An Artist's Nightmare

An Artist's Nightmare depicts the story of a professional theatre artist's return to his roots after a quarter century of a successful career in the big city. With his family in tow and a big dream to help rejuvenate a lackluster old automobile town, he forgot one thing: small town mentality. From the moment he opens his performing arts center in this provincial capital city, the theatre artist is dumbstruck by the mean-spirited rejection he receives at every turn. Local academic...
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An Artist's Nightmare depicts the story of a professional theatre artist's return to his roots after a quarter century of a successful career in the big city. With his family in tow and a big dream to help rejuvenate a lackluster old automobile town, he forgot one thing: small town mentality. From the moment he opens his performing arts center in this provincial capital city, the theatre artist is dumbstruck by the mean-spirited rejection he receives at every turn. Local academic theatre persons ridicule his resume of real world experience, local directors dismiss his offers to collaborate, and the local media ignore his shows and exclude his work from local theatre awards while hypocritically treating his work with an odd discrimination that never gets explained. Fortunately he's good. And he survives the slim odds to succeed by finding students and families that believe in his work. An Artist's Nightmare is a thirty minute play-let that explores broad questions about the arts and community through the eyes of two local small town women; it is designed to provoke thought and ask larger universal questions regarding how the arts are played out in a provincial setting especially when mixing with the real world experience of an artist who has been to the heights of professional international experience.