Artistic Statement
There will be nothing artistic about this statement. The better part of my work is language for the stage, written to be spoken.
Most of my plays fall into the category of political comedy. This comes from a long-term involvement in grassroots activism and a checkered history of comedy sketch-writing and writing for stand-up comics. I believe in theater as popular entertainment. Of course we would like our audiences to leave the theater thinking about their lives and their world in a whole new way. But at a minimum, we want them to be entertained. We are show people. We need to give the people a show.
I am committed to a theater of action and performance, one that creates its own world, as opposed to the naturalistic model that still predominates. Action means that the characters want something badly enough to take irreversible steps to achieve it. And those steps change the situation and move the story forward. I don’t want my stage language to be “realistic,” i.e. to sound like street language or like TV/film. When my dialogue has the right pacing and the right subtext, the audience is busy drawing conclusions. When it doesn’t, the audience goes to sleep.
Performance means that theater should be a show. We get involved and excited when actors do things the rest of us cannot -- they collide or explode or sing or dance or jump back and forth between multiple roles and multiple realities. When plays put on a show and characters take irreversible actions that move the story forward, audiences get engaged and invested. And then I get famous!
Most of my plays fall into the category of political comedy. This comes from a long-term involvement in grassroots activism and a checkered history of comedy sketch-writing and writing for stand-up comics. I believe in theater as popular entertainment. Of course we would like our audiences to leave the theater thinking about their lives and their world in a whole new way. But at a minimum, we want them to be entertained. We are show people. We need to give the people a show.
I am committed to a theater of action and performance, one that creates its own world, as opposed to the naturalistic model that still predominates. Action means that the characters want something badly enough to take irreversible steps to achieve it. And those steps change the situation and move the story forward. I don’t want my stage language to be “realistic,” i.e. to sound like street language or like TV/film. When my dialogue has the right pacing and the right subtext, the audience is busy drawing conclusions. When it doesn’t, the audience goes to sleep.
Performance means that theater should be a show. We get involved and excited when actors do things the rest of us cannot -- they collide or explode or sing or dance or jump back and forth between multiple roles and multiple realities. When plays put on a show and characters take irreversible actions that move the story forward, audiences get engaged and invested. And then I get famous!
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Jerry Polner
Artistic Statement
There will be nothing artistic about this statement. The better part of my work is language for the stage, written to be spoken.
Most of my plays fall into the category of political comedy. This comes from a long-term involvement in grassroots activism and a checkered history of comedy sketch-writing and writing for stand-up comics. I believe in theater as popular entertainment. Of course we would like our audiences to leave the theater thinking about their lives and their world in a whole new way. But at a minimum, we want them to be entertained. We are show people. We need to give the people a show.
I am committed to a theater of action and performance, one that creates its own world, as opposed to the naturalistic model that still predominates. Action means that the characters want something badly enough to take irreversible steps to achieve it. And those steps change the situation and move the story forward. I don’t want my stage language to be “realistic,” i.e. to sound like street language or like TV/film. When my dialogue has the right pacing and the right subtext, the audience is busy drawing conclusions. When it doesn’t, the audience goes to sleep.
Performance means that theater should be a show. We get involved and excited when actors do things the rest of us cannot -- they collide or explode or sing or dance or jump back and forth between multiple roles and multiple realities. When plays put on a show and characters take irreversible actions that move the story forward, audiences get engaged and invested. And then I get famous!
Most of my plays fall into the category of political comedy. This comes from a long-term involvement in grassroots activism and a checkered history of comedy sketch-writing and writing for stand-up comics. I believe in theater as popular entertainment. Of course we would like our audiences to leave the theater thinking about their lives and their world in a whole new way. But at a minimum, we want them to be entertained. We are show people. We need to give the people a show.
I am committed to a theater of action and performance, one that creates its own world, as opposed to the naturalistic model that still predominates. Action means that the characters want something badly enough to take irreversible steps to achieve it. And those steps change the situation and move the story forward. I don’t want my stage language to be “realistic,” i.e. to sound like street language or like TV/film. When my dialogue has the right pacing and the right subtext, the audience is busy drawing conclusions. When it doesn’t, the audience goes to sleep.
Performance means that theater should be a show. We get involved and excited when actors do things the rest of us cannot -- they collide or explode or sing or dance or jump back and forth between multiple roles and multiple realities. When plays put on a show and characters take irreversible actions that move the story forward, audiences get engaged and invested. And then I get famous!