Shooting Star
by
Steven Dietz

Director Scenic Design Costume Design Lighting Design Sound Design Properties Design & Set Dressing Production Stage Manager Public Relations Technical Director Set Construction Original Music Scenic Artist Production Crew Light Board Operator Sound Board Operator Stage Crew Key Art Production Photography

David Rose David Potts Dianne K. Graebner Luke Moyer Cricket S. Myers MacAndME Lisa Freed David Elzer/Demand PR Robert T. Kyle Red Colgrove Ryan Shore Chris Holmes Watson Bradshaw, Justin Kief, Christopher Rivera, Vanessa Velez Boswell Kathryn Horan Diane Travis Andrea Dean, Britin Robinson Doirean Heldt Michael Lamont

Reed McAllister Elena Carson

Kevin Symons Michelle Duffy

In my youth people told me their dreams – the great things they were going to do with their lives. These were people, in some cases, that I’ve never seen again. And the thing is: I find that I’m still holding those people to their dreams - unwilling to let them give up on what they promised me, despite the multitude of unmet expectations in my own life.

The singer/songwriter Eliza Gilkyson has a lyric that captures this perfectly: “We’re coming upon a time in our lives / when the little dream lives, but the big dream dies.”

We live in a time of “virtual reunions” - employing technology to “connect” us with the past, our history, our youth. In “SHOOTING STAR,” I wanted to write a non-virtual reunion. The real and messy kind. Where the person is standing right there and you can’t leave. And who would that person be? Someone from your past. Someone who has your secret. They have your secret because they once had your heart.

They knew you back in the day. Back when you gave your heart away so readily, so fully and foolishly. And on long, lazy mornings in cold, rented rooms - or in the candlelit quiet of long-shuttered cafes - you no doubt told this person just exactly what amazing things you were going to do with your life. You laid out your boldest plans in grandiloquent terms - and why not? You were young and in love and what in the great wide world of your own shining future could possibly stand in your way?

We wed the past to humor with good reason. Oh, how we used to dress! - and, god, our hair! - the music we listened to! - man, what were we thinking?! And with any luck, we can usually bundle up our great regrets in this same nostalgic laughter, and then happily move on.

Until we see that face. That person who has the goods on us: who knows exactly how close or far we came to making our life match our dreams. Reunions of this kind - the actual face-to-face variety - are typically built on laughter, banter, remembrance and alcohol. The one you’ll see tonight is no different.

Thanks for being here.

Oh, and it’s snowing.

Steven Dietz
Austin, TX
March, 2010



This letter appeared in a recent playbill at The Theatre @ Boston Court, and is reprinted here with their kind permission.

Dear Digital Immigrant:

That’s what you are - an immigrant to the digital age. The only true natives are those under the age of 18.

This is one of the juicy tidbits we learned from the recently concluded Theatre Communications Group annual national theatre conference, which had non-profit theatre-makers numbering over 1,100 flooding into Los Angeles. For three days we were packed into various plenary and breakout sessions to discuss the state of American theatre, the accomplishments we’ve achieved and the many challenges we face.

A number of the sessions this year focused on the proliferation of technology, and the ways this revolution impacts us as theatres. How do we use social media to market to a new generation? How does an audience that is accustomed to leisure activities "on demand" relate to an art form where a play starts at a specific time and specific location, not of the viewer’s choosing?

One of the most mind-blowing and inspiring speakers was futurist David Houle, who theorized that after thousands of years of the Agricultural Age, less than 150 years of the Industrial Age, and around 20 years of the Information Age, the world is giving way to "The Shift Age." In this new era, time seems to be moving faster, technology is evolving at a rate we can’t keep up with, and the digital revolution is changing the planet in ways we can only begin to imagine.

But in Houle’s discussions about how these changes may impact the theatre, he drew some heartening conclusions. One thing he observed is that young people - the digital natives - as they become more secluded with personal electronic devices, are craving live interaction. In fact, he notes that young people hug each other more freely and frequently now than ever, and he attributes this to the need to compensate for the physical isolation they experience in so much of their lives. He suggests that theatre can be a kind of hug for the digitally secluded, a tangible, live conversation that takes place nightly between the audience and the artists. And in an intimate theatre, there is no separation between the artist and the audience; sweat and breath are visceral and evident. Try to get that from your portable electronic devices!

We theatre-makers are devoted to both embracing the world as it shifts around us, and continuing to make the entire experience of seeing a play one that can’t be replicated digitally. One that, as Oscar Wilde (a theatremaker from the Industrial Age) said so eloquently, makes theatre "the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being."

Jessica Kubzansky & Michael Michetti
Artistic Directors, The Theatre @ Boston Court