In the past few months over on Scott Walter’s blog, he has begun posting about his vision of the new frontiers of theatre — re-imagining theatre, if you will. When I first began reading his blog, and Mr. Walters had just begun his war against the status quo, he explained repeatedly what the problems are with the current set-up of LORT theatres across the country. He identified and defined dozens of aspects of the current set-up that simply are not working. I’m not going to launch into a recap of them now (honestly, it would take far too long), but I will make an observation.

In the beginning, God said “Let there be—… wait, wrong beginning.

In the beginning, Mr. Walters did nothing but explain the problem. Several readers of his (including myself) felt he was preaching to the choir. We were already on his side, or we would not have been reading his blog. Perhaps we hadn’t fully identified all of the problems that he did for us, nor had we thought through the consequences until he pointed them out. But many readers asked Mr. Walters to slow down on the expounding of the problem and attempt to identify some solutions.

Over the past two months, more and more blogs have taken pages from Mr. Walters’ proverbial book and posted on the issues as well, identifying and further clarifying the problems. Once more, there is more discussion about the nature of the problems and less coming up with solutions.

In recent weeks, Mr. Walters has begun offering possible solutions to the problems he has identified. He refers to his philosophical ideal as a tribe — a group of people who work closely together to solve the problems they’re faced with. If you would like more information on his tribal structure, check out his blog here.

I had a different point when I began this blog, but I’ve run out of time for now. I’ll post further on the subject when I get some more free time to work.

I challenge you, readers, to identify any issues or problems that you recognize in your theatres and offer possible solutions, whether on your blogs, in my comments, or on Mr. Walters’ tribe website.

Cowboys and Indians, go!

Tags: problem solving, scott walters, theatre problems, tribe

This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 4:58 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.