Incubator for the Theater

When I think of a Golden Age (Periclean Athens, Elizabethan London, or Rooseveltian America, for example), a few defining strokes dominate the canvas. There is open recruitment of talent into leadership elites. There is a confident spirit of inquiry into the pragmatic and speculative sciences. And, there is lively, original Theater.

Today, in America, the same monster (an incubus?) that ate Hollywood has eaten regional theater. Big budgets, big marketing, big actors, bog productions, and big ticket prices all add up to gigantic risk aversion. Original Theater must run for cover. Free enterprise theaters, to survive, must impose limitations - minimal sets, tiny casts, etc. Such theaters often try to carve out a special niche, thus further limiting themselves. And limiting Original Theater.

There is a useful place for an incubator. Reader's Theater. Playwrights benefit from seeing and hearing their plays read and critiqued. Actors benefit from the work. The audience benefits from exercising the little gray cells in the cranium.

To make an impact, three things are necessary - space, a schedule, and participation. The Colorado Theater Guild, thanks to Gloria Shanstrom, has given us a chance to make an impact by solving space and schedule. If local playwrights do not take advantage of this program BY PARTICIPATING (which means attending readings other than one's own), the fault will lie, Dear Brutus, not in the stars but in ourselves.