An outdoor production of Molière’s “The Miser” at St. Columba’s Church this summer marked a joyous return of community theater to Inverness after two dark pandemic years. But nearly two weeks after the play closed on Labor Day, producer Sharron Drake hadn’t received the proceeds from ticket sales.
Her emails and calls to the Seattle-based ticketing service Brown Paper Tickets were going into a “black hole of communication,” she said. Then a Google search confirmed her suspicions. Ms. Drake was far from the only thespian to be stiffed by Brown Paper. “Stiffed by Brown Paper Tickets,” a Facebook group she joined, has nearly 850 members. On Yelp, where the company has a one-and-a-half-star rating, the comments are full of event organizers accusing it of fraud and warning others to steer clear. Some wrote that they had not been paid in two years or more.
Last month, after garnering the attention of the San Francisco Chronicle, Ms. Drake finally received the more than $10,000 in sales she was owed. When reporters contacted Brown Paper one day before the article ran, the company quickly notified Ms. Drake that it would deposit the full amount in her bank account. She soon paid the bills and compensated the 15 actors and three crew members.
“I made a lot of noise and I got the results,” Ms. Drake said.
Brown Paper became embroiled in litigation in 2020, after more than 1,200 complaints led Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson to sue the company. A Seattle firm had also filed a class-action lawsuit on behalf of ticket buyers. Last year, Brown Paper agreed to turn over $9 million in restitution to roughly 45,000 customers who used the service before November 2020.
But the 20-year-old company continued to operate, mystifying many. Ms. Drake had used Brown Paper before the pandemic and was always paid within 10 days. She hadn’t heard about the lawsuits when she decided to use the service again for the Inverness Theater Compant’s production of “The Miser” in August.
When she heard nothing from the company, Ms. Drake made a GoFundMe, filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau and called the Chronicle, which had covered the lawsuits.
Ms. Drake could only speculate as to why Brown Paper drags its heels in paying clients, but the problems seemed to begin in 2020. The first days of the pandemic saw a wave of event cancellations and refund requests that the company said overwhelmed its financial system. That year, the company’s president, William Jordan, told the Associated Press that it had “lost control over which payments were able to clear and which weren’t.”
Michael Sennott, the company’s general counsel and C.O.O., did not respond to the Light’s questions.
Ms. Drake’s production is not the only West Marin event to be affected by Brown Paper’s practices.
The Bolinas Community Land Trust frequently used the company, which is generally cheaper than Eventbrite, for private events, and had no problems until one such fundraiser near the beginning of the pandemic. The ticket sales had generated $26,000, but Brown Paper vanished, failing to respond to emails and calls. Arianne Dar, the trust’s executive director, heard about the lawsuit and filed her own complaint with the state attorney general.
Then one day this fall, someone who had worked for the trust encountered a Brown Paper executive by chance at an event. “All of a sudden they gave us all the money they owed us,” Ms. Dar said. “It was quite a ride.”