Theater is about our limitations. It is about failure and suffering and the inane, the joyful, and the ridiculous. It is about stories that are told and retold to us as if our memories are short-lived. Theater is an imperfect art that holds a mirror up to an imperfect world.
And theater is about freeing ourselves, audience and performer, as best we can, from our limitations. It is about pursuing an action and experiencing a transcendent moment.
If we study dramatic literature that has the power to shape our thoughts, we are reminded of our intellectual linkage to the past. If we read the text aloud, as I encourage my students to do, we awaken our senses and just might feel the heartbeat of a writer, the pulse-like action of a Shakespeare or an Ibsen. If we take the challenge to think and feel as if we were Prospero, Hamlet, or Dr. Stockmann—to surrender to their movements and actions, to assume, for all intents and purposes, a well-drawn literary character, a character uniquely created for human inhabitation—we open up the character’s world.
In doing so, we begin to realize an expression of freedom.
—Professor of Theater Dwight Watson, delivering the 30th Annual Charles D. LaFollette Lecture, “An Abridgement Between Nathaniel Dunn’s and the Graveyard.”
Read more and watch the lecture at WM Online.
