The Mavericks

I had the wonderful opportunity today to read Shakespeare's "Hamlet" aloud with about 15 other thespians.

It was incredible.

We (and a handful of others) want to organize a new theatre group in our community. Dedicated purely to performing bare bones, thought-provoking, depressing-ending plays, we are hoping to change the face of theatre in our community. No Oklahoma! or Annie for us.

Instead, we'll delve into the biggies. O'Neill. Ibsen. Stuff that kids are forced to read in college but which they normally cannot hope to understand until they have more life experiences... or see it performed well by actors who care about the words more than they care about set designs, costumes, or, dare I say it, box office figures.

We want to bring raw, scarred, imperfectly perfect theatre alive.

Will our plan work? We have no clue.

But it doesn't matter.

We're not beautiful. We're not model-material. But we're dang good actors. And we just want to present some plays that few people have the opportunity to see without heading to a big city or renting a DVD.

Wish our band of mavericks good fortune as we set off on this rocky, wild journey.