Race: Why It's The Season of Everything

The Dragon season is chosen by the Artistic Director, Meredith Hagedorn. She routinely receives scripts and suggestions from actors and directors and other theatre people like me, and then does a whole lot of reading. When she showed me the season she was planning for 2018 I started to read as I'm the person that needs to come up with the way to describe these shows to there public and to our graphic designer for posters and advertising. And while I was reading the season (out of order) it occurred to me that while there are some very different, seemingly unrelated, stories in this season, there was in fact a common theme, and that struck me while I was reading Insignificance, which deals, in part, with Albert Einstein.

As the daughter of a physics and calculus teacher, I know that Albert Einstein's last big project was to wrestle with what's become known as the Theory of Everything. Basically, Einstein realized that there are two basic theories in physics - the theory of general relativity and quantum field theory. General relativity centers on gravity and explains the behavior of very large things with very large mass, like planets, stars, galaxies and so on. Quantum theory describes non-gravitational forces like electromagnetism to impact very small, very low mass things, like atoms, molecules, sub-atomic particles, and so on. What Einstein realized what that while both things simultaneously exist in the universe - the tiny bits make up the much bigger bits - physics fails to describe HOW this is true, so Einstein believed that there is an overarching theory that unified the two theories into one giant theory.

My more liberal arts-y take on that is that everything in the universe is connected, whether we observe it or not. It occurred to me that the plays this season really illustrate this. There's some science mixed in with some humanities in this season. Einstein, Shakespeare (or as we will call his later this season, Shagsepeare), and Mamet exist at the same time on the Dragon stage this year.  We have a play about racial and sexual politics, a play about government cover ups, a play about mountain climbing, a play about damaged, creative families, a play that imagined celebrities mingling in the 1950s, and a play about artificial intelligence and repetitious Watsons in time. Because while we are all different and have different backgrounds and experiences and prejudices and desires, underneath it all we are all connected. We all live, laugh, cry, dream, and struggle. We are never alone.

As someone who once worked in big tech and now works in small theatre, I've watched the discussions in the Silicon Valley area trying to reconcile tech with art. And I honestly think that the two do go hand in hand. Science may explain HOW things happen, but art can explain the WHY and examine the human impact of technological advances. One without the other results in a stagnant society.

I think that theatre really can unify us because the stories that we tell on stage demand you to have some empathy and examine the world from someone else's perspective. Our actors literally put themselves in someone else's shoes to try to experience someone else's life and they do this boldly and bravely, live, for 16 performances. They ask you, the audience, to suspend reality for two hours to come on this journey with them and share this amazing experience with them. Theatre is actually a participatory event that absolutely includes you, the audience, at every show.

David Mamet's play Race opened a few days ago and already we've received a good deal of feedback from audiences that they're spending lots of time thinking about and discussing the play because it brought up some tricky feelings and thoughts about race, justice, and sexual politics in America. More than a few people have remarked that this is the perfect time to watch and reflect on such a play. Sparking conversation and personal reflection is absolutely the reason why we wanted to help Pat Caulfield get this show produced as a part of our 2nd Stages Series. I couldn't be more thrilled to hear that this little show, with only four actors, is really making people stop and think. Reactions like this are why we do what we do, so THANK YOU for coming out and experiencing this piece of theatre with us.

Like local boy Steve Jobs said, “[it]’s technology married with liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the result that makes our hearts sing.” We're all in this together!

--Kimberly Wadycki
Managing Director, Dragon Productions Theatre