- Kate Snodgrass on Why Theatre is Important
- Allyn Burrows on Why is Theatre Important
To inaugurate ExploreBostonTheatre.com, we asked Artistic Directors from Boston and New England theatre companies to start the conversation by sharing their thoughts on this question:
The past year has brought changes to the national economy which affect the financial health of theatres. We need theatre now more than ever. It promotes the public dialogue about what matters to all of us. Why?
Kate Snodgrass, Artistic Director of Boston Playwrights’ Theatre starts the conversation.
Kate Snodgrass, Artistic Director of Boston Playwrights' Theatre.
Yes, our economy has changed.
Yes, we need theatre now more than ever.
Yes, theatre promotes public dialogue… And we need this dialogue. We need to be in the same room together to have it, so…
Go to the theatre.
We will find the answers if somebody will ask the questions.
Go to the theatre.
The playwright observes our lives, our needs, challenges, foibles, and then s/he asks us to look at them with clarity.
Go to the theatre.
Theatre acts as a sounding board, but it can’t do this unless we generate new work. How do we feel NOW and not twenty years ago?
Go to the theatre.
New work asks the questions we’re afraid to ask, and it does it with respect and in-your-face compassion.
New works make us laugh in the face of hopelessness, instruct in the face of ignorance, and call attention to our lives just in the nick of time.
All new plays all the time–that’s what will save the world.
Go to the theatre!
Thank you to Kate Snodgrass (tag archive).
Ultimately, theatre can help us to realize that there are different levels of living going on all the time, different for every person we see.
In a way, we can say that every person lives in their own world. Many of us live in ways that are so unnatural due to our societal influences that we forget that there are ways to perceive that can allow us to be free. Theatre presents little keys to doors of freedom. Truly, theatre attempts to unshackle us.
Theatre reminds us what we can do when we work together as a community.
Theatre reminds us how to empathize with others.
Theatre reminds us to believe in magic.
Theatre reminds us to create for pleasure.
Theatre reminds us to create for a cause.
Theatre entertains us.
I am a colleague of Alan Lightman’s, working on chaos and on Einstein’s dream for many years with my best friends in the arts. At the moment my finding that in the equivalence principle, the lower stories with their slower clocks are proportionally enlarged is maximally hated by the profession. I am turning to you to – please – make him contact me immediately because if I’m right, the experiment starting in 3 days at CERN will shrink the planet to 2 cm in a few years’ time with a probability of 1 in 12. Maybe I’m wrong, but no one was so far able to prove it. Is he strong enough to do me and the world this favor?
He can listen to me on notepad.ch, but it is much easier to allow me to talk to him. We are very close in every respect, only I am older and more stupid by 8 years. Forgive me the impossible intrusion, I never wrote a letter like this. Take care,
Otto E. (“Emmanuel”) Rossler