“How do I pay what you can at an event?” someone named TooAfriadToAsk posted on Reddit recently.
Keen to attend a local show but unsure how to navigate the $35 or pay-what-you-can entrance fee, they turned to their online peers for answers. The budget was tight, they said, and $35 was not an option. Would they be asked why they couldn’t pay? Did they need to declare their preferred price? Justify it? How exactly are these things done?
Many helpful responses came from TooAfriadTo Ask’s way, reassuring them they were welcome at whatever they could afford and that no fuss or explanation need be made of it.
In all the positivity, however, two answers were shining examples of what pay-what-you-can (PWYC) pricing is genuinely about. Especially when it comes to the arts.
One came from a performer. “I’d rather play for a full house of people who paid a dollar than three people who paid full price. More people make it more fun for the performer and the audience.”
The other response from a former concert promoter who organized PWYC gigs said, “We didn’t ask for any reason or justification as to why people could or could not give much, that was the whole point of the system …. People should be able to enjoy culture even when their budget is tight.”
If it all sounds very kumbaya, it is. If that’s a problem for you, you probably don’t work in or know anyone who works in the arts. Certainly not anyone in the theater. Find yourself someone involved in theater who’s in it to make money, or does it for the money, or makes loads of money from their theatre work and you’re most likely hallucinating.
So, how do these PWYC theaters survive? Just because they aren’t in it to make money doesn’t mean they don’t need it to survive.
“Prior to switching to a PWYC model, our ticket prices were always reasonable. The highest we ever charged was $15,” says Jason Nodler, Founding Artistic Director of Catastrophic Theater, now in its 15th year of PWYC pricing.
But the relatively inexpensive ticket prices still had drawbacks for the company’s audience.
“We realized that for a lot of people $15 was affordable and they could come as often as they could,” says Nodler. “For other people it wasn’t affordable at all and for people who could pay a lot more but were only charged $15, there was this sense that it was kinda cute.”
As the company watched the economic gap widen in Houston, they decided that a PWYC model most represented the kind of theater they wanted to be. By charging everyone the same amount, namely what they can afford, the company believed that more people would be able to come and experience theater.
At first, it didn’t go well.
Catastrophic marketed their shows as pure PWYC with no suggested price. But it turns out that too much choice without direction was frustrating for audiences. So, they quickly shifted to a suggested price (originally $35 and now $40), stressing that anything under or over is just as appreciated and that no ticket price reflects how expensive it is to produce a show.
This change made things much smoother, resulting in box office revenues holding steady at 20 percent of the budget – a lower percentage than most theaters but still financially viable for Catastrophic.
Still, Nodler admits there are drawbacks to PWYC. “Some people that can pay treat it as a discount program, and we need to get the message across that it’s not a discount; it’s an honor system, and if audiences want to keep us going, they have to be reasonable.”
On the flip side is the audience’s guilt at not being able to pay much at all. “We’ve had situations where people say I can’t afford to come to this one,” says Nodler. “They feel guilty about not being able to make the suggested price. So, we stress that the PWYC program is specifically for the people who can’t afford it.”
It’s precisely those people Mildred’s Umbrella Artistic Director Jennifer Decker had in mind when she became the second theater in Houston to go PWYC.
“I teach college full time and have many students who have never seen a play,” says Decker. “The attitude was it wasn’t for them; they felt it was something fancy, expensive, and remote. So, if they did come, I was comping them a lot – young people just don’t have the money to go.”
Decker was also concerned about other actors and young theater students who couldn’t afford $30 a ticket despite wanting to or needing to see shows as part of their career or curriculum.
Mildred’s already had a popular Monday PWYC performance, and Decker decided this was the way to go for every show. She went to her board and proposed a $20 suggested price and PWYC model.
“Initially, the board was worried because they thought if we offered PWYC, no one would pay more than $5, but it really evens out because people will pay $50, or they’ll make a donation,” says Decker. “Most people that buy tickets pay at least $10 and that didn’t change what we were making percentage-wise. One-third of our funding comes from tickets.”
Like all theater companies, regardless of ticket policy, Catastrophic and Mildred’s also rely on funding from Foundations, individual donors and state/federal subsidies to make ends meet. You’ll see those sources listed in their programs, and if you’ve paid attention, one name will have popped out at you from Catastrophic’s donors – Jim Parsons. Yes, that Jim Parsons, the Big Bang star who Forbes named the world’s highest-paid television actor and one of the founders of the company Catastrophic grew out of — Infernal Bridegrooms. .
Nodler is clear, however, that while Parsons has been generous to the company, it isn’t because of him that they can afford to employ the PWYC model. “Jim understands like many donors that no theater’s budget should rely too heavily on one source,” says Nodler. “Most theaters have some sort of angel or some connection to money like a board with deep pockets. We don’t have that board. And we have donors who donate more to other theaters relative to budget size.”
Mildred’s is not one of those theaters with money connections enabling a PWYC model.
“We don’t have any rich donors giving us big checks; we have lots of small donors giving us small checks,” says Decker, who jokes that she’s still waiting for one of her actors to get a big TV gig so they can help the company out.
The truth is that neither company chose PWYC based on some financial bedrock backing them up. It was all about the work and who got to see it.
“The real impact of PWYC program is that it has allowed us to attract new audiences and that’s something we were really trying to reconnect with,” says Nodler. “We’ve seen more young people and more diverse audiences in every sense of the word.”
Decker says the PWYC model means that Midred’s attracts an audience with an average age of 36, much younger than most theaters. “I just keep making the art and making sure everyone has a chance to see it,’ says Decker. “I don’t worry if we make money on the ticket sales; if we just break even, that’s good enough for me.”
Nodler also holds fast to the idea of art over money and removing barriers to entry.
“We hope that the arts will do more and so if we raise our ticket price, even if that raises our bottom line, we are failing to accomplish our central mission, which is to create meaningful exchanges between artist and audiences. In order to do that, we need to attract the people who need this sort of work the most and will gain value to their lives as a result.”
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2025.
