How to Make a Theatre Production
A Living Art Form
Theatre is a living art form that succeeds on the talent and vision of many people. The actors, lighting, set design people, the sound, stage management and marketing people. The producer and the volunteers, the playwrights and the musicians and singers, the many brave people who venture forth into live theatre collaborate to bring the theatre to life.
What makes Theatre?
Theatre brings mere words on a page, on a computer screen to life. The playwright begins the process by imagining a living world. Actors bring the words to life by interpreting this script with their training, talent and experience. A director uses his vision to guide the actors across the pages of the play. The stage manager is the drill sergeant making sure that the directors orders are carried out. The set designer and builders create the buildings, the rooms, the landscape, the castles, the architecture of the playwright's world, structures that appear like fairy castles out of early preset mist only to disappear in the lighting designers final blackout, to be ignomiously recycled in the next play. The sound operator enhances the sound of the actors and singers giving the actors projection and clarity, using his free download to create sound effects on his lap top. The volunteers find common union in helping to make this crazy world called theatre work. The under-appreciated producer must somehow tape this bundle of yarn together, to make it presentable, to somehow sell it, while soothing bruised egos, and getting that story in the paper. While Theatre's more popular offspring; film and television have overshadowed their roots, the theatre refuses to die. Like a hardy weed, it clings to life.
The theatre is the communion between performer and audience that society gets no where else. Theatre is a wonderful place for an audience to be able to watch living worlds on the brink of collapse saboataged by a forgotten line, or on the brink of triumph with a brilliantly realized line, each night of the run of a show being wildly different in many ways and so similar in others. A team of disparate horses pulling in the same direction becaue of a bizarre faith, to be judged, applauded or pilloried by an audience of their peers.
