| AND SUDDENLY, THE FALL SEASON IS UPON US!
by Jason Loewith on 8/14/2007 12:47:00 PM
i was at a meeting last night at the Chicago Humanities Festival with colleagues from Steppenwolf and Congo Square Theatre Companies, and it turns out that all three of our theaters begin rehearsals for the 07-08 season TONIGHT! What happened to summer?
Whatever happened to it all, with rehearsal beginning tonight, the fall 2007 cultural season is upon us. With it come fond memories, high expectations – and serious artistic anxiety. Our world is evermore falling prey to what's been called "continual partial awareness" – we're competing for your attention alongside 550 cable television channels, late-summer blockbuster movies, a seemingly infinite number of blogs, podcasts and YouTube videos… and who's counting the voicemails and emails you’re downloading from your BlackBerry as you read? What hope does our ancient, clumsy, grounded-in-gritty-reality form of theater have in such a universe?
I mean, you’ve got to buy the tickets ahead of time, arrange schedules with your friends, drive on over to the theater, walk in the door… and then, as Mary Zimmerman told me, we ask that you silence yourself. You silence yourself bodily; you remove yourself from the technologies that aid you; and you sit in the dark, in the presence of friends and members of your community and artists… and then the play begins.
The start of the season is a special time for me and my fellow artists because it gives us a chance to make the case once more that what you'll get at the theater – if we do our job right – is an opportunity for transcendence… we take you back to the garden, we take you back to the campfire, we ask you to release your cares for two hours so that we can tell you a story the way stories have been told since the dawn of recorded human history. And if we both succeed (you in releasing your cares, us in holding your attention), we've given each other a gift that lasts well past when the curtain falls.
So tonight, we go to first rehearsal for Keith Bunin's THE BUSY WORLD IS HUSHED... and look forward to six weeks of opportunities this fall to give our audience a special experience of transcendence.
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I received my copy of Next Up! and read it cover to cover. I found it to be fantastically full of info. It was the perfect amount of information to remove the cobwebs about the gospel, The Episcopal Church, etc. Great job! I am looking forward to seeing the show.
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