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Ideas We Love: A Pulitzer Winning Playwright on Why Theater Saves Us

By December 30, 2017September 1st, 2021No Comments

(Photo: Actor Pierre Jean Gonzalez appears in Miami New Drama’s upcoming production of The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity.)

We share some inspiration to start the new year – a New York Times essay by playwright Ayad Akhtar, winner of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for drama, on how theater synchronizes our heartbeats (yes, really), brings us together, gives us hope – and maybe even frees us from Facebook.

“A living being before a living audience. Relationship unmediated by the contemporary disembodying screen. Not the appearance of a person, but the reality of one. Not a simulacrum of relationship, but a form of actual relationship. The theater is an art form scaled to the human… Once it starts, you can’t stop it. It doesn’t exist to be paused or pulled out at the consumer’s whim. It can’t be copied and sold. In a world increasingly lost to virtuality and unreality — the theater points to an antidote.”

Read the full essay here: An Antidote to Digital Dehumanization? Live Theater

Miami New Drama’s next presentation of theatrical reality, The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, opens Jan. 25th and runs through Feb. 18th.