Scene4 Magazine | the readers blog

Nathan Thomas article brought the words "community theater" into a more enlightened context than the one usually associated with the words "community" and "theater". His broadening of the scope of community, suggests a broader landscape for theater artists to work with. In the August, 2007 issue of Scene4, titled "Homeown Grown Theater", I wrote about the efforts of the 4TH Line Theater in a Canadian rural community, developing stories that frequently leap frog over parochial concerns, into a shared and cognizant sense of the overall human community. For the most part, Community theatre in the United States simply copies what has succeeded elsewhere in order to appear up to date and "professional" with the right kind of recipe. I am not talking about merely exploring the "experimental" aspects of theater; that has been done to death and has limited appeal. I am talking about rediscovering community theatre from the ground floor up, where the real demand for a fresh approach needs to succeed.
Ned Bobkoff
read Nathan Thomas' article