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I can't wait until it stops being fashionable to hate whatever production you just went and saw, and hate people and entertainment that you think you get to call 'high minded' just because it used words that are longer than a couple syllables and maybe is smarter than you.

I am having this problem currently with my classmates in London and, well, NBC. If you have a legitimate reason for not liking a production, fine. But don't pull something out of your ass because you want to stir the pot and be CONTROVERSIAL!!1! That's just stupid and makes you look pretentious. To disdain something because it's above you is not what art is about. Art is about lifting up. Art is about aspiration. Art is about wanting to be something besides a complicated machinery of muscle, bones, organs, and a mind, about wanting to be more than you are.

To say, "People wouldn't say that" is to dismiss the characters and not consider them at all. A dockworker with an eighth grade education isn't going to quote Sappho to his wife in a very tense moment of suspended lust and uncertainty. A Cambridge professor whose wife is a Classics professor is going to. Disney would not have produced Coram Boy. Disney would not have touched Coram Boy with a ten foot pole. If Disney even comes back up in discussion tomorrow I'm going to scream.

I have never seen a production that I have felt this strongly about. lostlikealice called me a fangirl, and I'm not denying it. This production has stirred up a passion for theatre that I periodically think that I lose. I didn't even feel like this about Gypsy, when I had put as much of my heart and soul into that production as anyone else had and we were 1000% committed to the process. When we had a phenomenal opening night and everything after that ran smoothly, I was elated. I (we) had done something awesome. I got to share with the audience, and this time, everyone involved in Coram Boy was 1000% committed to the process, and I was blessed enough to be able to have them shared that.

I do love theatre. In Coram Boy, Alexander Ashbrook is not going to be allowed back to the choir school to work with music and he is destroyed because his father believes musicians are little better than servants and his heir is destined for better things. When Melissa shows him the last virginal on the estate and then it is broken, and no more music to keep him sane is left on the estate, he runs away. He is broken by the thought that he would never get to do music again. If I were told that I could never do theatre again, I would be the same. I love what theatre can do. I want to think that there was someone in that 1000+ person audience who was as deeply affected by that play as I was. If I could never do theatre again... why would I even bother?

I love theatre, but if these are the people that I'm going to have to deal with for the rest of a life in theatre, I'm not sure that it's worth it. If one day, too, I am going to stop finding joy in the theatre and will only see cliches and things that have been used and done and never find anything wonderful again, I don't think I can continue. I know I can't. I would rather never go to a theatre again than become one of those people.

I'm sitting here near tears and I have to go to another theatre performance tonight, this time in a small theatre (50 or so people) above a pub in Greenwich. I might be near tears because I'm stressed (one paragraph of a 1000 word essay due tomorrow) and tired and emotionally overwrought from Coram Boy, but god damnit. I have never felt this way about anything I've seen or done before and if they can do it, why can't I?

ETA: Going to see it again Friday.