TOM DEWEY has worked at the Book-It Repertory Theatre Box Office since April 2009. When not there, he appears as an actor on many Seattle-area stages and choreographs fights for the theatre, including for Book-It’s latest production, Welcome to Braggsville.
“Last year on the education tour, we did Romeo and Juliet for the Yakima Tribal School. And earlier that year they had lost a classmate to suicide. And so the energy of performing Romeo and Juliet for these kids was really just an electrifying, cathartic, therapeutic experience for everybody involved. We were energized by it; they were energized by it.
We spend so much of our lives trying to communicate with each other, but our life experience and vocabulary sort of prevents us from really saying what we’re trying to say to one another. With theatre, through the course of a play, the playwright teaches everybody in the audience what the vocabulary should be. So when it’s done really well, for a brief period of time everyone in that room truly understands each other, because they’re all experiencing the same emotion at the same time and hearing the same words at the same time– it’s almost an act of worship, I feel like.”
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