Peter Sellers’ Message for Theater Day: The Need for Equality

best friends,

Because our world today is hung hour and minute on the daily news feed as if we are being drip-fed, may I invite all of us, as creators, to enter into our sound domain and our own perspective of this epic time, epic change, epic awareness, epic reflection, epic vision? We live in an epic period in human history, which has resulted in profound changes in people’s relationships with themselves, with each other, and with non-human worlds, changes that are almost beyond our ability to understand, express, and speak.

We do not live in a round-the-clock news cycle, we live on the edge of time, and newspapers and media are completely ill-equipped and unable to deal with what we are going through.

Where is the language, and what are the movements and images that would allow us to understand the profound transformations and ruptures we are going through? How can we convey the content of our lives now, not as a reportage, but as an experience?

Theater is the art form of experience.

In a world awash with extensive press campaigns, simulated experiments, and harrowing speculation, how can we transcend the endless repetition of numbers to experience the sanctity and infinity of one life, one ecosystem, one friendship, or the quality and beauty of light in a strange sky? Two years of COVID-19 has weakened people’s senses, narrowed people’s lives, cut ties, and put us at a strange ground zero in human life.

What seeds should be sown and replanted in these years, and what exotic and overgrown species should be completely and permanently removed? There are too many people living on the edge of the abyss, too much violence flares up illogically and unexpectedly, and many entrenched regimes are exposed as structures of constant cruelty.

Where did the memorial ceremonies go? And what do we need to remember? What rituals allow us to finally reimagine and begin to practice steps we have not taken before?

The theater of epic vision, epic purpose, epic recovery, epic reformation, and epic care needs new rituals. We don’t need entertainment, we need to gather and share one space, we need to create a shared space and protected spaces for deep listening and equality.

Theater is to create that space on earth in which all are equal, whether people, gods, plants, animals, raindrops, tears, or the process of renewal. The space of equality and deep listening is illuminated by subtle beauty and kept alive by the deep interaction of danger, equanimity, wisdom, hard work and patience.

In The Ornament of Flowers, Buddha lists ten types of great patience in human life, and one of the most powerful of these is the patience to realize that all people are, after all, a mirage. Theater has always presented the life of this world as a mirage, allowing us to see clarity, power, and liberation through the veil of illusion, disinformation, blindness, and human denial.

We are so certain of what we see and the way we see it that we are unable to see and feel the alternate reality, new possibilities, different approaches, invisible relationships, and timeless connections.

It is time for a profound refreshment of our minds, our senses, our imaginations, our history, and our future. This work cannot be done by isolated people working alone, we must do this work together, and theater is the call for us to do this work together.

Thank you deeply for all that you’re doing.

World Theater Day 2022 – 27 March

Letter author: Peter Sellers, USA

Theater and Opera Director and Festival Director