The Barter Theater is a community theatre in the best possible meaning of the term. It is a fully professional Regional Theatre that produces a wide range of programming specifically for the surrounding community that is its audience. A number of the plays, like the Dracula we open tonight, are adapted to locate them around community issues. This version is set in America in the 1920′s, specifically the Virginia Highlands where Abingdon resides.
The actors and other staff all live in and interact with the community and several are natives of the area. There is a saying that “All theatre is local” and while there are a number of exceptions, this organization certainly proves the rule.
Coming in from out of town to do these shows might, to some, appear to break that idea of serving the community, but I feel it enlarges it. Community is not solely bound by geographical locations. In our contemporary world where distance becomes increasingly mitigated by technologies like the internet fostering cross cultural pollination of ideas, creating works that are inherently part of that larger cultural dialog are vitally important.
And in a way it certainly fits the specifics of this play. The action centers around a foreigner from another country who “can control the weather and shift forms at will.” This is light.
Light is not just illumination. It is the weather, the progression of the day, the moon and the stars. It is the atmosphere that surrounds action and binds disparate activities together. In a world where that atmosphere is controlled by a person of foreign origin how perfect to for the light to be designed by someone from far away.
If all theatre is local, I believe it is equally true that it is about outsiders. True action can only exist when the status quo is out of balance. Without an inequality between the current state of things and ones desire for change there is no reason to act. If we become hungry our desire for food causes us to go and eat.
Theatre is about action.
As such the world must be unbalanced, out of alignment. Almost any play, and this applies to movies and other performance as well, begins with a world out of balance. A crazy king losing the throne, an ancient kingdom beset by plague, a young woman sick with a mysterious illness.
The action of the play is then to right that imbalance, or perhaps, to change the surrounding context such that the world balances along a new axis.
This can only be done by the outsider. The one out of balance, out of harmony, with the surrounding world. Henry V can only lead his country to victory because he was the debaucherous youth. The action of the play can only be portrayed by the crazy people who inhabit the world of the theatre.
A world set apart.
Like Halloween or Carnival, a person dons the clothing of another and for some span of time, rejects their own ego to inhabit the life of someone else. Worlds are created within, but apart from the surrounding world. A Temporary Autonomous Zone.
Even at a practical level our world exists apart from much the rest of the world. We go to work such that others can come for recreation. We rest on the day when most return to work. We live in fantasy and create new possibilities out of language, cloth, wood and light.
Part of, but apart from, the world. In the community but perhaps not of the community.
