"All the World's a Stage..." Getting to "...And Beyond."

Serious thinkers often have one or two core ideas they remix for their lifetime. A singular event, a phrase, or an obsession becomes their intellectual leitmotif.

This explains why Slavoj Žižek recycles the same six jokes, Michel Foucault sees prisons everywhere, and David Brooks is always (always) wrong. Socrates professed ignorance over any form of wisdom. Freud fixated on sex and cocaine. Even heterodox thinkers like Giorgio Tsoukalos, who ranges far and wide, will do naught more than "ask questions." This isn’t part of postmodernism; it’s timeless. And it doesn’t stop these thinkers from writing book after book.

I was introduced to my steering idea in an acting workshop. A Juilliard student, discussing open-mindedness, script analysis, and acting choices, exclaimed, “The director will give us our choices!” They didn’t mean collaboration, they meant submission. Despite elite training, they were eager to become a product, hoping for a job in return. Do as you're told, and you'll continue to be hired. I see this attitude often: young actors reducing themselves, commodifying their artistry and themselves. Many, before their first audition, ask, “What should my stage name be?” before even discovering who they are. The more I looked, the more I saw: a rush toward commodification, coupled with shrinking confidence and risk aversion.

This isn’t happening in a vacuum. It’s shaped by a culture steeped in precarious late-stage capitalism and technological fetishism. Dr. Olga Chtiguel, designer and historian, noted that the intellectual, political, and philosophical winds of a place and time blow through the theatre. She was right. To continue meaningful dramaturgy, I had to become a cultural meteorologist, expanding my inquiry into philosophy, technology, embodiment, theology, and, yes, even politics. Too much that was happening beyond the stage door had been ignored for too long.

My previous blog, The Savannah Dramaturgy, reviewed local productions when no major media outlet in the city covered theatre. When I moved to North Carolina, with fewer productions to review, I shifted focus. Now, The Friendly Neighborhood Dramaturg… and Then Some expands my scope while staying rooted in dramaturgy and theatre. I plan to drag big questions through the stage door and put them under the lights. This will mean interrogating topics ranging far from the theatre, as this art form in and of itself is of diminishing relevance to our increasingly digitized, globalized, and fractured society.

Yet at heart, I’m still your Friendly Neighborhood Dramaturg. I still examine our culture through the stories we tell and the meaning they create. If all the world’s a stage, we need a good dramaturg, because in this foul decade, we’ve lost the plot.

So, I invite you along. Read, discuss, and share what resonates. Ask questions, please. I’m used to screaming into the void, but it’s getting lonely. If you’d like to support this work, subscribe. There are perks. If not, just stay open. See you around, and see you onstage.