What is it about theater ?

“Theater is, of course, a reflection of life. Maybe we have to improve life before we can hope to improve theater.”

I am a great fan of the theater. I believe that theater is art. The drama, the atmosphere , the actors ,the lights, the costumes,  the live audience everything adds to the thrill. You are right there when the performance is going on. The actors have no room for error. Its here and now.  Theater is the art of story telling, it represents an entire culture of language, costume and addresses a number of social issues.It represents the modern and the traditional. I am quite dramatic I guess but it is just the lights me thinks 🙂 .

Theater was a dying art post the introduction of television. It was funny because both of them are different mediums, theater has a richer culture than television. However television managed to seduce the audience away from the theater. It was considered down market to go to a live theater ” o you dont have a TV ? ” people would ask. When ever I went to my village I could see the folk theater dying ,the colors were fading , people refused the attend the all night recitals, the costumes were getting old, it was a sad decline. Theater was a career option which was slowly forbidden in the face of a career in logic. It was the murder of expression and joy. But people needed to eat and it was not a viable career option. It was the opposite in the west, funnily it was considered that a person has truly arrived if he went to watch a live theater/ opera / ballet performance.

Now there is a surge of revival, there are chic live theaters in every city. New theater groups are coming up, theater classes / acting classes are being offered. There is a definite effort made to revive a dying art form. It is now considered fashionable to attend live theater and dissect it later. Reviews are being written, new forms are coming up , new actors are being talked about, scripts are being refined, in short it is improving. It is considered as a career option maybe not enthusiastically by the older generation but they still accept that it is not a bad option. It also helps that the tickets are being sold at a premium, there is a first show, there are full shows. People are queuing up ! Its almost exclusive now that’s the draw me thinks.

The upwardly mobile as we are called now, are interested in new things. We want to be able to hold a conversation ,we want to appear interesting and theater is the new topic now. It is fun, it is now and it is something anyone can relate to. We also form opinions about actors in theater, the opinion is carried over if we see actors on the big screen. Its as if  a stamp of approval to the actor, that he/she can really act. Now the halls are jam packed , people want to see this form of entertainment.