This I Believe

The following is the result of a writing assignment for the Plan-B/Meat & Potato Directors' Lab, based on the style of the This I Believe radio series. Though a bit tangential to this blog's purpose, I share it because I quite liked the results.

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I believe that theatre matters.

I believe that theatre still matters even millennia after we gathered around the fire and reenacted that day’s hunt. I believe that even in an age of texts and tweets, gathering people in a room and telling a story is important and worthwhile.

I feel like I’m explaining my “belief” in gravity, or in a round Earth, or in the wetness of water. Yet in the early days of the 21st century, a belief that theatre is important and relevant and that it really matters puts me in the camp with the birthers or the flat-earthers, stylish in my tinfoil hat.

Theatre matters because it is still unique, because technological advances cannot breach the simple truth that we are all here together in this place and in this time. Each performance, actors and audience all gather in a temporary community that will never happen again. In a world that is slowly advancing beyond the physical limitations of time and place, theatre is one thing that cannot be timeshifted, cannot be virtualized, cannot be indexed by Google. Even as the social networks of the Internet gradually take us out of our local communities and make us members of larger groups unbound by geography, theatre still only can happen in the here and now.

I moved to Salt Lake City a few years ago, from a past spent in cities like Chicago, San Francisco, and New York. I moved to the far exurbs, and comfortably settled in to my virtual network. I worked from home with folks from the East Coast, and socialized online with friends from across the United States and beyond. Though I lived in Utah, I did not live in Utah. Some of that was that I simply felt like a fish out of water, an alienated intellectual agnostic in the heart of a theocracy. I didn’t have much in common with my community, and chose to find my own that was unbound by locale.

Then, one night, I went to a play: Hedwig And The Angry Inch at Plan-B Theatre. Suddenly I felt amongst my people. The crowd cheered and a drag queen swore, and loud, filthy rock filled the air … and I felt like I had come home. I was not importing my community from Hollywood or Chicago or London, I was not selectively living in a virtual community … I was here in this moment with these people in this place, and I found a people I could be a part of. I don’t feel that online communities are any less “real” than local ones, but they certainly are different. Though I couldn’t know much about the crowd around me, I felt a spirit that surrounded me and could sustain me.

My later work with Plan-B has highlighted my sense of this true “Community Theatre”. We’ve sadly made that term synonymous with “amateur theatre”, as if by virtue of our paychecks we are no longer a part of our communities. As if our union status or tax returns prove that we are somehow above our community and no longer come from it and speak back to it. But there should be no shame in the term “Community Theatre”, no shame in a theatre that gathers us together for a couple of hours and lets us tell the stories we need to tell and hear the stories we need to hear. It’s what all really important theatre is.

Especially here in Salt Lake, that community theater fills a need. There are many of us that don’t quite fit in the dominant culture, who feel ill-at-ease in a conservative state where a church wields enormous power. Mannie Mannim, of South Africa’s historic Market Theatre has a quote that resonates for me: “The critics of the Market said that we were simply preaching to the converted. But that wasn’t really right. What we were doing was giving nourishment to like-minded people.”

I felt this most profoundly playing a role as the kind of right-wing religious politician that defines Utah’s political landscape. I could feel the palpable waves of smug superiority rolling off the audience, accompanied by the occasional audible snort. I was immensely frustrated that I was unable to shake them out of their assumptions and get them to actually listen. I wanted them to confront their own prejudices. I wanted to shake them out of their red/blue worldview and get them to look for the shades of purple.

Then I stopped. … and listened … and felt. A Sunday matinee made me see that this was a secular service where people were taking in the spiritual sustenance they needed to get through their week in a larger society that wanted to exclude them. While everyone else was at their church, we were at ours. I gradually accepted that this was a chance for us to escape into a community where we felt among peers and could be among our people. As a performer, I was part of that community, not separate from it. It was not “us vs. them”, it was just “us”. Some of us were telling the story and some were listening, but that was beside the point: we had gathered together because this story and its communal telling … it mattered.

It’s ok to be nourished sometimes, to get a fill-up of community and belonging, to be reminded we’re not alone. This nourishment doesn’t only come from overtly issue-oriented theatre: we can be nurtured or challenged or inspired by beauty as much as politics. What’s important about theatre, and what makes it still matter at all is that electric sense that it’s happening to us together in this moment.

We make theatre, every time it happens. We can make theatre happen without lights, without set, without costume, without even a script. But without us, without that physical community gathered together, it’s not theatre … it’s rehearsal. That community? That nourishment? That theatre? It will always matter.