Welcome, and thank you for leaving the house
Thank you for coming out tonight. I mean that more literally than usual. There is an extraordinary amount of the world's best storytelling available on the device in your pocket, for free, and you chose instead to drive here, park, and sit in a room with three hundred strangers.
I want to tell you what I think you came for, because it is not the story. You can get better stories at home.
What happens in this room
Here is the thing a screen cannot do. A screen is perfect every time. It is the same performance in Kathmandu as it is in Kansas. It never fluffs a line, never catches a breath wrong, never has an off night.
Tonight, eight people on this stage are going to do something genuinely dangerous. They are going to attempt something difficult, in real time, with no edit, in front of people who can see their faces. They might fail. Not tonight, hopefully — but the possibility is real, and you can feel it, and that feeling is the product.
Witnessing is not passive
When something goes wrong in a film, the illusion breaks. When something goes wrong on stage and the actor recovers — a stumble turned into a gesture, a dropped prop made into a joke — the illusion gets stronger, because you watched a human being think on their feet and you were part of it.
That is why a live audience laughs at things that are not funny on the page. You are not consuming a joke. You are participating in a moment that will never exist again. This performance is a one-off. By tomorrow it will be a memory held by three hundred people who were in the same room, and it cannot be streamed.
What we owe you
In exchange for your evening, we owe you two things.
First, we owe you effort. Not polish — effort. A clean, safe, forgettable production is a worse gift to you than a messy one that reached for something.
Second, we owe you the truth about the play. We did not make this to be comfortable. There is a scene in the second act that I hope makes at least a few of you genuinely angry. Please stay for it. There is a bar, and it will still be there afterwards.
Enjoy it
Turn your phones off. Not down — off. The person next to you is about to do something difficult and they deserve the same attention you would give a friend.
Thank you for being here. Let's begin.