... you get a blog about theater. :)
I like live theater. I've noticed myself, in the past -- when I've been about to tell someone that I'm off to see a Shakespearean piece, or a modern play, or even more, a musical -- hesitating. Somehow, admitting that I like to go see Shakespeare or Chekov or Williams feels a little dorky to me. It's like admitting you love SciFi. So I usually flinch a little. No offense to Scifi lovers. (Go Battlestar Gallactica! Star Trek! Star Wars! Yay!) It's just the first comparison that came to mind.
But, (almost) every time I see a piece of live theater performed, I remember again why I love it ... especially if it's great live theater. And then I realize I need to acknowledge my love of theater and not hide from it. So here I am, "standing" in front of you in infinitely wide cyber space. I love live theater! There. It's done. Maybe I'll go to a convention dressed as the Bard himself.
Yesterday I saw a play by Susan Cooper called Foxfire. It was about a couple who raised their family on a farm in the Appalachian Mountains. None of their children wanted to follow in their footsteps. Each left the homestead when he/she grew up. And in the end, when the husband of the couple died, the wife had to decide whether to move into the city to live with her son or to stay at the farm, where practically her whole life's worth of memories lived. I won't tell you what she chose ... in case you ever get to see it. But I will tell you that I got in an interesting discussion with several other audience members -- of varying ages -- after the play. One elderly lady stated that she loved it, though it was hard to watch because it was all about the inevitable letting go of life as you age, but that she couldn't imagine that the younger members of the audience would have resonated with it much. And then a few of us "younger" members chimed in stating that we very much could resonate with it. First of all, many of us anticipate what it will be like someday to care for our own parents or to face the awful, gut-wrenching decision about whether or not to sell our parents' homes. And B, all of us, at every age, face the inevitable changing of life. No matter how much we'd sometimes like life to stay the same, it ALWAYS moves on. And, no matter one's age, there is loss at every season. It was a beautiful play. A lovely play. Go see it if you get the chance.
But what I also realized was that, maybe even more than the play, itself, there are several things I love about watching plays:
1) Good theater, like any art form, brings to light truths about the experience of human existence. Good theater brings little bits of life alive, puts them in front of us, and helps us -- in so doing -- to see ourselves a bit more clearly. Shakespeare -- for example -- highlights the capacity for self-deception we all have. Shakespeare does lots of other things too. But I won't go on about those. That would make me a theater dork (gasp!).
2) Good theater, for the two or three hours it has you, finds you sitting with a few hundred other strangers you've never met, experiencing the same phenomenon. There's something about laughing together, crying together, sitting in that sacred moment of silence together when you're just
waiting...
waiting....
waiting....
to see how the next character will respond to that little bit of life brought to the forefront, that finds you, well, together. And even though you're sitting in a room full of strangers, you don't feel alone at all. You feel a part of something larger than you.
3) One of the best parts of any play is the discussion that follows. And usually, one thing you discover is that as much as you each had a similar experience, you also had a very difference experience. It's funny - you experience the same exact things in different ways, each through your own filter. Just like life.
So, I lobby for all of us getting to see a few great plays in our life. And if that makes me a nerd, well, as Will himself did saith (we're on a first name basis): "To thine own self, be true."
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