You Could Drive a Person Crazy

Book excerpt: For years, conventional wisdom has held that theatre companies have to produce brainless, well-known, flashy shows to make money and stay afloat. But one regional theatre company out in the middle of America has been proving since 1991 that conventional wisdom is wrong. New Line Theatre consistently challenges its audiences, taking them on wild, intense, roller coaster rides, assaulting them with issues, challenging them with complex characters and themes, demanding that audiences not remain passive, sometimes producing shows very few people have heard of, daring to be controversial, aggressive, confrontational. And not only has New Line survived its first ten years, it's sailing into its next ten years as healthy and as heartily supported by its public as ever. New Line Theatre has, once and for all, shattered the myth that audiences only like what they know, that audiences don't like to think when they come to the theatre, that television has made us all into passive couch potatoes. On the contrary, New Line has proven that audiences-even those in the supposedly conservative Midwest-love to be challenged, shaken up, confronted, involved. This is New Line's story.