The American Theatre could certainly rest on it's laurels - and why shouldn't it? I mean, we've got Broadway. Who else has Broadway? And the 1900s produced a century of playwrights that ranged from Cole Porter to Lilian Hellman to Eugene O'Neill to Neil Simon to Lorraine Hansberry to Edward Albee to Susan Lori Parks. To name but a small few. In fact, there are enough brilliant American dramas and musicals to keep our nation's community and regional theatres hopping for the next century. But is that enough for us Americans? Hell no!
Let's face it, amigos mios, somewhere along our national course, this country was bitten by a very serious theatre bug and even as we go careening into cyberspace, with u-tube and my-tube (we should maybe get our tubes tied) and daemon digitalization of all things entertainment, live theatre just keeps on coming and audiences just keep on going. In fact, live theatre may be the only thing keeping us human as we have known human to be up until this point. And while we may indeed spontaneously mutate before our own iPhones into something other than flesh and bone one day, the happy fact is that we haven't yet and it still feels good to go out, hang out and laugh and cry at the human predicament as only live theatre can lay it out (literally) before us.
There can be no denying that New York City is the birth place of all of this wonder, but at this turn in history pretty much every corner of the American theatre is peopled with artists who have paid their NYC dues and chosen, for whatever reason, to move on to other places.
So every day, those of us who are in the theatre wake up to the never ending challenge of inventing theatre in a new moment and for a new purpose. We have the luxury of a world canon of dramatic literature that we can study and explore, an academy of acting gurus whose disciples we can enjoy being, and ever expanding technologies which we can use to bring magic to the stage. And a land where we are free to celebrate all of this from sea to shining sea.
I don't know what you say to all of this, but I say
Come to Nashville and Go to the Theatre!
Jaz Dorsey
The Nashville Dramaturgy Project
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