A dream deferred

I have never been more disappointed in my life. I rarely feel disappointed, if ever, so this by far takes the cake.
A bunch of us University of Iowa playwrights got free tickets to see two shows at Steppenwolf Theatre. I was really excited for the first one, "A Well Appointed Room," because the director for the Puzzle Locker was involved with its development. The second show, The Pajama Men, was getting truly decent reviews. I haven't seen a show at Steppenwolf since my first one, which was the absolutely unforgettable production of "One Flew Over The Cukoo's Nest." Seriously, one of the defining theatre experiences of my life. Needless to say, I had really high expectations for these shows.
So we see A.W.A.R.. My god, I just realized what the show's title was an acronym for. This fact will become more significant in a moment. Anyway, the set was posh, if a little too cinematic. The acting was really strong. The performances were clear and well done. The rhetoric of the play was impeccable. But the play itself was completely irrelevant. It was all about rich white people, with impossibly eloquent dialects and high opinions of theatre. Two one acts. Both were extremely mysogenistic. The first was disturbingly violent (verbally, not phyically). What's worse is that the plays were "tied" to 9/11, and it had absolutely nothing significant to say about the event. Instead, the play used terrorism and war to define a battle of the sexes. It was all some stupid academic excersize in the way the whole trauma has "affected" our sense of time. Bullshit. ARGH! I am extremely aggrivated!
Why was this play made? Why do we keep portraying ourselves as utter victims? Haven't we taken care of our victimization? Isn't that what this whole war-vendetta was about? I'm sick and fucking tired of all this violence...
Anyway, we were all invited to this meet and greet afterwards. I didn't want to be impolite, so I figured I should at least poke my head in. The whole event turned into a coporate petting zoo, with some lady from fidelity mutual investments talking to us about how "we could all still have a future in the corporate world" and blah blah blah. The whole meet and greet was the worse peice of theatre I've ever seen. They took pictures of everyone, and I feel used.
I hate that this theatre was wasting its time stroking its investors. If they produce good work, they shouldnt need to do that shit. Theoretically, if they stayed at all relevant, then they wouldn't have to worry about what fidelity investments thought, or whether or not their investors felt thanked. Boo! Boo Steppenwolf! I really wanted to work there some day. They have a sweet internship, but now I see why its so well funded. Could I ever be OK with working in a place like that? GAH! The Associate Artistic Director was such a shill for the man.
I understand that theatres need investors, and that it's almost impossible to function without them. Steppenwolf is a non-for-profit, so I guess I just expected more out of them. Can't they just find private donors without a stake in getting their name attatched to good art? Not that A Well Appointed room was good art. It was good acting. It was terribly unimportant writing.
MAKE CHANGE IN THE WORLD!
DO SOMETHING GOOD FOR ALL HUMAN KIND!
DON'T FEED US THIS GARBAGE ABOUT YUPPIES AND THEIR PROBLEMS!
That's all my complaining for now. I had a really crappy night. I feel like I majorly screwed up somehow. Not all that abnormal.
I promise I'll start writing about the DTAT project tomorrow, once I collect my thoughts. After that, I'm off to New York.