Ten and one half weeks ago I departed the family homestead to make my way in the big city. I left with a prestigious internship, a manageable financial situation; and in some greater sense, a worldview: a scheme of ideals, thoughts, feelings, hunches, intuitions, and dissatisfactions about my world and the art that happens inside of it.
Ten and one half weeks later I have none of these things.
But don't despair, gentle reader: this would-be crisis has forced me to reconsider all I had known and reimagine all I could want, for me and for theatre. (Which is to say, hopefully/eventually for you, an audience, as well.)
This weblog hopes to chart these developments as they...develop - and to invite discussion where many often demur. You know, somewhere inside, that you didn't enjoy the performance you just witnessed; you feel forced into submission by the sheer and guilty enormity of your ticket cost; you want to talk, to complain, to dissect, and maybe even to redeem what you've seen, but you don't have the words.
Or maybe you're just that asshole who doesn't like anything - like me.
I like to bitch, whine, moan, ridicule, deride, flay, obfuscate, manipulate, deliberate, and irritate just as much as the next guy. I also know when to congratulate and to appreciate when something precious and fleeting has been given to me, handed from the stage to an enraptured and inarticulated audience. But I don't want these impulses to be checked at the auditorium door. I want them to lead somewhere, to something bigger.
I want a theatre that is expansive, inclusive, straining, and trascendent. I hope for a theatre that transports and renews. I work toward a big theatre.
Ten and one half weeks later I have none of these things.
But don't despair, gentle reader: this would-be crisis has forced me to reconsider all I had known and reimagine all I could want, for me and for theatre. (Which is to say, hopefully/eventually for you, an audience, as well.)
This weblog hopes to chart these developments as they...develop - and to invite discussion where many often demur. You know, somewhere inside, that you didn't enjoy the performance you just witnessed; you feel forced into submission by the sheer and guilty enormity of your ticket cost; you want to talk, to complain, to dissect, and maybe even to redeem what you've seen, but you don't have the words.
Or maybe you're just that asshole who doesn't like anything - like me.
I like to bitch, whine, moan, ridicule, deride, flay, obfuscate, manipulate, deliberate, and irritate just as much as the next guy. I also know when to congratulate and to appreciate when something precious and fleeting has been given to me, handed from the stage to an enraptured and inarticulated audience. But I don't want these impulses to be checked at the auditorium door. I want them to lead somewhere, to something bigger.
I want a theatre that is expansive, inclusive, straining, and trascendent. I hope for a theatre that transports and renews. I work toward a big theatre.
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