Why Theatre?

It is through theatre that we are offered the most excruciating human situations to navigate, the most challenging conflicts to adjudicate, the most troubling and confusing incidents to unravel. Theatre gives us life situations in concentrated form to chew on, wonder about, stumble our way through.

In other words, Theatre is the site where we work out many of the perplexities of everyday life, ranging from how to live to how to bring up our children to how to die with dignity. It is the place where we contemplate the right to kill another person and the right to insist that killing of any kind is always wrong. It is our arena for deciding what matters most to us and what can be set aside, at least for now. It is our collective conscience writ large and writ bare for all to tear down or build up. I really do think it is our single, best public space for articulating the civic philosophy that animates our thinking and spurs on our doing.

Theatre matters as no other art form does. It shapes how we see ourselves, our very identities, and without it we are diminished as thinkers, creators, and doers. Theatre defines the issues of our time and in the process defines how we see ourselves and others. It is a kind of public school of what the possible and impossible present themselves as, and it challenges us to become better selves than we ever thought possible.