Why teens need live theater in the age of YouTube

A good article from the Boston Globe.

The plays I saw with my dad handed us a script on every uncomfortable topic parents and children both painstakingly avoid and desperately need to discuss.

If YouTube’s current teenage audience is anything like my teenage self, they won’t take kindly to their parents telling them to get offline. At that age, my dad disparaging a website I genuinely loved felt like proof that the two of us were fundamentally incompatible. We simply didn’t have any cultural common ground — that is, until we experienced live theater sitting side by side in identical plush seats. Something I hadn’t learned while analyzing The Crucible to death in English class is that theater can leave you feeling vulnerable. Making eye contact with a character giving his dying soliloquy or professing her love, I was forced into more unguarded emotions than usually provoked by the screen-based mediums that helped me maintain my oh-so-cool brooding facade. There was no algorithm spoon-feeding me my own opinions. I was inhaling countless worldviews, all with my dad at my side. —Why teens need live theater in the age of YouTube – The Boston Globe