03/02/2003 - 5:48 p.m.

Risking danger, making noise

Theatre. Theatre can be a high school senior class play. Theatre can be an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. Theatre can be a performance in an 11th street lot. Theatre can be an improv troupe getting together in someone's basement on Saturday nights. Theatre can be a bunch of guys who came up with this incredibly funny idea that they want somebody else to laugh at. Theatre can be an angry outburst about the way the people of the world treat each other. Theatre can be a church youth group passion play. Theatre can even be going into the house dressed like a turkey dinner and watching the show on which you've spent a small fortune in tickets. Theatre can be all this and more. Theatre can be helpful, hurtful, progressive, offensive, mind-opening, blinding, funny, or scary.

People who love theatre know all this. From the Becketts waiting for Godot, to the Larsons living in America at the end of the millienium, theatre has been the genre of the oppressed group. Playwrights are fighting to be heard, hoping that by these words they write, these characters they create, they can perhaps change the world. This world of the playwright is real and live and on the stage demanding changes.

This is why theatre has the power to scare people. Theatre can stand on stage naked and howl primal screams to be noticed. Theatre can also sneak up from behind and quietly whisper that it would like to take its clothes off. An audience is never entirely certain what it will get.

I always go in to a theatre with the knowledge that I could see the former. If I get the latter, that's equally fine. I have not yet met with theatre that offended me, but it has its place. Theatre that offends me is there to make me ask why I am offended.

If someone wanted to write the Aaron McKinney story or the Russell Henderson story, those works would be just as valid as The Laramie Project. I would not like to watch people stand up for them, but I would be forced to watch an opinion in opposition to my own, and maybe I would learn something.

There are people in this world who find RENT, my favourite musical, offensive. They deem it badly written music about childish stick people without morals. The opinions of my own parents are not far off this mark.

During the American College Theatre Festival last week I saw a lot of theatre. I didn't like a lot of it. Much of what I saw was student work- plays about men and women complaining about their miserable lives. That was it. The catharthis was on stage for the character, not for the audience. I have no great desire to want to watch somebody else's emotional orgasm with no benefit to myself. However, there are people who are going through the rape, emotional abuse, neglect, fill in the blank- and perhaps this does something for them. These plays are obviously doing better than mine are at the moment. For those people, then, who get something out of this, that is valid theatre.

But valid theatre can also be the parody of such a piece. This, however, is where all the open stage doors slam shut and the playwright and the stage hands exchange hesitant glances on an empty stage before fleeing to the catwalks from a persuing audience. However, are not the satirist's points equally valid? Are they not the opinions of someone who is trying and dying to be heard?

I believe they are, and so I stand up for them. Admittedly, each individual person has their own lines into which theatre, for them, should not stray. If we humoured every one of these individual lines, Angel Dumott Schunard and Tom Collins would never have made it on stage, Matthew Shepard would be banned, and Estragon and Vladimir would continue to wait under their tree.

So go to the theatre. Dare to fail. Dare to laugh, cry, fear, scream, think, hurt and look from a different perspective on the world you thought you knew. Good theatre has the ability to make you piss your pants from laughter, anger or fear (metaphorically or physically speaking). If at least some of the audience isn�t feeling warm and wet at the end, what was the point?