E-mail from work...2

From: Chad Glazener
Sent: Monday, March 23, 2009 4:14 PM
To: Jeff Fazakerley
Subject: Hey Jeff!

Hey brother! Hope you are doing well :)Last week I gave a lecture at my church on theatre & theology, and I'd love to hear your thoughts as a person who loves to think about this too!

Here is the link:http://www.redeemerlm.org/resources/the-arts/

Hope to hear from you soon!


From: Jeff Fazakerley
Sent: Monday, March 24, 2009 2:14 PM
To: Chad Glazener
Subject: RE: Hey Jeff!


Hello friend,

Thanks for sending that link. I listened to it this morning. I really enjoyed it! It was so fun to hear you talk so passionately and thoroughly about that subject. You’re right I do love to think about it. A few things I enjoyed…

- “Theatre is greater than the sum of its parts.” So true. I wanted you to go on talking about how combing theatre with Christian community can be this amazingly strong force in the world. Greater than the who, what, when, where, and how is the WHY. Why we do what we do can have a great impact on the piece that we play. If we perform pieces with questionable material but make sure to center ourselves as a company on the truth of the characters and content and have a justifiable reason for portraying such content, the impact is stronger. The same is true if the whole company is centered on one ideal; especially a Christian ideal. I think also that saying, “Theatre CAN be greater than the sum of its parts” is also true as some companies and theaters fall short in this regard. It could be argued that theatre should never be done to just “do theatre”. Obviously the hobbyist or the simpleton can put on a play for fun and games, but compared to what is possible when there is a goal, a mission statement, a purpose behind the lines we memorize, why just do theatre to do theatre?

- “Theatre is an art form that teaches us to be fully alive” I love this! My favorite quote is on my website (www.jefffazakerley.com) On my blog it says, “I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.” - Oscar Wilde. It should be a theatrical law that in every piece done, representational or presentational, truth should always exist. It doesn’t matter if spectacle is your primary goal, it will always do better if the human beings in your audience can relate to what their seeing. Spectacle for spectacle’s sake is like a candle in a football stadium, it hardly exists. In theatre we must always have a reason for what we do so we can share with our audiences what it is to be human. Theatre is the greatest portrayal of the human experience.

- I seriously think you could write a book on a new acting philosophy with everything you said about the incarnation and acting. Screw Utta Hagen and Stanislavski, we gots us some JESUS! Brill. Totally brill.

- I loved the way you taught your audience to be an audience and what it means to be an audience. The church needs to be taught how to experience entertainment as I believe many are clueless. It should be a sermon on Sunday morning in my opinion…”thou shalt not judge a production by your personal offences. Rather you shalt experience the deeply rooted truth in each character.” Especially in the cinematic culture we live in. Its too easy to show up, watch the silver screen, be numb to our own feelings for two hours and leave saying, “Well that was cool…that was funny…that was scary…mucka mucka mucka…” But with theatre, it should be impossible for people to leave the same way they came in. I think you could even argue that productions done in the round or on a thrust stage have great impacts on audiences today than a simple proscenium stage. The proscenium is too close to its silver screen cousin. It’s too easy to think you’re watching a movie when your play is framed in such a way. However the thrust or round stage is the ultimate 3-D experience. Harder to direct and perform on, but man, the way the audience is drawn into the production as opposed to being shut out. So cool.

- I also loved what your guest director said about how film makes theatre evaluate its existence. The rise in popularity of the silver screen means putting theatre in check. I think it was a movement for a time, even in the last decade, that students felt the need to combine multimedia and live stage action. My senior project was done in such a way. Powerful in its own right, but something should be said for making a clean break and really discovering what makes theater so powerful and what has kept it alive for thousands of years. How long will film last? I believe that even when the multimedia experience is so advanced that we’re able to walk around in a digital world and experience things like on Star Trek…you know that room they could go in and input a program and actually be in a different space and time and tangibly experience their surroundings…even when film has reached that point, I believe theater will still exist apart from it. The real versus the unreal.

Well…that should show you how much I enjoyed your lecture… J Thanks for getting my mind on things I’m passionate about.

I really appreciate it!

Have a blessed day,

Jeff