Director's Note

by Ben Galosi

I’ve been thinking a lot about the purpose of theatre—why we gather and tell stories and listen. There are certainly a lot of reasons, all of them correct, but the one thing I am sure of is that it is not for pleasure alone. 

That phrase (and its famous cinematic inscription in Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander) was the nucleus of this production. Apart from an interest in breaking this play out of some of its obvious aesthetic traps, I was drawn to a conceptual framework that embraced a level of theatrical artifice and nostalgia. The moral pollution of an innocent artistic space felt like the right aesthetic structure for this rather slippery and complex piece of musical theatre. I certainly hope that there is pleasure, but never pleasure alone. 

After all, the true function of fairytales goes beyond mere enchantment—they are really the human’s first vehicle for making sense of psychological conflict and existential anxieties. They work on our childhood selves like magic, for it is only through stories that we can access our souls. And it is only through theatre that we can do it collectively. And the collective soul is the only remedy for our broken world. That is what I believe the spine of our work here at EPAC is: to look at our world as a collection of selves and honestly ask what we can do better. May the theatre not be a space to run away from the troubles of our world, but to conquer them. To empathize is to take responsibility, and collective responsibility leads to proactive communal action. At its core, that is what Into The Woods is really about. So, we’ve destroyed our planet. What will happen if we stop screaming at our neighbors about whose fault it is and actually come together to clean this shit up? And maybe do something about that Giant that is stomping around. 

The thematic throughline of all of my work is the end of the world. I can’t help but be drawn to stories about the apocalypse in this moment of societal and ecological destruction. We have no choice but to face our own reactionary isolationism that has led to a serious lack of intergenerational stewardship and collective empathy. The genius storytellers among us (like Sondheim and Lapine) know best how to package all of this anger and existential query into something digestible…and accessible from every angle. Into The Woods is the show that is about whatever you need it to be about. And it is the show that grows with you. It is magic in that way. It is healing for me, and I hope it is part of the canon of dramatic work that will inspire us to heal our planet, which I hope is the true purpose of theatre.