When did I say I did not want to talk to them? I have been arguing that there is no reason to unduly limit the activity of a producing agent to a geographic community.

Besides, the ‘vast maority’ of regional theatres employ co-productions with companies across the United States. Much of the work that is being done regionally is being produced on a national scale that understands that the connections between geographic communities are as strong as the connections within them. Most of these companies rely on coproduction and regional transfers as part of their yearly operation. All I am saying is that is a good thing.

Further, if internationally minded companies are the exception, my point is that is an unfortunate reality. That companies from the US that are not based in NY, Chicago or San Francisco SHOULD be getting international exposure and vice versa. We should be working towards MORE cross polination rather than isolationist tribalism. Not that you are anyone I know is arguing for that, but it is a risk.

But these are exceptions that prove the rule. Of course, there are international companies, but the vast majority of regional theatres (which is really my focus) draw an audience from within driving distance. Why don’t you want to talk to them?

I somewhat agree. Josh Ellis makes that point quite well. But one can only make works from within the worldview we inhabit. A very select few are able to transcend that, and even then it is more a synthesis with its opposite.

I think of what Picasso did with D’Amoiselles d’avignon. He took modernity and its opposite and smashed the two together. The interesting thing is that we have within our contemporary world these opposing forces. At that point it becomes incumbent upon those of us making the work to address that inherent duality in contemporary culture.

What I disagree with is that a culture that is not operating at the level of the advanced industrial nations would have no consciousness of the work created. One need only look at voodoo religions or West African tribal religions to see the ability of the so called primitive mind to adapt and incorporate new technologies into its preexisting cultural framework. There are certainly degree us understanding, but a powerful work will remain a powerful work.

Lucas, I would be interested in knowing what level of education or income you perceive this global community as having. Your ideas are expansive and interesting, but I suspect that if I produced such works as you mentioned above and played them for an audience culled from a community of 10,000 people in Kansas, or placed it in the rural areas of Rwanda, audience members there would have no such consciousness for completely different reasons.

I sometimes wonder if we among us who use technology and see its potential promise and possible future sometimes attach to it ideas which cannot possibly be imagined by people whose villages don’t have running water or electricity, or who have gangs of marauders destroying their homes on a monthly basis. -Tom Loughlin

I actually do know a number of people who hop around the globe to see shows but I get your point. Yet, just because everyone in the audience is sitting in the same room does not make it a local community. Broadway shows do not stay open because of New YOrk audiences, but from national and international audiences.

There are companies like the San Francisco Opera, or Munich Opera or the Brooklyn Acadamy of Music that produce work for a global community. The cast, production team and so forth is international, and the shows themselves travel to international audiences. The same is true of most dance compainies, like William Forsythe or Bill T. Jones. These truly are international companies creating work for an international audience. Each night the people sitting inthe house may be primarily from a certian geographical region, but the work is created for and presented to international viewers.

Lucas and MattJ — Thanks for the prompt, Matt. You may be surprised that I agree with you that we are all part of a global community, that the global is local and the local is global. This is becoming increasingly true as the world becomes flatter and flatter, and the communication revolution eliminates the concept of distance. It would be foolish to deny that this is true.

That said, the global community is not buying a ticket to your play, specific people from a specific place are. And while that community may be more diverse in NYC, where the combination of immigration and tourism creates a circulation of nationalities and ethnicities and localities, it is nevertheless defined by geography: the people who are close enough to your theatre to see a performamce that night (nobody in, say, Beijing is hopping a plane to catch your latest production of “Hamlet” tonight, most likely).

So the phrase “act locally, think globally” has great applicability to theatre. The world is not defined by the geographical bounds of your town, but the majority of the people with whom you are conversing through your art are likely to be drawn from within a reasonable distance of your theatre. Those are the people who are sitting in your seats, and those are the people with whom you are communicating. This is very different from a mass media such as movies, which simultaneously addresses with identical artistic experiences (one print is the same as another) a geographically dispersed audience. That requires a different mindset than theatre.

You can define your community however you wish — you can create theatre that addresses the gay community, the immigrant community, the senior citizen, the children, the poor, the tired and hungry — but in the final instance, you are talking to a specific group of people who have brought their bodies, minds, and spirit into your unique theatre at that particular moment in time. One might like to think that one is addressing the global community, but unless you are working in a mass media, it simply isn’t true.

One thing that seems to go a lot in translations is Sophocles’ use of sentence fragments, which are usually “cleaned up” and made more “readable.” Creon’s speech over his dead son at the end works a lot better when it keeps in all of the false starts and fragments he’s saying, stumbling in his grief. Same with the chorus sections.

Also, Creon’s horrible cries of grief (“Io,” “Aiai,” and “Oimoi”), do NOT accurately translate to “Oh!” — as I see in far too many translations — and play perfectly well on stage (well, except for “oimoi,” we had to cut that one in fear of getting unwanted laughs from Creon seeming to say “Oy, moy!”).

Actually, we weren’t on a stage, per se, but outdoors in a natural amphitheater in front of a stagnant pond, getting eaten by mosquitoes, but well worth it, as the bullfrogs in the water always knew their cue to start croaking en masse was when the lights came up on Tiresias. Can’t plan an effect like that.

It’s so much more common with ‘gender’ than it is with race or culture. Too bad, I would love to see work that ignores all that nonsense and just gets down to the story telling.

Ha ha.
It’s funny because when I wrote that comment, i thought to myself, shit, i should start a company with blind casting. there is one company called React that kind of does that but they are very focused on men roles for the most part.