"I'm not only an artist, but a citizen." -- Broadway director Bartlett Sher

THE PAST: Twelve of St. Louis' most exciting, most adventurous theatre companies came together in an unprecedented collaboration to bring to local audiences the second bi-annual St. Louis Political Theatre Festival in fall 2008. As part of the Festival, St. Louis Actors' Studio announced an entire season of shows about politics and power, New Line Theatre ran Hair for six weeks, The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis held pre-show and post-show discussions about Frost/Nixon, and The Immediacy Theatre Project held an opening reception for the Festival on August 15, after opening night of the world premiere of Johnny A. Cannon II: Johnny Descending.

The 2006 festival was a tremendous success and received some national press as well as plenty of local coverage. The 2008 festival featured fourteen shows (several of them St. Louis premieres) running from August through November, in venues all over the St. Louis metro area (like a smaller version of the world-famous Edinburgh Fringe Festival), bringing the most important issues of the day to the stages of St. Louis. These shows challenged audiences to think about and get involved in the great struggles of our times and our country, as we found ourselves in the middle of one of the most crucial Presidential elections in our lifetimes.

The Festival was created for two reasons. First, to remind people that theatre addresses with enormous power the biggest issues of our times, better than any other art form by personalizing those issues in the bodies of live actors. Second, to remind St. Louisans of the importance of being engaged in our government "of the people, by the people, and for the people." The stage has forever been a place where political issues have been examined and challenged. After all, democracy and theatre were born in the same place and even in the same decade! The ritualistic and social significance of the earliest Greek performances in central arenas brought relevance to many controversial topics -- war, politics, sex, religion. We do the same today.

Throughout history, the times of greatest tumult are also the times of the greatest theatre -- in America in the 1930s and in the 1960s and 70s, but also in Elizabethan England and modern day Iraq. We believe that America in the new millennium is one such place and time. Back during the height of the Depression, the American theatre became increasingly, intensely political, with shows like Waiting for Lefty, The Cradle Will Rock, Power, Awake and Sing!, One Third of a Nation, It Can't Happen Here, Pins and Needles, and many others. Once America entered World War II, rabid patriotism overpowered political dissent, and political theatre faded away. But when the 60s arrived with renewed political and social unrest, the theatre returned to fiercely political drama and satire, with shows like Hair, Viet Rock, Cabaret, McBird, US, Tom Paine, Futz, and many others. But the materialism of the 80s and the dot-com prosperity of the 90s lessened the public appetite for political theatre once again. Then came the September 11 attacks, and the Bush administration. Now, political theatre is back again, and it's healthier and fiercer than ever.

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