An Invitation from Ron Reed

Artistic Director

Here we go!  Another year of journeys together to unfamiliar worlds.  Another season of unforgettable characters, living and moving and having their imagined being right now, right here in the room with us.  Breathing the same air we breathe.

That's why we go to the theatre, isn't it?  To sit within a few rows of other human souls as they live through the moments that reveal their hearts and define their lives.  To see impossible situations take shape, to imagine choices made and consequences lived through.

Do plays tell me answers?  Not usually.  Not the good ones.  Will they make me a better person?  Don't count on it.  But they might make me a bigger person – having imagined myself through another set of circumstances, having lived a bit more life, there'll be more of me to be human with.  Having identified with this missionary or that gay man, this in-group or outcast or upstart, that Nazi or Jew or Samaritan, I'll have a hard time pretending they aren't human.

Who goes to the theatre for propaganda, to be told how to live or what to think?  We come here for stories, to watch how people do live, to find out what it must be like to be them. To experience.  To feel.  And most certainly, to think:  to think about how the world works (or doesn't) for somebody we might see on the street, somebody we might glimpse in a 19th century novel or behind tomorrow's headline.

Scrooge's nephew says Christmas is "the one time in the year when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys."

Why wait 'til Christmas!  Come to the theatre, where every night we settle in and say, "Tell me a story.  Show me what it's like to be you."

Ron Reed,

Artistic Director