Our 2023-24 season is now (finally) underway! The Senator project required all of our energy and focus, so we had to delay the commencement of our own season to make way for this massive collaboration. It was wonderful to work with so many people across the Casper theatrical community; supported by a generous grant from the City of Casper Joint Powers Board, we were able to rescue a lost play from obscurity, and give it a lush staging in accordance with the time of its original production, the late 19th century. Theatre history, theory, and practice converged on the Natrona County High School stage, to the delight of our actors and audience, who enjoyed a trip to a simpler time in American theatre and politics. We are especially grateful to historian Johanna Wickman, who discovered the play and facilitated the collaboration between the theatre community and the Fort Caspar Museum.

We turn now our attention to the work before us. The slate of plays for this season was selected for the variety of perspectives they offer on the theme of education. At the moment in these United States, education is in crisis from pre-K through college. The statistics are alarming. Enrollment in college continues to decline sharply; 56% of people surveyed are dubious of the value of a college degree; fewer students are graduating from high school, and many of those who do graduate require remediation in reading, math, and writing; millions of grade school students cannot read at the level expected for their age; and over half of our citizenry is functionally illiterate, innumerate, or incapable of identifying the branches of government, let alone explaining its workings. The reasons for this are many and it is not our purpose here to unpack them; that will be for the plays to explore and for you, the audience, to consider and decide.

We begin with The Lesson, an absurdist drama by Eugene Ionesco about how sadistic ideologues masquerading as teachers destroy their students. Next, Oleanna by David Mamet is a drama about how sadistic ideologues masquerading as students destroy their teachers. The Thanksgiving Play, by Larissa FastHorse, satirizes a group of woke but well-intentioned theatre teachers who attempt to create a politically correct Thanksgiving play. Arthur Miller’s monumental tragedy, The Death of a Salesman, explores, among other things, how fathers destroy their sons by miseducating them about manhood and the American Dream. In Spring 2024, while Conte is directing The Threepenny Opera for Opera Wyoming, Heather Lynch will hop over from her work with Stage III and Opera Wyoming to direct Lonely Planet by Steven Dietz. It is a two man show set in the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and explores the effects of the misinformation rampant at the time. Finally, Nicholas R. Johnson of Turn on the Dark Productions and Stage III Community Theatre will direct How I Learned to Drive. Paula Vogel documents the complex but nonetheless horrific nature of intra-familial sexual grooming and abuse–and how one brave woman overcomes it.

Ours is a season designed to challenge the actors as well as the audience by confronting intellectually complex, emotionally fraught themes and ideas. Almost all of the plays will be difficult to watch, as they are intended to unsettle, to shake us from cognitive torpor and aesthetic laziness. We encourage you to make an effort to see as many of the productions as you can, so that you may contemplate the miseducation of the American mind in its many facets. As always we thank you for your continued and enthusiastic support of the Theatre of the Poor.

William Conte, Ph.D
Artistic Director
Theatre of the Poor