Come to our new play. What's it about? Guess!

(This is a thread about a discussion I'd like to bring up about new plays generally, rather than a specific play, so I'm not sure if this is the right place, or if it should be in the 'General Chat' thread. If so, apologies and I can delete/try to move it).

I'm probably more of a casual theatre-goer than most of the posters here, but since moving back to London and having a little more disposable income I've been attending plays more regularly, and an issue has arisen that I thought might make interesting discussion, and provide useful for less knowledgeable theatre-goers here like me.

I'm enjoying attending new plays. Two of those I've enjoyed/am looking forward to most this year are new ones; The Ferryman and Mosquitoes. However, on deciding on booking tickets, I've noticed something that's pretty frustrating about the way these plays can be presented to the public. The websites typically give very little information about the play itself, either in terms of some broad synopsis/story outline, or even what type of play it is (e.g. is it a thriller, a comedy, etc.). Indeed, most of the pages that accompany the 'book here' buttons seem to just include a couple of vague & non-commital sentences along with a single -typically abstract- image.

For example, Ferryman had "Northern Ireland, 1981. The Carney farmhouse is a hive of activity with preparations for the annual harvest. A day of hard work on the land and a traditional night of feasting and celebrations lie ahead. But this year they will be interrupted by a visitor.", while Mosquitoes has a little more "Alice is a scientist. She lives in Geneva. As the Large Hadron particle collider starts up in 2008, she is on the brink of the most exciting work of her life, searching for the Higgs Boson. Jenny is her sister. She lives in Luton. She spends a lot of time Googling. When tragedy throws them together, the collision threatens them all with chaos."

I appreciate that in both cases the lines are definitely enigmatic, but they don't really give much for a potential audience to make an informed decision on.

Presumably the practicalities of staging a new play makes it difficult to say much; the script is still being finalised, the sets/costumes/etc aren't in place making photos difficult and so on. Furthermore, in some media have gone too far in terms of giving away 'too much information', e.g. the trailers for some movies seem to spoil the entire thing. However, some of these websites seem so vague as to be irrelevant, requiring audiences to base their decisions largely on prior knowledge about the people involved rather than the play itself. Do you know the star? Do you know the playwright? And so on. While that might be fine for seasoned theatre-goers, it strikes me as quite opaque for newcomers who don't have much prior knowledge to go on. Compounding this is the fact that popular smaller plays might be sold out long before press night, giving casual theatre-goers little chance of getting tickets by the time they read about something in their paper.

Apologies for the waffling mini-rant, but I guess my thoughts/questions are, how do people decide on the plays here? Do you do a fair bit of reading around (playwrite interviews and so on)? Do you just bulk book and then return? Do you have access to secret knowledge outside of the general releases? Or perhaps it's not really such a big issue outside of a very small number of 'big names in a small theatre' type events? And day returns and schemes like the NT's Friday Rush gives people enough access anyway?