The Minutes
CLIENT
Situation Interactive
TECHNOLOGIES
WordPress, PHP, JavaScript, SASS
YEAR
2022
EXTERNAL URL
A deliberately lean brochure site for Tracy Letts’s Pulitzer-finalist play at Studio 54. Where American Buffalo and for colored girls — launching the same week — demanded rich content systems and ensemble profiles, The Minutes called for discipline: ticketing calendar, production overview, reviews, and nothing else. Ninety minutes, no intermission, no feature bloat.
Delivered as development lead at Situation Interactive.
Background
A Steppenwolf transfer that got sixteen previews before the pandemic — and two years to think about what came next.
Tracy Letts’s The Minutes premiered at Steppenwolf in Chicago in November 2017 and was announced for a Broadway transfer in the 2019-2020 season. Previews began at the Cort Theatre on February 25, 2020. Sixteen days later, every theater in New York went dark. When Broadway reopened, the production found a new home at Studio 54, resumed previews on April 2, 2022, and officially opened on April 17 — landing in the same two-week window as American Buffalo and for colored girls, all three of which I was building simultaneously. Unlike those productions, The Minutes was a focused brochure site from the start. A 90-minute play with no intermission, a single set, and a tight ensemble directed by Anna D. Shapiro did not need the content depth of a seven-woman choreopoem or a star vehicle with three A-list headshots. It needed a clean conversion path.
The Pulitzer nomination for Drama gave the production critical credibility. The site’s job was to channel that into tickets without overbuilding.
Implementation
A focused brochure site with a ticketing calendar built to convert.
Where American Buffalo had a star-driven content system and for colored girls demanded a seven-color visual identity, The Minutes called for restraint. The custom WordPress theme was structured as a clean brochure: production overview, cast and creative profiles, media gallery, reviews section, and the ticketing calendar. That calendar followed the same pattern as the other spring 2022 builds — date-driven schedule at Studio 54, availability states, direct purchase routing — but the surrounding content was lighter. Mobile-first layouts, compressed assets, and lazy-loaded media kept page weight minimal. The production team could rotate press quotes and handle schedule changes through the CMS without touching code.
Knowing when not to build is as important as knowing what to build. This site did exactly what the production required and nothing more.
Results
108 performances, $5.8 million at the box office, and a Tony nomination for Best Play.
The site supported the full run from resumed previews on April 2 through the final performance on July 24, 2022. Across 108 performances at Studio 54, The Minutes grossed $5.86 million at an average ticket price of $84.28. The production earned a Tony nomination for Best Play alongside recognition from the Drama League and the Outer Critics Circle. Post-launch, the production team handled everything — schedule changes, press quote additions, cast updates — without developer involvement.
Building this alongside the more complex American Buffalo and for colored girls sites reinforced something useful: the same ticketing calendar pattern could scale down to a focused brochure or up to a full production platform without rearchitecting. That flexibility paid off on every build that followed.
