Whose story belongs on a stage?
It’s a question anyone who does what I do for a living wrestles with on the regular. And truthfully, it’s not really a wrestling match because the answer is obvious: everyone’s. The struggle comes with the how of that giant aperture.
There’s a notion that all good theater provides both a window and a mirror for everyone in its audience. A window through which to watch a life other than one’s own, and hopefully to come to some fuller understanding that bridges a difference. A mirror by which one sees one’s own story and is therefore reassured that, “Yes. Yes, I am wanted in this place and seen in this place.”
Hopefully, in every story we tell and in every audience that comes to spend time with us, there’s a wildly diverse stew of windows and mirrors. And the respective vantage points of the audience ought to be just as richly complex.
The young women that Phanésia Pharel brings to vivid life in this play haven’t walked on our stage in a long minute. And in their codes of social conduct, their commitment to family, friends and friends as chosen family, they have a great deal to teach us.
They, as windows to a world maybe we don’t know, hold the promise of making us bigger. Richer. But they are also mirrors for some audience members who may be joining us right now as you read this. And as all of us breathe together, laugh together and catch our breaths together, we are in the midst of the best stew of all.
Welcome.
Susan V. Booth
Walter Artistic Director
