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"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts…"
—As You Like It (II, vii, 139-142)

Once upon a time in a far away place called Seattle, the central nervous system of a large computer-operated office building went berserk. For reasons never fully understood or explained, the computer commanded that a sudden tremendous surge of water be propelled throughout the building's plumbing network.

When under intense pressure water behaves as humans do and seeks the path of least resistance and easiest outlet. So it came to pass that during business hours of an ordinary day in a nondescript skyscraper in Seattle—an explosive geyser of water shot out of every toilet.

No one died or was seriously injured. But if you were using or even near one of those toilets, what happened was traumatic. If you were a fireman arriving ten minutes later, the chaos of exploded porcelain and drenched, stunned, but physically uninjured office workers, was tragicomic. And if you were reading of the event the next day in the Seattle Times, what happened was hilarious.

It has often been noted that in comedy, timing is everything. It has also been noted that both comedy and tragedy share the mantra of retail and real estate, "Location. Location. Location." To wit, when you see a passerby slip on a banana peel, it's comedy. When you slip on a banana peel, it's tragedy.

In a way, live theatre is all around us. We are all of us performing artists, and graduations, bat mitzvahs, courtrooms, confession booths, football fields, job interviews and tussled beds with clothes strewn across the floor at 3am are some of the stages we strut and play upon.

I know this guy who got married on the Brooklyn Bridge. He likes to tell the story of standing beside his radiantly white-gowned bride, before the serious black-robed judge, with a hundred people of the wedding party circled around them beneath the Gothic-cathedral-like stone arch of the Manhattan-side tower. There, on the elevated wood promenade above the roadway, with the great city for background, on a glorious late-summer day, he was about to be married. Just ten feet below, the cars on the roadway were bumper to bumper, barely moving, engines idling quietly. Drivers stared up at the about-to-begin wedding ceremony as the gathered people quieted and the judge took a deep breath—and every person, animal and machine in the city—seemed to pause and take a breath along with the judge. It was a once-in-a-lifetime moment of near-silence in the teeming megalopolis.

But Nature abhors a vacuum. And so in that startling moment of silence during the staged performance of this guy's wedding on the Brooklyn Bridge, some other guy in one of the cars below was compelled to ad lib, "Don't do it!"

Because humans are creatures of volition, a live performance is never under anyone's control. This is why the big job in theatre is called Director, and not Controller.

In live theatre, when the lights dim down to darkness and the audience murmurs quieter and quieter, there comes a singular, still, fleeting moment right before the play begins, when everyone in the theatre—onstage, backstage and in the audience—takes a collective breath of anticipation.

Last year I attended a performance by the Lamb's Players Theatre of the musical 1776. As the house lights dimmed, the introductory music of fife and drum marches built in a martial crescendo—then suddenly the music stopped and the house went completely dark. In that instant everyone in the audience took a deep breath in anticipation—and some guy in the acoustically poised auditorium loudly farted.

Even as that fart reverberated in the dark theatre—the stage was flooded with bright light and a man in costume pretending to be John Adams—Revolutionary, Founding Father, and loving husband—began singing of longing for his wife Abigail. In theatre, as in life, The Show Must Go On. There are no do-overs, no edits, no revisions, no forty-three takes. When you screw up—and you will—you either die in agony on stage—or find some way to keep going forward.

We live in strange times. We are surrounded by a wealth of art and expression—and almost all of it is prepackaged, recorded, detached. Take music. What once was a participatory, out-of-the-ordinary enjoyment shared by gathered people has become detached from collective experience. We shop alone to music, we hold the phone alone to music, and we wait alone for our doctors and dentists to music. We wear headphones.

Take movies.  We are entertained by watching recorded images projected on flat surfaces while listening to recorded voices, music and sound effects. There are no mistakes; everything, everyone, is perfect.

Take television shows, please. When watching recorded shows on television we are incessantly cued with recorded laughter and have our imaginations—which are struggling to do the work of keeping the narrative dream unbroken—deliberately disordered by commercial interruptions commanding us to want things, to envy people we don't know, and to buy stuff.

In such a world as this, what could be more radically subversive than for people to freely assemble at a specific time and in a specific place? What could be stranger than, once gathered there, everyone agreeing to be still, quiet and concentrated for hours while bearing witness as other people get up on a stage and make sublime fools of themselves?

Theatre remains the final refuge of the defiantly original. When you go to the theatre, the people all around you, whether they are on stage, back stage, or in the audience, have something in common. They are seeking an unrecorded, unfiltered, three-dimensional, real-time, high-risk expression of what it is to be alive—here—and now—aware of all that has come before, yet not knowing what will happen in the next breath.

So kill your television. Go to a play. Take a deep breath, and be alive.

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