Exit music

And now it's done. Maybe. May comes to an end and of course the journey isn't over. Or I have yet to come to a resolution. Do I still feel as if the impact of theater has faded, for myself and within society? Yes. Do I still think there's hope for the future of this art form? Yes. I went to more theater productions this month than I have been to in the past year. It helped that they were all comped. Otherwise, because I'm not a student and on an extremely tight budget, I would have anxiously spent at least $150.00 on theater tickets. Yes, I could have rushed many of those productions or even tapped my connections, but still that would have been the price of one Springsteen show and we all know by now how much THAT emotionally fulfills me. I have taken out second/third jobs to pay for my music habit. I have worked extraordinarily hard as a photographer to get to go to shows on business. I am just not yet sure I am willing to put THAT much time and energy into theater again. I just need theater to show me that it's really worth it, that it continually will have the power to GRAB me. Will I make it more of a habit to go on Pay What You Can Nights to find out? Hell yes. This month, I tried to look at both music and theater from purely an audience member's perspective, because that's really all I know anymore. Save for the every other year Burlesque performance, I am no longer involved in theater. Yet, I planned my weeks, organized what night I would go to what theater, how I would see this friend or that show, and still make it to work every weekday by 8am. Save for hip hop at the Guthrie and Buzzcocks at the Fine Line, my music and photography have mostly fallen by the wayside. I grasped on by staying up a tad later and playing K'naan's videos over and over again (holding back tears as I saw stadiums of people waving their hands to his hip hop anthem "Wavin' Flag"), slowly and quietly editing my Flogging Molly photos, stopping dead in my tracks just to listen to Jason Isbell's "Dress Blues" on the radio, dancing in my office to Bad Religion and Social Distortion on my ipod. Those moments are so much a part of who I currently am. Here I am in my ratty old Styx t-shirt and wiener dog pj shorts taking a break to pump my fists around my room as K'naan pumps his. Taking a break to edit my photos of terriers and my nephew Max. Yet I THINK I realized how whole I feel when I allow theater to be a part of my life as well. Truth be told: I have had a DAMN great month and just feel so good. I explored. I have had AMAZING conversations with people I greatly respect about theater this month, about the world I grew up in and walked away from. Honestly, it's hard for me to type right now through my tears. Maybe it's not fair for me to expect theater to have the same effect as music. But I still will. Show me REALLY captivating theater, mind body and soul, and I truly believe, more so than before this month, you'll see an audience as fist pumping excited as any great concert. I saw threads of that this months, tiny threads in one moment, in one writer's explanation or one child's awe or one actor's scream, holding a society onto this art form. Much of our generation, like those before us, has seen great tragedy and where do the majority of people turn? To song. When Haiti crumbled, so many groups came together in song. Some annoying and trite. Some thrilling and awe-inspiring. But we listened. Theater, on any scale, needs to feel relevant to an audience to truly succeed. How can this happen? I don't know the answer. I don't know if it involves a rethinking about how it's presented or performed. The classics will always exist and, when done extraordinarily well, they will thrill. But succeeding means it can really be given back to the people and not just be for the affluent or intellectual. Theater, at its best and most honest, does just that. As long as there's hope (and pay what you can nights), it still has me in the audience. That's what I realized this month. That I've still got hope. That theater, at its best and most honest, is not just a part of who I was but it's a part of who I am and who I want to be. That's an awesome feeling!