One May, I happened to be in Jackson Hole, Wyoming because my husband was working a conference there. It happened to be the opening weekend of the summer season, so the local non-Equity theatre was opening Annie Get Your Gun. The actors had to serve dinner and dessert to the audience before the show got started. Most of the prop guns did not fire, the Indian character was definitely not ethnic, and the singing was not all that good. Yet the evening was electric—a perfect match of setting, show, and venue that left us singing all the way home—not because it was better than Broadway, but because it lifted up the crowd and energized the room in a unique and wonderful way. That was good theatre. 

I have seen good theatre in high school auditoriums where students are magnificent with The Laramie Project, or Midsummer Night’s Dream, or Little Shop of Horrors. I experienced great theatre in Budapest, where I did not understand a word of the spoken language; but the comedy was brilliantly clear, and everyone around me was convulsed with laughter, and carried me along on that wave. I have been to small theatres around the country that have no money and no cachet, and been moved to tears by the passion that surmounts reputation. I have been to gay and lesbian performances—poetry slams, drumming or dancing, or new one-act plays by writers that no one will ever take seriously in New York—and thought, “These are my people, and their joy and sense of ownership are so rightfully deserved.” I walk away thinking, “What a great evening.”

Good theatre carries the audience along, whether in a Broadway house or a basement black box. It speaks and sings, yells and screams, but ultimately digs into your soul. It can’t be codified, or dramaturged, or dissected, or reviewed accurately because it occurs in the space over our heads, and in our hearts. Recording it, analyzing it, predicting it are all impossible. It defies logic, which is why we always hunger for it.

David Zak is the executive director of Bailiwick Repertory Theatre.

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