The Importance of Being, You Know, Earnest: How Theater Failed America @ Woolly Mammoth - DCist:
But the personal really is political, and once the 35-year-old Daisey begins vividly to recall his salad days as an actor-manager, the show takes on resonance and heft. Whether he's talking about the 63-player comedia dell'arte he assembled for a regional one-act competition during a stint teaching high school (despite lacking even an undergraduate degree to call his own at the time), or the six-person troupe he founded in a part of Western Maine where the moose outnumber the people, or the Seattle production of Jean Genet's The Balcony wherein those sitting in the front rows must have wished they hadn't -- it's clear that theater saved his life. And the notion that a storyteller of Daisey's skill and generosity might still be working at Amazon without that peculiar institution is itself an strong argument for keeping it around.
How can the only piracy-proof story form ever invented be losing its audience even faster than the recording industry, for crying out loud? If How Theater Failed America doesn't quite answer that question, it passionately reinforces the importance of asking it. That's something. Actually, that's a lot.
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