What I Love About Theater — Something One Cannot Get With Movies — Is The Singularity Of The Experience

What I love about theater — something one cannot get with movies — is the singularity of the experience and the absence of a final product. The "same" play can never be performed twice. Even if the actors follow the script word for word, letter by letter — even if they enter and exit the stage at precisely the same moment as before — a single breath taken differently will alter the performance.

And what about the audience? You can’t expect to have the same audience for different performances of the "same" play, and you certainly can’t expect everyone to behave exactly as they did in a previous one. A cough, a whisper, or even the disruptive ring of a phone — all of these ripple through the space, shaping not only the audience’s experience, but also the actors’ performance itself. The theater is an exchange, a living, breathing dialogue between those who perform and those who witness. As such, even if you watch the “same” play five times, you are, in truth, watching five distinct performances — five unique creations that will never exist again.

This singularity is not the only wonder of theater. There is also its lack of a fixed, final product. Each play leaves an impression, an aftertaste, a mark, so to speak, on the spectator, but that’s all you are left with. With cinema, the final product is the movie. With theater, there is no such thing. With plays, every minute is the product of itself. Its finality lies in its continuity.

Of course, some might argue that this notion collapses once a performance is recorded. But trying to record a theatrical performance is a futile pursuit; it’s like attempting to capture the moon and its light with an average phone camera. The essence slips through your grasp. The beauty of theater is that every second counts. There is no final creation because each second is a creation, constantly metamorphosing into the next, and the next, until the whole experience dissolves into memory, an aftertaste, a mark. The beauty of theater lies in its immediacy. Every second matters, for every second is a creation in its own right, an act of becoming that dissolves as it unfolds. In this way, theater mirrors life itself.

Both theater and life resist finality. Their "product" is their continuity. This is why theater so often serves as a metaphor for life. Both in theater and in life, every second matters because, at the end of it all, there is no final product. In the end, all that remains is a memory, an aftertaste, a mark left on those we have touched.

Man, don’t I love theater!

musings on theater

Hope has dirt under her fingernails

Hope has dirt under her fingernails. Her broken foot trembles beneath her as she stands up, reading herself for another punch.

Faith clutches the rim of the sink, breath fogging up the mirror. Then she takes her meds and closes the door behind her.

Perseverance hands bribes to cops and takes the first cleaning job she gets, eyes averted as she gets slapped for tardiness.

Selflessness shivers on her bedroom floor, the memory of loosing a patient on the operation table replaying behind her eyelids again.

Love sits in the visitors hall of the hospital, waiting to replace the wilted flowers beside the coma patient.

Passion only leaves the house to go to therapy, the world too painful to look at for long.

Strength looks at the others and decides to make a home in their hearts.

25 ways to be a little more punk in 2025

Cut fast fashion - buy used, learn to mend and/or make your own clothes, buy fewer clothes less often so you can save up for ethically made quality

Cancel subscriptions - relearn how to pirate media, spend $10/month buying a digital album from a small artist instead of on Spotify, stream on free services since the paid ones make you watch ads anyway

Green your community - there's lots of ways to do this, like seedbombing or joining a community garden or organizing neighborhood trash pickups

Be kind - stop to give directions, check on stopped cars, smile at kids, let people cut you in line, offer to get stuff off the high shelf, hold the door, ask people if they're okay

Intervene - learn bystander intervention techniques and be prepared to use them, even if it feels awkward

Get closer to your food - grow it yourself, can and preserve it, buy from a farmstand, learn where it's from, go fishing, make it from scratch, learn a new ingredient

Use opensource software - try LibreOffice, try Reaper, learn Linux, use a free Photoshop clone. The next time an app tries to force you to pay, look to see if there's an opensource alternative

Make less trash - start a compost, be mindful of packaging, find another use for that plastic, make it a challenge for yourself!

Get involved in local politics - show up at meetings for city council, the zoning commission, the park district, school boards; fight the NIMBYs that always show up and force them to focus on the things impacting the most vulnerable folks in your community

DIY > fashion - shake off the obsession with pristine presentation that you've been taught! Cut your own hair, use homemade cosmetics, exchange mani/pedis with friends, make your own jewelry, duct tape those broken headphones!

Ditch Google - Chromium browsers (which is almost all of them) are now bloated spyware, and Google search sucks now, so why not finally make the jump to Firefox and another search like DuckDuckGo? Or put the Wikipedia app on your phone and look things up there?

Forage - learn about local edible plants and how to safely and sustainably harvest them or go find fruit trees and such accessible to the public.

Volunteer - every week tutoring at the library or once a month at the humane society or twice a year serving food at the soup kitchen, you can find something that matches your availability

Help your neighbors - which means you have to meet them first and find out how you can help (including your unhoused neighbors), like elderly or disabled folks that might need help with yardwork or who that escape artist dog belongs to or whether the police have been hassling people sleeping rough

Fix stuff - the next time something breaks (a small appliance, an electronic, a piece of furniture, etc.), see if you can figure out what's wrong with it, if there are tutorials on fixing it, or if you can order a replacement part from the manufacturer instead of trashing the whole thing

Mix up your transit - find out what's walkable, try biking instead of driving, try public transit and complain to the city if it sucks, take a train instead of a plane, start a carpool at work

Engage in the arts - go see a local play, check out an art gallery or a small museum, buy art from the farmer's market

Go to the library - to check out a book or a movie or a CD, to use the computers or the printer, to find out if they have other weird rentals like a seed library or luggage, to use meeting space, to file your taxes, to take a class, to ask question

Listen local - see what's happening at local music venues or other events where local musicians will be performing, stop for buskers, find a favorite artist, and support them

Buy local - it's less convenient than online shopping or going to a big box store that sells everything, but try buying what you can from small local shops in your area

Become unmarketable - there are a lot of ways you can disrupt your online marketing surveillance, including buying less, using decoy emails, deleting or removing permissions from apps that spy on you, checking your privacy settings, not clicking advertising links, and...

Use cash - go to the bank and take out cash instead of using your credit card or e-payment for everything! It's better on small businesses and it's untraceable

Give what you can - as capitalism churns on, normal shmucks have less and less, so think about what you can give (time, money, skills, space, stuff) and how it will make the most impact

Talk about wages - with your coworkers, with your friends, while unionizing! Stop thinking about wages as a measure of your worth and talk about whether or not the bosses are paying fairly for the labor they receive

Think about wealthflow - there are a thousand little mechanisms that corporations and billionaires use to capture wealth from the lower class: fees for transactions, interest, vendor platforms, subscriptions, and more. Start thinking about where your money goes, how and where it's getting captured and removed from our class, and where you have the ability to cut off the flow and pass cash directly to your fellow working class people

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libraryidealist

1 year ago

thank god or the universe or whatever for cycles and seasons though like yeah life right now is unbearable. but every two years the olympics come around again, and every december i have christmas and every year there is an autumn where leaves change and fall and the air is crisp. every year has a halloween, and a national pie day, and my cat's birthday, and national star wars day, and the arbitrary date in february when my family watches the princess bride together, and every fall i watch over the garden wall. next year i'll see my second total solar eclipse. there will be new tomatoes next summer and fresh applesauce the season after that. the sun will come back even when march seems like it will never end. don't go yet. it will be your day off soon. the olympics are next year. it'll be someone's birthday soon. everything changes and everything will come back around again, if you stick around to let it.

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libraryidealist

1 month ago

Finally the world is beginning
to change, its fevers mounting,
its leaves unfolding.

And the mockingbirds find
ample reason and breath to fashion
new songs. They do. You can
count on it.

As for lovers, they are discovering
new ways to love. Listen, their windows are open.
You can hear them laughing.

Without spring who knows what would happen.
A lot of nothing, I suppose.
The leaves are all in motion now
the way a young boy rows and rows

in his wooden boat, just to get anywhere.
Late, late, but now lovely and lovelier.
And the two of us, together—a part of it.

late spring by Mary Oliver

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libraryidealist

9 months ago

Ada Limón, from "The Widening Road", Sharks in the Rivers

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libraryidealist

8 months ago

James Baldwin talking about love

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libraryidealist

4 months ago

truly some people have no genre savviness whatsoever. A girl came back from the dead the other day and fresh out of the grave she laughed and laughed and lay down on the grass nearby to watch the sky, dirt still under her nails. I asked her if she’s sad about anything and she asked me why she should be. I asked her if she’s perhaps worried she’s a shadow of who she used to be and she said that if she is a shadow she is a joyous one, and anyway whoever she was she is her, now, and that’s enough. I inquired about revenge, about unfinished business, about what had filled her with the incessant need to claw her way out from beneath but she just said she’s here to live. I told her about ghosts, about zombies, tried to explain to her how her options lie between horror and tragedy but she just said if those are the stories meant for her then she’ll make another one. I said “isn’t it terribly lonely how in your triumph over death nobody was here to greet you?” and she just looked at me funny and said “what do you mean? The whole world was here, waiting”. Some people, I tell you.

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libraryidealist

8 months ago

There’s something so silly and beautiful about those Hatsune Miku pieces being made. I don’t even know who the character is or why she’s popular, but it’s so cool to see how people view their homes via this silly little trend.

Like beyond the ones where it’s cultural clothing - I saw a german one where she has pants that zip off above the knee, as germans are very practical people. A West Virginian with a NASCAR obsession. Hondurran Miku trying to survive a heat wave without electricity

Just stuff like that

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libraryidealist

8 months ago