David Schmader has a wonderful cover story in this week's Stranger, covering a subject near and dear to my heart:
The Intermission Escape Artist
Or, How One Lifelong Theater Devotee Learned to Stop Worrying and Hate the Form.
Here's the article.
A disclaimer--I'm mentioned briefly in the piece, which is very flattering, and I know Dave--but the ideas stand on their own, and I'd love the piece whether I were in there or not. It's a piece filled with wonderful moments, but here's just one of them:
At the very least, this pedigree-trumps-pleasure model threatens to limit theater attendance to ascetic aesthetes ready to pay their respects to the Ancient Art of the Stage and stock up on art karma, and to restrict the theater to a genre hobby, with no more to offer a contemporary entertainment seeker than a Renaissance Faire. At worst, it threatens to erode the knowledge that theater could ever be as exciting as a rock show or an action flick, but was always and forever a more or less pleasurable variation of vegetable eating.
I think it's a great essay, and I'm delighted that The Stranger published it--it addresses a fear I have, that as theater is continually contracting in my lifetime that it is shrinking away from engaging with the culture in any significant way and becoming ingrown and hermetic, staring at itself and commenting on its own existence in lieu of prying its way into the hearts and minds of the rest of the world.
4:02 AM