Why Nothing Will Save Us—But Maybe Theatre Can

by Jen Silverman

The spring after I turned nineteen, I would wake up, go to class, come home, and another of my peers would be dead or hospitalized in a suicide attempt. It seemed as arbitrary as it was unrelenting. One close friend called me from the top floor of an apartment building, standing in an open window, torn between stepping forward and stepping back. It felt like living in a war zone. It felt like my generation had completely given up on the world.

What I remember most from that blur of a spring was McCormack Theatre, a small black-box theatre at my university. McCormack was a place where we made sense of our stories and dared to re-envision them, to change them, to imagine new endings for ourselves. It was a place where we could look at the world in ways that didn’t feel as damaging and hopeless as everything outside those walls. I remember after rehearsals, I’d lie down with my cheek pressed to the wood floor. Taking breath after breath, I could feel every rigid sinew in my body soften. As a nineteen year old, two things quickly became clear to me: First, McCormack Theatre and everything happening within was magic, and second, theatre was the only thing I’d found that I could place my faith in.

When people ask me “Why theatre?”—which happens more often than you’d imagine, and the question is always followed by: “I mean, because you don’t make any money, right?”—I say I write plays because theatre is a truly collaborative form, it’s all about forging community and forming families. And yes, there’s nothing like the rush you get from the bravery and daring of live acts performed in communal spaces. But maybe the real answer for why I write for the theatre has more to do with the spring I spent with my cheek pressed to a wood floor.

I think it’s fair to say that my generation has become more and more distanced from our sacred spaces, from traditions that we consider holy, from any belief in rightness, goodness, and order in our world. We have lost faith not only in our political structures, but also in ourselves. We are afraid, and our media feeds our fear back to us in sound-bytes. We are cynical, and our cynicism engenders more of the same. We’re angry, without the conviction that our protest will effect change, so we mask our anger in apathy. We need help, but we don’t believe in it. The need for theatre has never been greater.

The playwright David Adjmi once told me that when Oedipus was performed in the outdoor arenas of ancient Greece, it was staged so that just as Oedipus blinded himself, the sun went down leaving audience and players in darkness. It underscored a simple fact that has haunted me ever since: we are blind together. What is happening to one of us, is happening in some version to us all. We are connected to each other and to our world, but many of us have forgotten this. Perhaps it takes an act of theatre to remind us.

My generation is starving for a medium that—by its very definition—challenges isolation by demanding that an audience come together, witness together, react together. My generation is starving for theatre that is relevant, provocative, that reflects our needs and contradictions, that doesn’t shy away from multi-national, multi-racial, and queer voices. I think it might be dramatic—but it would not be unfair—to say that theatre-makers are in a unique position to hold up a mirror and ask audiences to see themselves clearly, to imagine how we might change what we see. I think of the story of Medusa, who was so ugly (poor thing) that you couldn’t look at her without being turned to stone. Like the mirror through which Perseus could see Medusa without being turned to stone, theatre is a way to reflect the world truthfully back to us, but in ways that invite self-awareness and understanding instead of paralysis and horror. Theatre-makers say: Come in. This is what our world looks like. This is what our world could look like. This is who we are to each other. This is a sacred space. Come in.

Jen Silverman’s essay “Six Bright Horses and the Land of the Dead,” winner of the Orlando Award for Nonficiton, is forthcoming in Issue 10, October 2011.