Full of Noises

Full of Noises was started in 2008 with the goal of mounting politically salient stagings of classic texts.

Theater and democracy, Oskar Eustis has noted, were invented in the same city in the same decade, and that is not a coincidence. The reason, he claims, is that the act of two people sharing a stage and the act of participating in polity require and inspire the same thing: empathy.

We believe that the act of theater can serve not only to inform its audience about the issues of the day and deliver lessons about enduring truths, but that it can also inspire questions and perspectives that its audience has not yet asked and seen, that it can inspire the impulse toward fostering peace, justice, equality and freedom, an impulse that is alive in all people.

In Athens, the wealthiest citizens were enjoined by law to sponsor either a war boat or a theater troupe. In the West Africa of antiquity, griots served not only as storytellers and actors, but as historians and teachers, as well. In our day, in our land, the integral and fundamental link between engagement as a spectator and engagement as a citizen is often conspicuous only in its absence, the citizenry preferring depression-era reality competition TV shows firstly to intellectually and ethically stimulating theater and secondly to the type of discourse necessary in an active democracy.

Full of Noises seeks to give a tug on its little corner of the zeitgeist’s fabric, in the direction of revitalizing that link, enlivening minds and achieving a revolution of spirit in all involved parties.

In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, the foolish cosmopolitans Stefano and Trinculo are terrified of entering an unfamiliar world, uncomfortable in its challenge to their well-established notions of what it's like to live. Caliban, the prince-turned-slave, invites them in, defies their ideas and shows the beauty of the dark underside:

“Be not afear’d; the isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.”