Welcome to the first show of Salesianum School Theater's 2018-2019 season. This year we are, as a school, focused on the theme, "Live Courageously, Love Greatly". This concept feels so familiar that it seems to be written into our institutional DNA. It feels essential. What makes this theme so functional for this community is the obvious way in which it fulfills not only who we are (and we are that well) but also it speaks to where we come from...our foundational mythology.
Joseph Campbell says (and Mary Zimmerman, author of Metamorphoses invokes) that "Myths are public dreams. Dreams are private myths." Salesianum was the public dream of Blessed Louis Brisson when he sent the three Oblates to America to establish a school. To the degree that we are the living, contemporary, fulfillment of that public dream, we are his private myth. The imagined story that would explain the fundamentals of his world.
Fr. Beretta often speaks of the divided and challenged world in which St. Francis de Sales lived. The gentle strength that he showed in that world informs how we can try to walk through this one. The idea that the engine of courage could be love was foundational for him, the stories of his gentleness, courage, and love would have been the origin stories of a mythology that Brisson knew well. That private myth becomes public dream in the work and creativity of our young artists. We strive to serve a world that needs our hearts and minds in equal measure. We privately dream and then we work to make that dream public.
But why then do we need a pool?
Tonight you will see work that is intensely intimate, but writ large. The gods walk among humans and demigods alike and all in service of a singular understanding: The transformative, metamorphosing, power of love. Symbolized by water, moved through it, cleaned by it, changed by it...our humanity is effected by this pool. It allows us to physicalize some of the most essential and foundational ideas of Western Culture.
But also...this production, as much as it serves our founders and the visionaries at the root of Salesian spirituality, it also serves a much more mundane end. There is a longstanding myth at Sallies...still tried at every now and again by an ambitious senior offering to sell a freshman their pass to the "third floor pool." For the first time in the storied history of Sallies, we've actually got a pool! And who would have thunk it...it took the theatre program to make it happen! For all of the intellectual and artistic heft present in this show there is also this element...we built a pool. Inside...and isn't that COOL!?!?
SO, tonight, we hope you enjoy this exploration of love and transformation, and how these elements make up our collective mythology. We hope you can find the moments of Salesian optimism and grit in these stories and that they can inform your approach to a world that, right now, needs us to show both...We hope you think it is cool...we hope you are inspired to look at your own private myths and begin to seek to make them public dreams.
Give me the grace to perform this action...
