Artistic Director

Thoughts and Musings...

“In dreams begin responsibility”

                  W.B Yeats

What are our responsibilities as artists?   It is easy to be embarrassed by pretentious pronouncements extolling the artist’s sacred mission to discover some profound truth that escapes the more pedestrian denizens of our planet.  Yet – in our hearts we fervently believe that in pursuit of our artistic passion we can reveal something real and just and pure.   Our contemporary world is awash in lies, distortions and deceptions.  Politicians and the bureaucrats fill the airwaves with self-serving bromides.   Through their greedy manipulation of the world financial systems, wealthy plutocrats shatter our faith in economic veracity.   Yet, we persevere in our search for truth. 

We spend our lives in pursuit of this quest.   Yet truth in art is illusive.  The dream of a better world we strive to create is ephemeral.   In his brilliant and scathing acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize, celebrated British playwright, Harold Pinter, delineates the evanescent fragile veracity of theatrical art:

Truth in drama is forever elusive. You never quite find it but the search for it is compulsive. The search is clearly what drives the endeavor. The search is your task. More often than not you stumble upon the truth in the dark, colliding with it or just glimpsing an image or a shape which seems to correspond to the truth, often without realizing that you have done so. But the real truth is that there never is any such thing as one truth to be found in dramatic art. There are many. These truths challenge each other, recoil from each other, reflect each other, ignore each other, tease each other, are blind to each other. Sometimes you feel you have the truth of a moment in your hand, then it slips through your fingers and is lost.

Clearly, for Pinter it is the act of searching for the truth that provides theatre with its objective and its value.   We must keep trying to articulate, to dramatize, to explore our truth.   We never arrive, but must not cease exploring.

This need tirelessly to pursue provides the cornerstone for our efforts as theatre artists and teachers.   It is the secret key to comprehending our responsibility.  As we create each new piece of art we embark on a fresh and frightening journey.   We understand the general direction; know our destination – but cannot ever be sure that we will arrive at our truth.   We seek to expose all the lies, the evasions, the malfeasance and corruption we perceive in the mundane world outside of our sacred theatrical space – but we are never certain whether what we create possesses veracity, purity or integrity.  We reveal our deepest secrets, explore our shames and aspire to formulate something new and authentic and good.  But will we reach our goal?  Ultimately it does not matter, because it is this state of uncertainty, this lack of definite boundaries, this condition of liminal insecurity that gives art its power and worth.

Each time we turn on the television we are confronted with a quagmire of chaos and corruption.   We recoil at the sickening sight of seabirds gasping in oil soaked oceans; of young soldiers dying in an endless war we cannot comprehend; of hate filled faces spewing forth vile racist rhetoric at town hall meetings.  We long to turn away from the world and hide in the cloistered tranquility of our ivory tower.   But, as artists and teachers we cannot and must not retreat.   As Pinter insists:  “…the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot.” We must probe and question; reflect, comment and dream.   We must be society’s conscience and its beacon.  Our plays this season delve and investigate and explore.  From reimagining Clifford Odets’ classic American angst of the depression, to sharing the emotional turmoil of Strindberg’s tempestuous entanglements; through delighting in Mac Wellman’s fanciful language to contrasting the truth of science and art, Cal Rep embarks on a thrilling and always perilous journey.  As Pinter warned, we may only occasionally glimpse at truth, but it is in the journey that we find our worth.  

Please join us on our voyage of discovery.

Joanne Gordon

Artist need to tell the truth faced in  world of prevarication.