If you’re not reading Theater for the Future, well, you should be.  Not only am I proud to call Nick Keenan who writes it a brilliant sound architect, master of technology, inspirational collaborator, and New Leaf company member, I’m perhaps most proud to call him urban family.  I can also, I think, call him a visionary (a term that his lovely wife used this evening – and it really clicked for me).  One of the things that I most admire about Nick is his capacity for big picture thinking, not just in the way I aspire to do within New Leaf (and even in my own life), but for the theatre community at large.  He’s dedicated to make things happen that will benefit all of us fighting the good fight of not-for-profit theatre in Chicago.  I want to be more like him.

It makes me realize that we all have the capacity to be agents of change.  Capital “C” Change and smaller-scale change as well.  I feel like there’s a lot of waiting in my generation: waiting for our lives to start, waiting for our dues to be paid, waiting for a phone call or an e-mail or a text message that will bring about something new and exciting and full of promise.  I heard this story on NPR about a new age bracket called “emerging adulthood.”  It basically says that everyone in the 18 to 25 range is taking their time, limping along, and putting off being grown-ups for as long as possible.  Even their parents don’t yet consider them adults. 

But it seems to me that we’re also living in incredibly impatient times.  We’re so eager for the promising future we’ve been “guaranteed” since infancy, but we’re somewhat less willing to lay the ground work that will ensure our own success.  We’re becoming increasingly self-serving, increasingly disconnected from one another – increasingly greedy and impatient.  And I wonder where we can find the community and positive change for everyone not just ourselves that, I think, is in the end the only way we’ll all survive.  Certainly the only way that we’ll be able to find anything like fulfillment.

And that’s what I love about what Nick’s doing.  He’s not waiting for someone else to create the resources he wants to utilize, he’s doing it himself.  And he’s not just creating them so that he can use them, he’s making them available to everyone.  What would happen if we each took on one thing, just one “for the greater good” positive change and made it our responsibility to bring that thing to fruition?  How much could we improve our world in a day, a month, a year?  Or even smaller than that – what’s one small thing you can do for yourself right now that will make you take a clearer, brighter, a renewed look at your life?

I saw Shining City‘s final dress reheasal at the Goodman tonight.  What a beautiful, resonant play.  What a wonderful production.  What a lovely way to remember how much I admire Bob Falls.  That play is, in some ways, also about this idea of change.  Some of the characters have change thrust upon them in a way that rang with such truth to me – some parts with a little more truth than maybe I’d like to think about.  And even though there is certainly pain and hardship and struggle in this play,  there’s also hope.  There’s the hope of making it to the other side of something awful and being stronger for it.  But we have to connect with each other.  And we have to make an effort.  We have to try.