainly describes our high-level approach to the five-year development of Manalive’s creative muse, the 10-story project slate meticulously borne of it, and now manifest through what we believe will be a genuinely innovative inaugural production, the unifying dynamic across all of our target audience demographics is, simply: that we all are made to be astonished. 

Having necessarily had to think deeply about all of this since founding in 2018, as relates to this uniquely eclectic audience segement cohort, we have no doubt but that our Live Cinema portrayal of the production of the play Death Comes for the War Poets will have tremendous appeal, most particularly as our story is anchored to poetry, the art form that reckons with the violence of things, and continually sets our broken world back in order again. (Properly understood, poetry is the total art form, from which all the other modern art forms have been parted out. This realization, combined with the loss of ontological sustenance in the cultures across the West, will uniquely position our production for acceptance across this most discerning of demographics.)

And while our story does not preach about the fruits of faith and salvation, its philosophical, theological, and anthropological essence, as well as its oblique approach to universal themes of faith, wonder, and mystery, provide (echoing novelist Piers Paul Read) “witness to the very idea of objective truth” — which will appeal greatly to the poets whose verse serves as a means of spiritual expression and contempation, to the prophets whose proclamations further illuminate reality, and to the pacifists whose protestations speak, like those of the War Poet Siegfried Sassoon, to the absurdity of war and of the apocalyptic fury that today demands a smashing of existing ways.

Meditatives, mediators, & Metaphysicians

Scholars—Learned or Not—Seek Soul Nourishment

The essential elements of our story and its universal themes will speak to deeply felt experience rather than to higher education, appealing to those (paraphrasing Flannery O’Connor) whose minds are willing to have their sense of mystery deepened by contact with reality, and their sense of reality deepened by contact with mystery.

In the most basic terms, this demographic loves a puzzle, is alert and intelligent, though not necessarily learned. Therefore, those who consider themselves to be meditatives, mediators, and/or metaphysicians will drawn to our story, for the simple reason that it captures the literal truth of human experience — dramatized through the illuminating events of World War I and the growing awakening borne of living through the powerful’s attempt at another wild experiment on humanity, which resulted in nothing but disaster, quite similar to the Great War.

Lastly, as we previously noted in this plan’s Innovation component (Creative — Live Cinema sub-section), when first staged as an Off Broadway play in 2017, Death Comes for the War Poets received critical acclaim in both secular and faith-based media. Thus, we are very optimistic that the themes of the original dramatic verse tapestry, contextualized to our adaptation and performed as a Live Cinema innovation, will be similarily well-received, most especially by this unique cohort — religious or not, who understand the need of a moral catharsis today, and that our project can go a long way to purging pent-up anger and amorphous frustration. Simply, at a time when (borrowing Muggeridge’s haunting phrase) the shadow of the world falls across the face of innocence, our story’s exploration of ritual, death, love, and community will serve those meditatives, mediators, and metaphysicians seeking a powerful counterpoint to the zeitgeist. 

“To talk at all interestingly about death is inevitably to talk about life.”

—D.J. Enright