"Museum:" A Love Letter to Art, and All Its Many Incarnations

Tina Howe's "Museum" is an elegant meta-theatrical piece that manages to simultaneously capture the subjective nature of both a visual arts and a theatre arts experience. Just like the pieces of art that are displayed on stage during the course of the story, the play itself must be experienced with a mind that is an open window- it must be viewed from many sides and many perspectives in order to truly appreciate its message. At first glance, the play's many seemingly unconnected and fleeting stories (as represented by the gallery visitors' comings and goings) may come across as random and overly naturalistic, with no real throughline other than the single location that remains constant from start to finish (the museum exhibit). However, just as a painting will look completely different up close than when viewed from across the room, one must take the play as a whole in order to understand the wonderful commentary "Museum" provides on the ability of art to transform even our perspective on life itself. As a theatre goer, this perhaps goes against our viewing instincts - we want to examine each character's specific life, we want to examine the individual stories - but this is also what makes "Museum" such a refreshing piece: it asks us to be open to experiencing art in new ways, finding the magic that comes in breaking with the ordinary.

There is no great secret to what we do on stage or behind it. Our success is born of hard-work, teamwork, and love for the theater. This drama room is a place to explore who we are and how this world works. A place where we try to understand and interpret the human condition. The drama room is a place where a student can be vulnerable enough to take risks and be willing to fail. A place where a student can then realize that failure isn't an end, but just a mile post on a journey to their ultimate ending. The drama room is a place to understand that theater and life is a process, not a series singular victories.

Most important to me is that the drama room is a place where students learn three important words:

YOU ARE ENOUGH.

Everything needed to succeed on the stage, behind it, or in life is already within us. The goal is to get out of our own way and be willing to work for it.