This week is more restful than many in the real estate business. We celebrate our families, our homes, our communities, our chosen charities, and we celebrate our myriad beliefs...and even our superstitions when we get to the New Year! I care more then ever about all those things I said we celebrate. And I add here my deep and warm feeling for all of you.
Recently, I wrote a welcome to the audience that will attend a twentieth annual play festival for a theater company that has become iconic for its continuing work with new plays and playwrights. My last post was about the strength of community that I experienced first hand in the throes of the surging water of Helene. But this statement, this post, is about the wonder of the creative arts, and what creativity can mean to individuals and to where we all live. I hope you'll join Theatre Odyssey as she celebrates twenty years. Here is the welcome I have written:
"Annual events come and go. When they happen for a long time, we often take them for granted. Then, they reach a milestone, and we tend to make a big deal about them. Twenty years of play festivals is one of those deals. This festival marks Theatre Odyssey’s vicennial. For all this time, we have produced original work, new plays by both aspiring and established playwrights. We have annually awarded designations like Best Play and Runner-up along with cash prizes to the authors. This vicennial event presents eight new plays, and provides as a bonus production, the most recent Best Play of our Student Ten Minute Playwriting Festival. It also represents a lengthy period of growth and change, of multiple festivals, of support for individuals and other organizations toiling in the vineyard of stage play productions. And the company has been agile. It has played its works in multiple venues, mostly conventional but some not so. It pivoted quickly when it had to. A world pandemic resulted in the production of radio theater presentations for a couple of seasons.
A vicennial is a clear opportunity to think about legacy. Is it a steadfast commitment to the new creations of writers? Is it a consistency of annual play festivals and awards to authors, helping them burnish their own individual legacies? Maybe it is constant work for actors, directors, backstage and front of house workers in the art? How about the loyal following of audience members, some of whom today also celebrate their own vicennial as observers or our work? I leave that for you to think about.
In the meantime, welcome to Theatre Odyssey’s Vicennial.
Tom Aposporos
Founder"
