Theatre Design & Technology - Summer 2013 - 16

Together we are also
responsible to dare to take
the risk to take a play and
create a work of art.
almost nothing as exhilarating than starting at that point, with
that blank canvas.
One of the first things I commissioned was Bambi: A Life
in the Woods. I thought, I'm doing children's theatre, I've got
to do some Disney stuff. I called Disney on the phone, and I
said, "I'd like to get the rights to do Bambi as a stage play."
And they told me, "Well, we don't actually have the underlying
rights, it's from a novel." I said, "What?" "Yeah, a novel." So I
looked up the novel, Bambi: A Life in the Woods, and it was
written by an Austrian Jew between World War I and World War
II. Germany is coming out of one world war they started, and
Nazism is on the rise, and this Jewish man writes this play about
these vulnerable deer lost in the woods, trying to survive. It's
obviously an allegory. There's one chapter in the book, chapter
eight, which is just two leaves talking to each other. The last
two leaves on the tree before they fell to the earth at the end of
fall. One fell, and then the other fell. That moment is where we
started with that play. And it's a wonderful show. Now it's been
published, and it's been done quite a bit.
It's so critically important to be responsible to the play
and responsible to your audience and to be responsible to all
those other things at the same time and to be responsible to
yourselves as artists.
I believe in issues for young people. I believe my job as a
father is to help my children cope with the world that they'll have
to live in, and my job somewhat in the theatre is to provide art
that helps children finds ways to cope with issues. I did a play
called The Yellow Boat, which is about an eight-year-old boy who
dies of AIDS. He's a hemophiliac. This was in 1994, they didn't
have drugs to cure it back then. The next play I did right after
that, in the same season, was I Never Saw Another Butterfly,
about children in the Holocaust being shipped off to Auschwitz.
So we opened the season with two plays where children died all
the time. Well, that was the end of the finances for that season.

theatre design

& technology

s u m m e r 2013

We had the biggest deficit we had ever had. I learned a whole lot
about responsibility to my institution, let me tell you.
But it was an important lesson to learn. I want these plays
to be done, so how can I find the way to do them appropriately
and responsibly and boldly; taking these full risks and not being
afraid of those things? We're responsible to so many things in the
theatre. We're responsible to the theatre as an art form, to the
play, to our fellow artists, to our audience, to our organization, to
our community. We're also responsible to ourselves. We always
have to find way to balance all of this, our risks and our responsibilities, kind of like a group of dancers who become a gyroscope,
always spinning, always creating, but never losing our balance.
Together we are also responsible to dare to take the risk to
take a play and create a work of art, to dare to do that, to risk
making the theatrical gesture on stage perfectly appropriate, so
that it magnifies, clarifies, reveals the truth, the truth about the
humanity of that particular play at that particular time in that particular place. We're called to use everything we do accordingly
so, like a composition, the design metaphor, the construction of
the sets and the props, the colors, the painting techniques, the
renderings, the lighting angles and colors, the quality of the costumes and fabric and shape and textures and the program and
the lobby and the acting, everything.
We together are creating art that speaks to the human soul
in such a way that no other art form can or does. That is the
theatre. It is our unique call as theatre artists to take these risks,
the necessary ones, to responsibly reveal the truth, the pain, the
joy, the beauty, the essence of human relationships, to reveal and
make felt that which makes us truly human. We're called to that
in children's theatres, in LORT theatres, university theatres, experimental theatres, in black box theatres, main stage theatres,
in all theatres.
So my message to you today is take risks, be responsible,
and really, really, really enjoy Milwaukee. v

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