We are living through one of the greatest revolutions in human communication in history. Almost anyone can now broadcast almost anything to thousands—or millions—of people instantaneously. We have never had more ways to express ourselves.
I’m not convinced we’ve ever been worse at actually communicating with one another.
Social media has given us extraordinary tools for connection, but it has also trained us to perform for one another, react to one another, categorize one another, and reduce each other to a sentence, a photograph, a post, a political position, or the worst thing they have ever said.
Expression and communication are not the same thing.
Neither are expression and art.
Art asks something more of us—to shape what we want to express into something another human being can enter. It requires imagination, craft, empathy, and—perhaps most importantly—the willingness to consider an experience other than our own.
That belief sits at the center of DetNY Theatrical Productions and A Killer Night Live.
We want to make theatre that entertains. Unapologetically. We want you to laugh. We want to surprise you, transport you somewhere you haven’t been before, and remind you of what human imagination can create.
But we also want to make theatre that brings people together.
Literally.
No matter how sophisticated our screens become or how much of our lives migrate online, there is something technology cannot replicate: being in a room with other human beings. Breathing the same air. Watching the same story. Laughing together. Becoming quiet together. Feeling the energy in a room change because something has just happened in front of all of us at exactly the same moment.
For thousands of years, human beings have gathered to tell one another stories. I don’t believe technology has made that ritual obsolete.
I think it may have made it more necessary than ever.
Maybe theatre can help lead us back toward something we are in danger of forgetting: how to be together. How to listen. How to disagree without immediately turning one another into enemies. How to become curious about the person sitting across from us. How to communicate rather than simply express.
That is the journey Kristine and I want to explore through DetNY, and A Killer Night Live is our first step.