Don and Audible Celebrate 5 Years since Audible Theater’s First Live Production
On September 18, 2023, Audible celebrated the fifth anniversary of Audible Theater. Don founded the program in 2016, and Audible Theater’s first show premiered in 2018. Audible Theater has presented 42 live shows at the Minetta Lane Theatre in New York, released 114 audio titles globally on Audible, commissioned 50 playwrights through its Emerging Playwrights Fund, and received 35 award nominations and 13 wins including Tony, Lortel, Drama Desk, and Audie Awards. At a celebratory event at the Minetta Lane Theatre, Don shared his founding vision for Audible Theater and his pride for the program’s progress today:
Welcome, everybody.
The idea that became Audible began to distract and often consume me back in 1994. I could not stop thinking about the idea of conveying to others the music I heard when I read fluent prose or listened to profound soliloquys full of artfully composed words. I was a writer then, lucky enough to have a full-time career writing for 20 years. And from that came a founding element of the original vision for the company: to unleash the power of well-composed and well-performed spoken words and to do this by connecting directly to the professional creative class. The idea was always to invite the culture’s most gifted artists to crossover into a world that harked back to the primal pleasure of being read to as a child, to create a mainstream media category defined by a singular aesthetic.
Early on, I imagined to convince Audible Original pioneers like Robin Williams and Ricky Gervais that the performances would be characterized by a seductive intimacy, empowered by new digital devices and delivery systems Audile invented, and the listeners would perceive their words as private performances. During the early phases, Audible positioned book as scripts, and we invited many of the world’s greatest performers to offer nuanced interpretations. I remember preaching to our editors that we needed to look to the critical vocabulary of theater when we described Audible Books, because theater’s vocabulary embraced not just the writer’s script but the performance, direction, and production values, too.
Throughout 2016, I discussed the vision for Audible Theater with many people outside Audible I admire. I was able to gain insight from my longtime hero Sir Tom Stoppard, from one-person show innovators like Whoopi Goldberg and Bette Midler, from future Audible Theater stars like Alan Cumming, always from my theater-obsessed wife Leslie and notable theater insiders like Page 73 founder Liz Jones and the impresario and dramaturg Oskar Eustis. In early 2017, we hired the theater expert Kate Navin, and things began to roll.
Some of the greatest stage actors that already crossed over to become the most successful interpreters of books, and Kate and others all felt assured that underemployed and sometimes overly talented playwrights would be able to grasp the power of the Audible aesthetic, sometimes screenwriters had often struggled to do. A few months before the Audible Minetta Theater opening, after Audible had launched the Emerging Playwrights Fund, my dear friend Oskar Eustis introduced me at the New York Stage and Film event where he thanked Audible for stepping up to support theater while the government continued to do too little. I got up and said, '“Well actually, part of the vision for Audible Theater included providing theater with a sustaining revenue stream it clearly needed.” I noted that a ticket to a football or a baseball game would cost thousands of dollars, much more than the then-recently opened Springsteen on Broadway, if not for various electronic revenue sources like television. The Audible logo could be on any poster outside a theater, like the old Intel Inside logos on PCs, helping any show to be heard by tens of millions of people.
For all of the progress we’re here to celebrate tonight, that vision is still in the works. But if I’ve learned anything, as I reflect with pride and gratitude on my crazy idea borne so long ago, as Audible touches the lives of so many millions of people in 47 languages around the world, as Audible has conveyed to listeners the work of 600,000 different performers and writers over the past five years alone, as Audible Theater has achieved 114 separate productions, including award-winners and international Audible listener hits, released 40 during the 18-motnh Covid lockdown alone, I’ve learned that our missionary agents of change, as the company’s guiding People Principles describe the kinds of leaders built to lead the Audible adventure forward, will continue to slalom around risk and even institutional resistance to chase great big visions of the possible like this one.
So thank you to everyone for being here tonight, thank you for the stunningly talented artists and other theater talent here and for being part of Audible Theater.