A letter from the Artistic Director
Dear friend of the Next,
I know the lazy days of summer are coming to a close when we gear up for first rehearsal here at Next Theatre Company. And though I’ll miss the easier pace, I look forward to the start of the cultural season, and four more chances to bring you the best that contemporary theater has to offer, starting with Keith Bunin’s extraordinary play The Busy World Is Hushed in September.
I’ve just finished rereading the play for first rehearsal, and I’m a little spent. You know how sometimes you read a sentence in a book, or a verse in a poem and those tingles shoot up the back of your neck and into your scalp? Well, it’s happened four or five times on this reading of the play. That’s why I’m so excited we’re bringing it to you.
On the intellectual side, the play is a tour-de-force trialogue about the possibility of faith in our daily lives, fear of intimacy, and the challenges of grief and change. Thomas, a wayward young man in search of clues to his father’s death, comes home to his mother Hannah, an Episcopal Minister with a wonderfully open approach to faith and God. Hannah has just hired Brandt, a young writer, to help ghostwrite her book on the Gnostic Gospels. Thomas and his mother have grave disagreements about the origins of faith, and Brandt becomes their de facto negotiator. When Thomas and Brandt fall in love, the sparks really begin to fly – though not in the ways you might expect.
But I doubt your primary experience of Busy World will be an intellectual one. What brings the shivers is how beautiful, smart, and complicated this love story is. The love between mother and son, between sons and departed fathers, between teacher and student, and finally between two lovers… Bunin’s achievement here is balancing a world of relationships on an achingly intimate scale. And he manages to tell his story with such wit, such warmth, such generosity of spirit and love for his characters that it makes one, even reading it, catch the breath and feel the presence of truth.
Bart Sher, the Artistic Director of the INTIMAN Theatre in Seattle (and director of The Light in the Piazza) told me this last month: “I have to believe that theater has the possibility of offering transcendence to its audience; film and television provide escape, and that’s a different commodity… Americans are always searching for artistic experiences – they just don’t know it. So we have to let them know that the unique opportunity for transcendence we offer is more rewarding, more engaging, than escape.” That’s why we’ve begun our 27th season at Next with Keith Bunin’s beautiful play. I hope it touches your heart the way it does mine, and kicks off another remarkable season together with a moment of transcendence.