An inside tip for any New Yorkers whose taste for cultural events exceeds their budget for cultural events: join play-by-play.com.

The idea is simple: theatre producers don’t like empty seats at their shows, as it makes people wonder whether they made the right choice in shelling out big bucks for tickets. So producers turn to services like Play-by-Play to fill unsold seats.

Conversely, theatre-goers can join Play-by-Play for $100 a year, then pay $3 a pop for any of those seat-filling tickets.

The obvious question is: what kind of crappy production has to resort to free seat-fillers?

And the answer is: surprisingly many.

Yesterday, Jess and I scored tickets to Things We Want (directed by Ethan Hawke, and starring Paul Dano and Peter Dinklage), which we’d long wanted to see. As those two tickets would have run us north of $150 on Ticketmaster, the annual cost of Play-by-Play membership paid itself off in a single evening.

This Saturday, similarly, we’re off to see Molissa Fenley and Dancers premiere Dreaming Awake and Calculus and Politics at the Joyce; another $80 saved.

What else can you find? Some Broadway, more Off-Broadway, and even more Off-Off. Plus dance, music, comedy, staged readings, and the like. For $100 a year, it’s a hard deal to pass up.