Theater is truly a “it takes a village” activity. You can’t make theater without at least two people. And every person added to the mix brings something unique - each presence on stage, each staff member contributing off stage, each viewer. Any one audience member’s cough, laugh, gasp (or cellphone) can change the tenor of a moment (just ask Patti LuPone).

At some theaters, the supernumeraries (the spear carriers, messengers, and handmaidens with one or no lines of dialogue) are called the Essentials -because you couldn’t have a scene without them.

And, well, The Essentials just sounds cool. Don’t think a name is important, go ahead and ask the folks in The Elgins if they aren’t glad they decided to rename.

Ask any artist at the highest level how they got started and chances are good that you’ll hear a story about a teacher or mentor who helped them open the door to a world of creation. But teaching the arts isn’t just about creating the next generation of practitioners, it’s about creating citizens.

Take a sample educational theater program: a group of students are thrown together to work on a project with a challenging and unchangeable deadline. Forced to work with and rely on their peers, the students play different roles and perform different functions - all of which are required for their project to succeed. At the conclusion of the project they’ll face -together- a public, critical assessment of how well they’ve mastered and presented the subject matter.

It might sound like a Harvard Business School project, but the purpose isn’t just to create talented, collaborators who can succeed in a task oriented world. Theater also presents a chance to imagine a vision of a world different from the one we live in. For students in high school, this is a critical skill to learn at their stage of development. And doing so can help bridge the achievement gap across socio-economic boundaries

Not enough schools in our community have functional or even partial arts programs. Students have a need and theater artists possess a skill set that can help. We think it’s essential to put those two together

Theater is where society comes together to share imaginations, to share stories, and ultimately - both audience and artists - share ourselves with each other.

We need theater now more than ever because we’re growing apart as a culture. We live in niches, we consume, vote, love, in niches, we’re even marketed to in niches. We live less in the present - in crowds, during parties, even on dates, we stop engaging in the immediate so that we can text or email or answer our cell. And we’re growing desensitized - to violence, to love, to each other.

Theater combats these forces by bringing us together - theater makes us more imaginative, present and more emphatic. When else but theater, funerals and weddings do we turn off our phones and blackberries, sit next to strangers, be fully present, practice listening to other people and imagining with the person next to us?

But we’re losing our theater habit - skyrocketing ticket prices have walled off a generation of theatergoers, theater companies have stumbled in meeting our cultures changing needs, and theater and arts educationare disappearing from our communities and our schools. We’re losing generations of audiences and artists.

We think it’s essential to change that. We’re starting now and we hope you can join us.