Texas Tech University

Screens Need Not Apply

Jay Culmone

September 28, 2021

Jay Culmone

The 2021-22 season begins in earnest this October. This year's theme—Awakenings, one that both the selected plays and the student choreography will explore—promises not to disappoint.
 
From over one hundred contenders, five plays—in a word, Bike America, Spring Awakening, Guapa, and A Little Night Music—made the cut. These shows will be produced alongside Frontier Fest's ten-minute plays, dance performances, and full-lengths from our graduating playwrights; DanceTech, featuring choreography by b-boy and hip hop artist YNOT; and alongside Fall Dance Festival, an exciting exhibition of original choreography from our fourth-year dance students.
 
And begin in earnest it truly does because this year's season will be performed—brace yourself, hold tight to whatever sturdy home appliance is nearest you—in person, on the stage, beneath the lights. Screens need not apply.
 
And to that I say: it can't come soon enough.
 
Because if you're anything like me—and let's face it, as far as quarantine goes you are like me, and I'm like you, too; we're all of us like each other, homebodies by mandate, both victims and victimless—this last year has left you feeling frayed, stir-crazy, squirming and eager as all get-out to return, finally, to business as usual. To life as usual. Because all of us are as overdue for a social function as a road-tripped car is for an oil change, your mind and body so starved for any morsel of human interaction you can practically see the mounds of its ribcage.   
 
And that's what makes this year's theme of Awakenings so apropos, so nimble of foot and multilayered of content. 
 
It means awakening to shared space, to shared experience, post-quarantine. It means awakening to the social, political, and racial issues that are more urgent than ever. It means awakening, too, to the inner lives of the play's characters, along with all the attendant strains and struggles—the disappearance of a son, the journey toward self-understanding, a coming of age, the chance at stardom, the rekindling of a love lost. 
 
It means, finally, the awakening. Full-stop, bar none. The awakening that each of us has so desperately awaited. Our reemergence, fingers-crossed, into daily life as we fondly remember it. Yours, mine. Ours.
 
The works this season resolutely urge us forward. Their stories and settings and people and dialogue all double as theatrical electro-therapy, stimulating the nerve this past year has threatened to atrophy and jolting us back into spirited action. Jolting us awake.      
 
Because awakening is sort of an ur-word, certain and fundamental, the measuring stick for what it is the job of every word under the sun to do: to call something to mind, to evoke, to invoke. To awaken, see? The smell of fresh-mown grass. The skitter-click of windblown leaves on pavement. The oven-hot warmth of sweatpants just out of the dryer. To speak is to speak is to speak...  
 
So yes, you better believe it: our selection committee has labored to ensure this will be a season not soon forgotten, one full of introspective performances fit to make you scooch as far forward as your seat will allow and pay attention like you've never paid it before.
 
I don't know about you, but I for one can't wait.