New Line Theatre Seeks Participants for Political Theatre Festival

New Line Theatre is organizing the third St. Louis Political Theatre Festival, running this fall, leading up to the 2012 Presidential election, and New Line has issued a call for participating companies.

 

In 2006, nine local companies produced eleven shows for the first Festival, and in 2008, twelve local companies presented fourteen shows, several of them St. Louis premieres, for the second Festival. The 2012 Festival will run from September through early November, in venues all over the St. Louis metro area (like a smaller version of the world-famous Edinburgh Fringe Festival), bringing the most important issues of the day to the stages of St. Louis. These shows will challenge audiences to think about and get involved in the great struggles of our times and our country, as we find ourselves in the middle of yet another of the most crucial Presidential elections in our lifetimes.

 

More info on the past Festivals is online at http://www.newlinetheatre.com/stlptf.html

 

To participate in the Festival, companies in the St. Louis metro region just need to contact New Line Theatre atinfo@newlinetheatre.com. Shows in the Festival can be overtly political or more subtextual. Political issues can be the focus of the shows or merely the context or background. New Line Theatre will present the fiercely political, Broadway rock musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson as part of the Festival.

The St. Louis Political Theatre Festival was created for two reasons. First, to remind people that theatre addresses with enormous power the biggest issues of our times, better than any other art form, by personalizing those issues in the bodies of live actors. Second, to remind St. Louisans of the importance of being engaged in our government "of the people, by the people, and for the people." The stage has forever been a place where political issues have been examined and challenged. After all, democracy and theatre were born in the same place and even in the same decade! The ritualistic and social significance of the earliest Greek performances in central arenas brought relevance to many controversial topics -- war, politics, sex, religion. We do the same today.

 

Throughout history, the times of greatest tumult are also the times of the greatest theatre -- in America in the 1930s and in the 1960s and 70s, but also in Elizabethan England and modern day Iraq. We believe that America in the new millennium is one such place and time. Back during the height of the Depression, the American theatre became increasingly, intensely political, with shows like Waiting for Lefty, The Cradle Will Rock, Power, Awake and Sing!, One Third of a Nation, It Can't Happen Here, Of Thee I Sing, Let ‘Em Eat Cake, Pins and Needles, and many others. Once America entered World War II, rabid patriotism overpowered political dissent, and political theatre faded away. But when the 60s arrived with renewed political and social unrest, the theatre returned to fiercely political drama and satire, with shows like Hair, Viet Rock, Cabaret, McBird, US, Tom Paine, Futz, and many others. Now, political theatre is back again, and it's more adventurous and fiercer than ever.