Though his proposals are focused more on marketing rather than theatrical content, Wofford insists that new tactics are needed to attract an audience. “San Antonio is in dire need of a theater company that transforms the experience of interacting with theater,” he said “That is Convergent’s staple. That is why I call myself the chief experience officer.”

Though his chances of success may seem as vague as Lifshutz’s endeavor to renovate a theater space, Wofford has captured the imagination of leadership at the Tobin.

David Green, interim managing director of the Tobin Center, and former general manager of the San Antonio Symphony, says, “Anthony came and gave me his vision, and it resonated with me. I don’t know if he will be successful, or to what extent. But I don’t want to tell this kid he can’t do it — he might be able to, so let’s let him try.” The take-away if Convergent succeeds is the Holy Grail of theater, which has been increasingly doomed to a graying audience. “If they are successful, it will really help activate that space for young people,” Green claimed.

The aging, and hence dwindling, theater audience is a problem also faced by dance and classical music, both in San Antonio and throughout the country. But in SA, other factors besides audience demographics and the lack of a central district may hinder theater’s health. One factor might be the way theater companies often respond to the financial support offered to the arts by the City’s Department of Culture and Creative Development, which awards grants ranging up to a third of an arts nonprofit’s annual operating budget. Monitored by DCCD on a monthly basis, the grants derived from the City’s Hotel Occupancy Tax must be met with matching funds. This is a factor leading theaters that own or manage their own spaces to book other companies on their stages in order to gain rental income. But this tactic, though it may have the benefit of increasing artistic diversity in a theater, has a down side, too.

Faced with the need to ensure a calendar filled with adequate rental space, theater managers schedule a number of short runs, usually three weekends, of their own productions. Faced with having to pay a booking fee, companies renting do the same. The result is that shows have little time for the public to learn of them. And if, by some chance, they do sell out, there are usually no opportunities to lengthen the run. Even with luck and hard work, there are few chances to expand audience in this system.

Coupled with the obligation to find matching funds for DCCD grants, the demands to serve their communities with a staggering variety of services ranging from visual arts education to dance instruction leaves little theater appearing on the stages of large City-owned arts facilities. The Carver Community Cultural Center, a historical bastion of the East Side, was awarded $327,000 a year in the last fiscal cycle by DCCD, although they do not produce their own work, but rather schedule a season of touring and local productions. The Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center (GCAC) located on the West Side, receiving $332,000 annually, concentrates on self-produced events like CineFestival and the recent Tejano Conjunto Festival, partially held at the historic Guadalupe Theater. A center of teatro in the 1980s, the Guadalupe Theater is now without a resident company, and no longer features TeatroFest, a contemporary Chicano theater festival.

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Rex Hausmann, local artist and arts advocate, recently opened his latest exhibition in the massive showrooms of Gallery Nord with a cohort of more than 30 participants, quite a crowd for a solo show. But Hausmann, who runs Alta Vista studio and exhibition space Hausmann Millworks with his family, and has toured groups of SA artists to Kansas and New York, loves a big social mix. His paintings have been exhibited at institutions such as UTSA’s Institute of Texan Cultures, Southwest School of Art, and at galleries in Los Angeles and New York, but collaboration has long been at the heart of his work.

The evening opened with a reading by SA poet Jim LaVilla-Havelein and continued with subtle programming. Models in cosplay costumes milled about, attended by stylists and followed by photographers Kat E.V. Day and Ernesto Ibañez. Dresses made of paper, by SA-based fashion designer Samantha Plasencia, held positions next to mock-ups of window displays filled with bits of ephemera and studio notes. A film and a slide show rolled, while a group of enthusiasts played the table-top game Warhammer. And that was just part of the ground-floor happenings, which also included an almost manic dispensing of donuts, treats that were seen in paintings done in his chaotically colorful signature style.

Two new series express Hausmann’s fascination with child’s play. Deep, canvas-like mono-colored squares are embellished on the edges with tiny clusters of plastic figurines. One large work depicting, says Hausmann, a trip to China, has the toy people stuck upside down on the bottom edge of a bare canvas, an allusion to the childhood story of people on the other side of the world walking upside-down.

On the second floor is a set of 15 line drawings — simple, but deftly executed. Like much of Hausmann’s output, there is an air of nostalgia; happy scenes of fishing trips are mixed with a drawing of a woman striding buoyantly into the day.

But why this outpouring of disparate work, much of it no longer on view at the gallery? Not just part of an ambitious opening party, Day’s photography and Plasencia’s architecturally constructed dresses are featured in Hausmann’s central project: a 95-page book, his sixth in a series. Part comic book, designer’s flip-book, and artist’s rendering for a film, it is a celebration of collaborative art making. The book, on sale for $40, costs a fraction of what the drawings and paintings, props for the pamphlet, go for. Hausmann is a hustler indeed, but though he plays the game of selling art for a living, he’s a San Anto boy, a populist through-and-through.

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AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18) “I was often in love with something or someone,” wrote Polish poet Czesław Miłosz. “I would fall in love with a monkey made of rags. With a plywood squirrel. With a botanical atlas. With an oriole. With a ferret. With the forest one sees to the right when riding in a cart. With human beings whose names still move me.” Your task is to experiment with his approach to love. Make it a fun game: See how often you can feel adoration for unexpected characters and creatures. Be infatuated with curious objects … with snarky Internet memes … with fleeting phenomena like storms and swirling flocks of birds and candy spilled on the floor. Your mission is to supercharge your lust for life.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20) Scientists in Brazil discovered a huge new body of water 13,000 feet beneath the Amazon River. It’s completely underground. Named the Hamza River, it moves quite slowly, and is technically more of an aquifer than a river. It’s almost as long as the Amazon, and much wider. In accordance with the astrological omens, I’m making the Hamza River your symbol of the week. Use it to inspire you as you uncover hidden resources. Meditate on the possibility that you have within you a secret reservoir of vitality that lies beneath your well-known sources. See if you can tap into deep feelings that are so deep you’ve been barely conscious of them.

A quarter of the way through The Flu Season, Will Eno’s 2003 absurdist exercise set in a psychiatric hospital, patients in the TV room watch a report on how an entire family fell through early-winter ice and died. Skating on a thin dramatic surface, the play itself hovers on the verge of its own destruction.  Like Samuel Beckett’s novel Molloy, which concludes with the statement: “It was not midnight. It was not raining,” nullifying the earlier assertion: “It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows,” The Flu Season performs a pas de deux between self-creation and self-negation.

Two metafictional figures, identified as Prologue (Sophie Bolles) and Epilogue (Stephen Poer), materialize at the beginning and, ignoring fourth-wall conventions, speak directly to the audience. Prologue is buoyant and rhapsodizes about the scene she sets for a play she calls The Snow Romance. But Epilogue, a jittery cynic, contradicts her and states that the play has been renamed The Flu Season. Prologue and Epilogue will repeatedly interrupt the proceedings with commentary. Prologue’s is exuberant and lyrical, immediately deflated by Epilogue’s tart disclaimers. “I’m sick of this story,“ Epilogue ultimately tells Prologue, “and I’m sick of you.”

The story, such as it is, involves a male patient, called Man (Nathan Thurman), and a female patient, called Woman (Kaitlin Graves), who meet and fall in love in the hospital. They are attended by an officious physician, called Doctor (Aaron Aguilar, who also directs), and a self-absorbed nurse, called Nurse (Halen George). Beyond that, a plot summary would be irrelevant, because verbal frolic is more important than events and because Epilogue – the author’s eraser – continually deletes what Prologue affirms and what we see on stage. “Life is a word game,” insists Epilogue, and, true to life in a loony way, The Flu Season, whose title is an ailing lark, is composed not of significant actions but verbal flummery and non sequiturs. “Buck teeth are buck teeth,” proclaims Nurse. “There’s only so much cocoa left,” declares Doctor, who is more deranged than his patients. ”That’s my philosophy.”

Since the fictional characters in the play are manifestly fictional characters, the challenge to Proxy Theatre’s talented cast is to make them not believable but memorable. For a suicidal soliloquy with echoes of Ophelia, Graves’ Woman stands out, as does Aguilar’s Doctor, especially when, swathed in bandages after a bee attack, he makes his drivel almost unintelligible. Epilogue asks: “It is entertaining to watch people in pain, yes?” Yes. Though The Flu Season skates over depression, rejection, loneliness, and death, it never quite falls through the ice. The spirited execution of lines and gestures that Epilogue pronounces “useless” generates a kind of morbid exhilaration.

In what might have brought down the curtain if there were a curtain marking off the minimalist set, Prologue, grievously disappointed in the turn her play has taken, finally announces: “The end.” But Epilogue immediately declares: “There is no end.” The players simply disappear, with no opportunity for the ovation they have richly earned. With this, the third production of its second season, an adventurous, audacious repertory company proves again that in San Antonio theater there is no substitute for Proxy.