A wild and wooly Saturday Night

Friends,

I've been thinking. Is there hope for a renewed exciting theatre of vitality? Is theatre going to die out?

I can't answer the first question, but I think I can take a stab at answering the second. It's a statement you hear all the time. Well, at least I seem to hear it often. "Theatre is dead." I'm pretty sure I said something akin to it just the other day. Well, let's take a quick moment and clarify the dead part of that phrase. There is a book, written by a man named Peter Brook, "The Empty Space". In it, Brook explores and explains some forms of theatre he has seen throughout the world. One in particular struck me, and it's the Dead Theatre. This is the empty Theatre, the shallow fluff dancing about Broadway and redolent in most major regional American Theatres. I think that most people, when saying that theatre is dying they imply theatre will face the same fate as radio when television came about, not that all theatre will resemble Brook's frightening vision.
So, will theatre die? Can theatre die? Theatre originated in every culture, more or less organically. All over the world, theatre sprang up. It seems to be an intrinsic part of human society. That shared moment, the shared four dimensional tale unfolding in front of us. There's an energy that theatre expresses which is lacking in all other forms of art. I mean, this line of discussion would require a rough tangent into defining theatre and art and dance and performance, but let's take a moment and wonder about the difference between a film and a play. Similar in some senses, but most assuredly not the same.

Theater won't die, and it will always surprise. It will delight and antagonize and frustrate and make me really angry. But that's because I love it, and I want it to be so much better than it is.
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