Mission

THE ARTISTIC STATEMENT

Our theater is dedicated to presenting theater as an art form. The plays chosen for production engage our audiences in an aesthetic and philosophical examination of the complexities of contemporary life. We believe that a fine performance of a fantastic play is one of the most rewarding and climactic experiences our culture can provide.

We search for plays, as well as new adaptations and translations to which creative visual and musical techniques add another dimension, allowing each play to evolve beyond the confines of immediate verbal meaning into the world of metaphor and poetic vision. In the effort to react imaginatively to current events, our productions often acquire subtle connections to current political and social issues. However, we intend our work to be politically evocative rather than provocative. We favor plays in which a political message cannot be reduced to the style of newspaper headlines. Our intentions are best served when a play's concerns burrow into the audience's mind, where they gestate and resonate long after the angry polemics of some traditional political theater may have faded.

In order to create a distinct impression on our audience, over-stimulated as it is by the thrills of the electronic media, we focus on the fundamental means of theatrical expression. During the encounter between audience and actors, we strive to create an atmosphere of intimacy with the author's and actors' imagination which transports the audience into states of mind rather than realistic locales. In addition, the theater space is designed to evoke a trusting, intimate atmosphere in which the audience feels inspired to share the most joyful and painful experiences of life.

Our style of staging is often characterized by a compelling succession of ever-changing images, created scenically as well as through the choreography of actors. These images aim at heightening the inner emotional realities of characters. The new found rhythm of the stage -- depicting locations, dreams, memories, etc. -- allows us to reflect our age in its own style: the style of spiritual velocity and surprise of the senses.

We regard our style of theater as a synthesis of many artistic disciplines. We consider the playwright's work to be the foundation for our collaboration, enhanced by other artistic disciplines, especially music, acting, visual arts, and choreography. Our creativity focuses on finding unexpected connections among these disciplines to illuminate the essence of a story. The collaborative process is a vital aspect of our play development. We see it as our responsibility to create an artistic home in which artists feel free to experiment, even to fail. Our commitment to original plays is reflected in discovering new writers. However, the process doesn't stop with a one-time production. We believe in developing long-term relationships between our theater and new authors, living both abroad and in the U.S., which leads to our commissioning of new plays, translations, and adaptations.

Our experience of having lived and produced theater in both Eastern and Western Europe enables us to bring to our audience a variety of plays which, despite different themes, share a strong concern with the basic questions of man's existence and deal with those questions in a poignant, contemporary theatrical idiom.

MISSION

The Wilma Theater exists to present theater as an art form, engaging artists and audiences in an adventure of aesthetic philosophical reflection of the complexities of contemporary life. We accomplish our mission by producing thoughtful, well-crafted, productions of intelligent, daring plays that represent a range of voices, viewpoints, and production styles.