Once upon a time.

We were both extremely critical of social convention, and hyper-rationalistic, believing every true thing had a knowable reason, so we used this to justify our retreat from the social morass of our childhood. People were harsh and arbitrary, and on top of that, corrupt: everything seemed to be done the wrong way—it was simple to see the best way, we thought. If only people had the courage to see that truth, life would fall out like a pleasant puzzle. As I got older, I started to see human beings as organic, our needs as much more contingent, and our means in all their variety. For very personal reasons (deep, inexorable love) I suddenly invested myself in this humanism. I wanted to find whatever relative truth I could about it, like those specious astronomical symbols that sailors once navigated by. Then I had a series of epiphanies that led me to see artistic production as the way of understanding this world. This is the prequel to the story I told him, which starts with fiction and leads thru film and theatre. Reading performance and dramatic theory in college turned my views around. In '96, I wanted messages to come neatly packaged, but by '98 I saw what a wild polysemy we have on our hands when we go to the theatre, and how sophisticated we need to be as spectators. But I still have the same yearning that was uncovered ten years ago when I was deeply, inexorably in love, and still trying to unwind the mystery of that feeling through the medium of theatre. In a sense, life is too complicated for non-fiction alone. Theatre is more complex, even if it's inarticulate—the same goes for film, photography, painting, and certain other modes. If nothing else, "art" can give us a pinprick of awareness that helps us to live more openly and, well, awarely.