On Sunday, I had coffee with a friend, a terrific actor and incredibly funny person - okay, it was Steve Barkhimer! When I arrived, he was passing the time reading Plato's The Laws. Turns out, funnyman Steve has been spending the last 10 years or so making himself into a Plato scholar- and the Laws was the last notch on his belt and he would be master of the whole canon.
Now, I was a Classics major in college, and I never read The Laws. It's pretty dry stuff, but we discovered some very interesting. The Laws consists of a three old guys talking about what the perfect society might be. Steve told me (remember, I have never read so much as a word of it) that the spend the first couple of books talking about stuff like how much they should drink, and what sort of music they should listen to. This is what's important in the perfect society, I guess.
What's interesting is that I was there to talk to Steve about this project I have been thinking about, and I started off by referring to the TCG conference I went to in June. It was all about Gen Y, how to reach them, make them come to your theaters. One of the basic lessons people were talking about was that to get Gen Yers into your theatre, you had to let people drink in the theater. Another thing was that Gen Yers are looking for a total experience, so that you had to look for ways to include music, spoken work, etc., around your performances.
So it looks like we've come full circle, back to Plato.
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