Once upon a time, the occasion of Theater produced a ripple effect, a buzz that created paroxysmal waves of civically valuable debate and engagement. No, really.

These days we may call it with funny names like Community Outreach, but if we take a trip in the Theater Wayback Machine to ancient Greece, we’ll discover a savage world of community-gone-wild connected to theater.

In old-school Athens, theater was inherently a community property and the play was never an end in itself, but rather (according to writer Lynne Conner) “the point of departure for the exchange of ideas, opinions, and passions that are the fundamental criteria of useful civic conversation. . . the function of interpretation was understood as both a cultural duty and a cultural right. . .the play was one part of a larger learning operation in which the audience’s collective and individual reception would invariably shape the ascribed meaning.” Back in the day, the Athenian “theatron” was an active (extremely vocal) place in every way, physically, intellectually and emotionally. . .not merely a place for reverent gazing or passive spectating.

The Greeks got that the arts were not an add-on or luxury, peripheral to daily life, but,  in fact, essential building blocks in the health of cities, democracies and the fiber of communities. Old School Portland got it too. Fer rizzle.

In 1846—long before statehood, you could find makeshift theaters set up in Oregon Country animating the newly settled land and the frontier gray skies with revues of light opera and Shakespeare, and the West’s first newspaper The Oregon Spectator was usually on hand to review the results (yes, even then everyone was a critic). In 1917, we even elected the head of a theater company as our mayor, George Baker (of the Baker Stock Company) served four terms even—setting a lovely precedent for the symbiosis of civic leadership and the arts.

It needn’t be all Greek to you, it’s really all about recognizing,  what we like to call these days, our “creative capacity.” When we grow our creative capacity, we grow civically valuable, cultural amenities like cooperation, tolerance, respect, and openness. Simply put: Art provides the fuel and the glue for community conversation; and conversation is one of the fundamental raisons d’etre of a healthy democracy.

Theater is the perfect vehicle for understanding that dynamic.

Renowned interactive design-mind Edwin Schlossberg (an early consultant on the Armory project), astutely reminds us:

“Theater provides the most effective way to communicate the ideas and principles of society and the most immediate way to challenge and experience what is considered funny, important, horrifying, and so on. Theater is a way for an audience to find out what feelings are shared or not shared with most people.”

This coming PCS season is your gateway to understanding who we are/what we believe/and how we become—stories of hope, virtue, and economic opportunity, discovery, equity, new lands, final frontiers, impossible dreams, power and justice, and an fundamental optimism that is simply intoxicating.

So how’s about stopping by this coming season and seeing where the conversation leads?