Okay, you need a teaser? Here.
We keep talking about finding ways for people to connect with our particular art form.But people don't want to connect to art . . . they want to connect to other people.
So instead of a theatre company seeing their performance on stage that night as the point of the evening, perhaps they should just see themselves as the hub . . . as the thing that connects all the people in the audience to each other.
You can say the words connection and theatre without me thinking of this quotation from William Ball's A Sense of Direction.
Through the medium of belief [the audience's] consciousness transcended to a state in which he was in complete unity with something outside of himself. ... This transcendence into unity is the mark of a work of art in the theatre. ...These moments of unity, in which the audience and the actor are one, are the very purpose and the reward of drama. Theate people will endure considerable hardship and suffering in hopes of attaining even a few moments of this unity. But because these sacred experiences are irrelevant to the practical actions of the profession, this unity - which is a result, not a goal, is never referred to.
... An actor would never openly admit that a play is an innocent masquerade that uses the power of belief to draw the spectator into a few moments of unity consciousness.
