Letter to the Editor: Why I’m proud to attend this Wild Party

In one week, I will be cheering the premiere of a production in which performers play women who are at once jarring and sympathetic. There is Queenie, young, beautiful, and eager to find love, or at least a lover. There is Kate, a vivacious ingenue who longs to be the center of attention. There is Madeline, a woman who appreciates women, and who knows what she wants. And there is Mae, a woman living at the ragged edge of the Jazz Age. She is glamorous, hungry, and dangerous in equal measure. Some folks in the community have already reached out to say that this is a story we shouldn’t tell. I can understand the concerns about themes involving nudity, drugs, and sex, particularly in light of some of the horrendous stories in the news this past week. Andrew Lippa’s The Wild Party certainly does not look away from jealousy, addiction, or violence, and one scene in particular has drawn some of the sharpest objections. I won’t pretend that scene is easy for audiences to watch.

It isn’t supposed to be.

Here is what I’ve learned in the weeks I’ve observed these actors preparing to bring their characters to life: the things this show depicts are not inventions. They aren’t made up. They reflect the anxieties and adversities that too many people in our own community carry quietly, every day: into their homes, their relationships, their own private wild parties. Jealousy that descends into control. Desire that outruns judgment. The particular violence that can erupt when love and power get tangled together. Pretending these things don’t exist doesn’t protect anyone. It just leaves the people already living through them feeling more alone.

That is exactly what theater is for. A stage is one of the few places left where a community can sit together in the dark and confront what frightens us, without anyone actually getting hurt. It’s a rehearsal space for empathy. When the lights come up on that difficult scene, the audience isn’t watching something happen to strangers. They’re watching something recognizable, something human, and they get to feel it, question it, and carry it back out into their lives a little more awake to it. There’s nothing indecent about that. That’s the job art has always done, from Greek tragedy, to grand opera, to a converted theater at Norwalk’s SoNo Collection.

I think it matters enormously that a school like the Norwalk Conservatory trusts its students with material this ambitious. Andrew Lippa created a score that is thrilling and unrelenting, characters who are messy and fully alive, and a world dripping with the glamour and the grit of the 1920s all at once. This show has asked more of these young performers technically, and even emotionally, than probably any role they’ve played before. That is precisely the kind of gift a conservatory is supposed to give its students: not the safe, sanded-down version of a story, but the real one, so that they can grow into artists capable of telling it honestly.

I don’t say any of this to dismiss the concerns of anyone in our community. I say it because I believe those concerns deserve more than a rumor or a synopsis; they deserve an actual encounter with the work. Judge it for yourself after you’ve sat in the audience, watched the performances, and felt where the story lands for you. Theater loses its meaning entirely if we start deciding, sight unseen, which truths are too uncomfortable to look at.

The Wild Party opens Oct. 8 and runs for two weeks. I hope you’ll come. Sit with your fellow community members in the dark. See what Queenie and Mae and the rest of this extraordinary cast have to show you, before you decide what you think about it.

Colin Hosten is director of development at The Norwalk Conservatory of the Arts.

Editor’s note: This piece is an opinion article. The views expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the perspectives of the publication or its staff.