I remember turning into my bank’s drive-through lane in the mid-1960”s and being stopped 100 feet from the bank by the instructions, “Please put your bank business in the container, close the container, drop it into the air-tube, and wait for the container to return with your receipt.” I thought, even then, that it won’t be long before we’ll be banking without even seeing a human being. Little did I realize that that was just the beginning. Now we can see a couple eating dinner and texting each other at one table and watch an entire family on their separate phones at another. I hear people brag about having 5000 friends on Facebook though they’ve seldom seen or talked to them. It’s this kind of isolated technological community that has become our reality and it is this reality that makes theater so important and necessary.The theater has become one of the last vestiges of instructive human behavior. We can watch cultural mores, ethics, morals, and practices of countries all around the world. We can observe more than a hundred generations of social conduct, humor, family difficulties, laws, love and marriage. We are able to connect ourselves to thousands of years of human history. The Oresteia of Aeschylus has guided our sense of justice, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rexhas become part of our psychology, and Romeo and Juliet has come to define eternal love. The vast history of theater has helped us to define our lives.Film, television, iPads, iPhones, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, laptops, Netflix, and the rest of our cyber world does not bring us closer or make us better understand ourselves or each other. Our announced Facebook status is small talk and as often as not, connected to media. We are reaching a stage in our society where experience of life is inferior to experience with the computer; the internet has become our playground and we are growing remote and obese. I remember reading in the late 1960’s that the constant input that we were beginning to receive would send many of us over the edge into an isolated madness and when I note the raft of mass killings at movie theaters, elementary schools, Sikh temples, shopping malls, restaurants and work places (more than 60 of these mass killings in the last 30 years and seven of those in 2012) it’s seems that those articles were absolutely right.Culturally, we need the theater to keep us aware of our selves, our mores, and our responsibilities. We need to witness the pain and truth of O’Neill’s A Long Day’s Journey Into Night and Williams’ The Glass Menagerie to help us understand our own pain and truth. These great plays give us the right of passage, something we all need: the right to become ourselves. In the theater we can see who we are. David Mamet and Neil LaBute show us our cowardice and sexism while Ibsen lays out our struggle with justice for women, health, money, and duty. Chekhov and Beckett confront our impotence while Peter Weiss reflects our inhumanity. And what can we say about Shakespeare who confronted racism, anti-semitism, sibling rivalry, magic, revenge, and love four hundred years ago? Edward Albee and Ping Chong give us portraits of the outsiders, the others, while A. R. Gurney chronicles the white Anglo-Saxon protestants and August Wilson tells us the stories of African Americans. These plays are our lives. There is something and someone for each of us; all of us.Many a modern person looks to films as a replacement for theater; as an equal or even a superior platform for behavior. There are several issues with this theory, however; not the least of which is the perpetual past in which a film lives. The conflicts we see are edited to serve the purposes of the director and the reactions between players are not spontaneous even though they may have been in one of the many takes. No matter how the audience responds, the film, the moment, will not change. Even with the advent of 3D made common, there is no depth of humanity in film; there is only the height and width of the human figure. Made up of light and sound, film presents us as sixteen feet tall and with closeups, heads that are six feet wide. These overblown images of our species that are the mainstay of film are a distortion of the human figure and require a more subtle approach to behavior than in normal life.We have all seen the work of Neil Simon on both film and TV. Perhaps it is that fact that leads so many of us to view him as a shallow writer. But he is not shallow -- he is a humorist and somehow we are led to believe humor lacks the depth of seriousness. But; we must not forget that the comic is the registration of a grievance and in our desensitized community, humor is an important path to the serious. Simon has spent a lifetime registering grievances and doing so with great popularity. Then, what play has not been thinned down by the screen: Odets’ Golden Boy, Crowley’s The Boys in the Band, The Laramie Project by Moises Kaufman, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Hamlet? Perhaps Marshall McLuhan is right in saying the medium is the message not the content. Films make us big and powerful with a deluded sense of universality. The only true advantage of filmed plays is the possibility of star power. However, the theater has a power that no film can possibly duplicate: the power of the living, breathing actor.Thespis is generally considered the first actor to step outside the chorus and play an individual role. He was accused by Solon, a Greek legislator, of teaching the public to tell stories and to lie because of the nature of the actor’s art. Thespis explained that it was not a lie because it was play. Of course we know that the people of the world did not need to be taught to lie by an actor and we have come to understand, as Picasso has said that all art is “the lie that reveals a deeper truth.”The primary source of American acting is the method developed by Constantine Alexiev whose stage name was Stanislavsky. He tried Aaron Hill’s ten facial gestures, Delsarte’s postures and gestures and many other techniques until June 22, 1897 when he met with director/teacher Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko to discuss the problems with the Russian Theater. Through this discussion came the development of the Moscow Art Theater. The lack of the theater’s initial success guided them towards The Seagull by Anton Chekhov which, in turn guided them to a new approach to acting; psychological realism. It is this psychological realism that is our primary approach to acting on stage, in film and serious television. Interestingly enough, I attended the Moscow Art Theater in 2009 and could feel the power of this new form as it pulled the theater away from the presentational style that proceeded it. At the same time, Stanislavski’s method has not evolved in Moscow to the same degree it has in the United States; in Moscow we can still see a kind of formal realism that has nearly disappeared in this country.So, what is it that gives the theater such a permanent power? What makes the living actor such a draw, such a greater teacher of humanity more so than the recorded actor? It is the actual human being living in the same time and space as we are. It is watching actual men and women confronting life issues and overcoming or succumbing to them. Feeling human pain and joy, fear and courage, love and hate, revenge and forgiveness, and all the human emotions coming from living people, like us -- people we can share our experience with, who can share their insights and interpretations; people who look like us and act like us -- released.The living theater becomes an experience shared by the actors and the audience. In 1982 I saw James Earl Jones playing Othello on the stage of the Winter Garden, that cavernous theater, and being completely moved by his almost naive and unworldly portrayal of the great Moor. His tragic and elongated decision to suffocate Diane Wiest’s Desdemona sent me and the rest of the audience out weeping. When we left the theater, I could actually see moist spots of tears on shirts and blouses. In fact, I was so impressed that I invited two friends to join me to see the production later in the run. The second time through, the show was not as exciting: Christopher Plummer’s Iago wasn’t quite as malevolent and though Wiest was as innocent, Mr Jones was playing with a bit too much effort and the audience was not quite with him. Clearly he felt that and he tried even harder to capture the audience. By the time he was contemplating the murder of Desdemona, the audience was giggling under its breath and my friends returned to their belief that Othello was truly a melodrama. I was disappointed. But now, more than thirty years later, I remember it clearly and so do my two friends, What we saw was not so much Othello, as the struggling James Earl Jones. His effort was pathetic, humorous, and near tragic: a real person with real and public emotions, not edited perfection.In the middle of February 1964, Beah Richards was rehearsing Sister Margaret in James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner directed by Frank Silvera. She had just been cast to replace an actress who “wasn’t working out” and had only two weeks to rehearse this long and difficult part. I worked the box office to pay for my acting lessons with Frank and when the show started I would go in to watch. The show opened on March 4, 1964 and on that night at a key emotional point of the play Beah yelled “line” at the same volume and emotional level as the scene she was playing and it was a moment of magic that made Beah’s absolute professionalism so clear and thrilling. I remember that “line” like it was yesterday. One night, Frank challenged me to watch the audience rather than Beah and I could not -- she was too compelling and I’ll never forget her performances: always alive, invested, truthful, and inspirational.Many times in my life I heard the living theater’s death knell. It’s death was announced in the 1950’s when television came into our lives and again in the 1960’s with the beautifully filmed versions of Broadway musicals like My Fair Lady and The King and I. Actually, I’ve heard it throughout my life. Most recently, Rocco Landesman, the Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts and a well-known Broadway producer declared: “there are too many theaters. If there were fewer theaters, they’d have the resources to pay their artists more.” His history as a Broadway producer seems to have stunted his view; it is as though Broadway and the major regional theaters were the only valuable theaters in the country. The theater however is more than a business; it is an important part of our culture. There are, according to the American Association of Community Theaters, more than 7,000 community theaters doing 46,000 productions a year with an audience of 86 million and an annual budget of more than 980 million dollars. These facts alone speak to the importance theater has in our culture. And as I think about the death knells, I remember Ron Willis, one of my mentors, responding to these dire predictions by saying, “The theater will never die because people like you and me need to do theater and there will always be people like us. Theater is a part of our DNA.” In fact, theater is a part of our cultural DNA and its value to our society is growing ever more important so let’s support the theater so it can support us.