CASTILLO THEATRE 2012- 2013 SEASON
“But I Know How to Love"
“But I Know How to Love,” Castillo Theatre’s 2012-2013 season, presents the best and worst of humanity. Children of Killers, by acclaimed playwright Katori Hall, explores whether children can overcome their fathers’ legacy in the aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. In artistic director Dan Friedman’s Demonstration 2013, we encounter in prose, song and historical footage the human capacity to change the world around us. In Fred Newman’s poignant musical, Carmen’s Place (A Fantasy), the young characters learn non-possessive ways of loving. The play’s signature musical number, “But I Know How to Love” is sung by a Latino police officer who tells the audience that, despite his unspectacular and in some ways impoverished life, he has learned how to love. In the Hip-Hop Explosion Workshop, we bring together the avant-garde and hip-hop culture — and create something unexpected and new.
“But I Know How to Love” also includes the thousands of young people who participate in our All Stars Talent Show Network. They live in poverty and have little opportunity to develop, but in the midst of the daily struggles of their lives, they play, they sing and dance, they appreciate one another, they take risks — and they grow.
Can love and violence coexist on the Castillo stage? They do in the world and Castillo’s 2012-2013 season dramatizes that paradox of the human condition. Our former artistic director, the late Fred Newman, put it this way:
“Human beings are very quick to violence. But, if there is anything that they are, roughly speaking, as quick to as violence, it’s love. Human beings fall in love at the drop of a hat. And that’s nice. I don’t subscribe to “all you need is love.” But, I think it is true that you can use those performatory passions much better than cognitive mental acts, which I’m very suspicious of in the sense that I don’t know if there’s an ontological reality that corresponds to them. I trust in human emotions.”
Ours is a political theatre that takes seriously the need for human development. For us, hope lies in the possibilities that performance opens up: of playing with each other, of finding new ways of being together, and of knowing how to love.