Howard Sherman: I know. It’s just a tweet. Let it go. But it’s emblematic of bias I read and hear constantly. It’s about time I said something.
I would like everyone to stop using “community theatre” as a punch line or punching bag. As people with a vested interest in building and sustaining interest in theatre, pretty much everyone in the business is supportive of and in many cases evangelical for arts education. We applaud academic drama programs and productions from kindergarten to graduate school, recognizing that such programs can give voice to the next generation of artists as well as the next generation of audiences.
2 comments:
As an active member of my own community theatre for a few years, I maintain to this day a love/hate relationship with it. I made quite few friends through it, and really wanted to enjoy the concept of coming together as a community and producing a show. Unfortunately, I often ended up angry and frustrated because of the politics involved with choice of show and casting, and because to me, the very social nature of participating seemed to take a back seat for putting on the best production we could. I also had my share of problems with people assuming that because I was a high school student, I didn't know anything about professionalism or producing shows, and got very tired of being coralled in with the 8-12 year olds... I'm sure my experiences aren't unique ones, and I'm sure that is a lot of the reason why, in the "theatre community," community theatre is ridiculed. I think they are valuable parts of any community, particularly for people who enjoy performing but don't want to pursue it professionally, however, for people who were more serious about producing shows, it's an endless battle against frustration, pettiness, and at anger.
I have to say that before reading this article I probably would've made one of those community theatre jokes, but the article has legitimately convinced me not to. I never really thought about it that way, or if I did, I never considered how much damage I could be doing by disregarding it. Not everyone likes theatre enough to want to go to CMU to study it, but why the heck shouldn't they have the opportunity to do it anyway?
There's a community theatre a few towns above me that I've seen a couple shows at. I know a few people that perform and design there consistently, and from what I can tell, they do it because they really love it. They actually did Sweeney Todd quite recently. It might not have had as much automation as our production does, but I must say... they really nailed the A Little Priest number.
(For once, not sarcasm from Pia Marchetti.)
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