Still, is this homogeneity enough to cause anyone to expend the time, resources and effort it takes to start-up another theater? 

For the past several years theater audiences in the Hartford area have dwindled. In consequence several theaters have had to shut down or reinvent themselves. Further, the audience’s love affair with electronic entertainment has drastically reduced the time they spend in theaters. All too often the result has made it more difficult for innovative and risky work to be done. Phoenix Theater, previously, Underdog Productions, know for mounting risky shows such as A My Name is Alice and Hair (with nudity), has a current season of Dracula, Fantastics and Arsenic and Old Lace.

More importantly, where do audiences find a personally challenging contact with theater artists that sends them home wondering what the hell happened? Where are they confronted with the “invisible made visible?” (The Empty Space, Brook) or with that purging of emotion known as catharsis (Poetics, Aristotle.) When the 4^th wall is always between the audience and the actor what real difference is there between theater and the electronic media other than cost and quality of production? Is it any surprise that someone would prefer to watch a good film with all of its high quality sound, lighting, settings and realistic staging?

 I am suggesting we need an intimate theater where the artists are encouraged to take risks, one dedicated to  a vision that each show is completely unique. This would be a small theater that does not depend on numbers of audience or cost of sets and does not belong to a group or community but is the sole possession of the current artists working in it. Such a theater would not be supported by an outside source that sets limits. It would not have any group of non-artists that set artistic standards and limits. It would be a theater in which the artists working can fail without undue penalty. 

I also suggest that we need a theater in which actor and audience breath the same air, touch each other directly and in which the experience arises in intimate encounter. We are all likely to benefit from a theater in which fertilizer actually smells like fertilizer because it is close enough to be smelt; a theater in which a box can be a table or a pillar and one can actually see the tears on the actor’s face; a theater in which poetry and passion and raw, genuine emotions can be communicated directly from actor to audience and back again without the distractions of sets or formalities.

To conclude, a theater that is vital and seeks to involve it’s audience on the most intimate level will, often be out of tune with contemporary society. Because it will not seek to reinforce or celebrate current values and assumptions but challenge them, it will often seem destructive and rough and dark. It will also seem insightful, poetic and beautiful in equally measure. This is what makes it essential to our collective and individual health. For it is only in the destruction of old forms and habits, and the unbridled mirroring of our collective and individual pains and joys that we can find our shared humanity and create an empty space in which the new may be born.   

                                                                                                                   Ted Guhl