A Viable Caffeine Substitute

We found out this morning that we are discouraged from taking coffee out of the dining hall, and from entering the dining hall outside of mealtime. So how are we supposed to function with such limited access to coffee? I’m used to knocking back several cups of black coffee from roughly 7:30 – 10 a.m. each morning. This isn’t one of those cult-inspired brainwashing techniques, is it? ;-)

From listening to our keynote address this morning, a good supplement (if not substitute) for morning caffeine is Mark Valdez. In 2005 I was a Fellow in the National Endowment of the Arts Institute for Theater Critics, and Ben Cameron at the time still with the TCG, spoke with us one morning. Ben is a great evangelist for theater, articulating the challenges the art form faces while firing up the crowd to meet those challenges. (Several people at lunch were talking about Ben’s gifts as a motivational speaker,)

Mark proves comparably gifted, and may even have a more infectious enthusiasm and sense of good cheer. Mark quoted Ben Cameron by saying “It’s no longer quality, it’s value of the arts” that is it’s crucial thing in America right now. He evoked Thomas Friedman’s book ‘The World is Flat’ and compared the current state of the arts to the state of global economics, that it’s shifting to “something wilder, something more energizing and infinitely more satisfying to the individual participants.” And in raising the question “What does it mean to be an artist in a time of war?” he found an answer in a lyric from Jonathan Larson’s ‘Rent’: “The opposite of war is not peace, it’s creation.”

A refrain in Mark’s address was the impulse and desire to change the world for the better. As “the research and development wing of American theater,” ensemble theaters are at the point of both finding new forms of theatrical language and engaging with the community in new ways. We’ll put the full text of Mark’s address on-line, but I’ll say this: it cleared out the cobwebs as good as any cup of coffee.

Curt