As many groups have already published, it is often difficult for a theatre group to directly respond to immediate political actions. In dealing with licensing and contracting artists, most troupes have to establish a season a year or more in advance. We, at Artists from Suburbia have had our upcoming Suburban Summer Theatre Surge laid out for months. There are ways that we can look at our programming and see what it says about our current situation and there are ways we can draw connections. Because of our mission statement, our season was already intended to be one which stretched and tested our own inclusivity while challenging our audiences’ senses of empathy. Across the nation, artists are responding to the current political climate. Talks and articles about the artist as a citizen are popping up left and right. It has become imperative for artwork to help us move forward, to help us move onward and, it seems, that those individuals who are not ready to do so, are being left behind in the dust. On November 9, I read a trusted favorite play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as part of a project. Originally, I was looking forward to reading something that would take my mind off of the election results and would distract and amuse me. I have never been so struck by the oppressive relationship between Hermia and her father, Egeus as I was that evening. Oberon’s possessive remarks about Titania had never shaken me so much. This comedy that had always made me smile seemed to be suddenly tainted by a world that many of us were not aware of. Every play is different now. Obviously, certain works have begun to strike chords with us all. George Orwell’s 1984 and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale are resurfacing to the top of the bestseller charts. J.K. Rowling is having a field day drawing connections to her own stories. Hardly a day can pass before it seems like someone is sharing a video from Charlie Chaplin’s The Dictator, or television shows like House of Cards or the border-wall-centric episodes of Arrested Development on social media. We are ready for artwork and stories which tell us how to respond to the world we are living in. Below, I have compiled a list of the top ten plays that, in my opinion, should be widely read and presented in the coming years. - Artistic Director, Andrew Child Top 10 Most Important Plays to Read and Perform Right Now
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There are people who believe that artists live in a fantasy world, so encumbered by their own imaginations that they don’t see the world as it really is. We at Artists from Suburbia ardently oppose this idea. What, we ask, is life but a multitude of ways in which individuals experience and interpret it?
With the current political climate, it has become ever more imperative that we, as a society and as a community, think about the struggles of other people. This requires imagination and this requires listening to one another: these two things together are the fundamental aspects of an artist in the theatre community. Actors, playwrights, directors, and everyone collaborating within a production team and contributing to the creation of a work in theatre, is called to have a greater understanding of their own experience in order to equally understand others’ perspectives so that the story being presented to the audience is genuine and affecting. For an actor to realistically embody a character, they must imagine what that character was doing before they stepped into that scene. They must think about what the character wants in that specific moment and they must distinguish the intentions of each singular sentence their character speaks. To act is to participate in a psychological exploration of someone who is not one’s self. To spend the time outside of one’s own head is the very definition of empathy. Audience members attend theatre to witness a narrative separate from their own. Many people turn to performance as an escape from their own world, yes, but those who truly delve into and understand what is being represented to them cannot stop themselves from connecting parts of what they are seeing to themselves. They can sympathize and empathize with the characters they see on the stage, no matter how different their own background may be. The theatre is a great equalizer in this sense. It reminds us that we are all human after all. This is why theatre is such a valuable weapon now - and has been ever. Ally Madden is a frequent collaborator with AfS and will be serving as dramaturge/ assistant director for this summer's new play workshop. |
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AuthorBlog posts are written by various members of Artists from Suburbia's productions and staff. Archives
July 2017
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