Our Grandiose Manifesto

     All theatre, like all art of any form, has one of two possible objectives: aesthetics or anesthetics.
     The vast majority of theatres today are designed to anesthetize. They perform plays that celebrate complacency and complicity. They provide their patrons with polite diversion, with an excuse to dress up and drink up, they help the privileged classes maintain the illusion that they are "cultured." Unsurprisingly, the Establishment finds oceans of funding for THESE types of theatres.
     But some of us believe that theatre can serve a higher purpose than simply amusing the affluent elite. Some of us believe it is theatre's duty not to lull people to sleep, but to wake them up; not to leave audiences feeling everything is "hunky dory," but to raise awareness, provoke, challenge, empower, incense, inspire, and even agitate!
     We at Subversive Theatre undertake to build a PEOPLES THEATRE . . . a theatre of aesthetics that is not beholden to corporate paymasters, but exclusively dedicated to the needs, concerns, and aspirations of those who are oppressed, exploited, and dis-enfranchised by the existing social order . . . a theatre that is not just a talkshop for abstract ideas, but a catalyst for action working directly with local, national, and international activist campaigns . . . a theatre that endorses no one political doctrine, but embraces the wide spectrum of the activist movement.
     The privileged classes are well aware that the pen can be mightier than the sword. For that reason they have flooded the world's stages with THEIR stories and cut the rest of us off from our own. Subversive Theatre commits itself entirely to presenting plays that tell the Peoples' stories -- both the classics of the past as well as the new emerging radical works of the present. In this way, we hope to help keep the august tradition of American protest theatre alive and kicking in the modern world.

Kurt Schneiderman
Subversive Theatre's Founder & Artistic Director