As audience members, most people only experience theatre between curtain up and curtain down. They buy their tickets, they go to the restroom, they find their seats, they flip idly through the playbills, they dutifully unwrap their suckies before showtime, and then the curtain goes up, they dutifully laugh, they dutifully cry, they dutifully rage, and then the curtain goes down, they dutifully applaud, and then they leave.
Still with me? Run-on sentences aside, there are a few things wrong with the idea espoused above.
First and foremost, Cabaret Theatre doesn’t have a curtain. So there goes that whole thing.
Second, this idea of dutifully doing anything. Theatre is meant to be interactive and engaging. It is meant to question and push and move. Theatre is, moreso than any other art form, a communal experiment in meaning-making.
At Cabaret, we want to engage our audience and our community in new and exciting aways. This means outside of the Black Box. We literally want to think outside the box.
Exactly the kind of hipster crap people often associate with theatre kids.
Which is why we’re here on the digital interwebs, the blogosphere, the great beyond. We want to give you access to the actual workings of Cabaret Theatre, moving past just the 2 hours between curtains, but into the rehearsal period, the production period, set builds, auditions, pre-production planning, and into our very brains and the synapstastic conversions that turn ideas into actuality.
Expect videos and pictures and musings from Cabaret staff–actors, directors, writers, producers, peons–that provide a fuller understanding of what it means to be Rutgers University’s original student theatre organization.
