The Wanderers' Manifesto: Awakening Theatre from Its Stagnant Dream

By Igor Golyak, Director of "The Wanderers"

Our theatre has stopped wandering. We've built comfortable settlements in familiar territory—the same emotional neighborhoods, the same aesthetic subdivisions—and forgotten that art's essential nature is nomadic. Not from lack of funding or empty seats, but from an epidemic of creative cowardice, we have abandoned the dangerous practice of artistic exploration for the false safety of predetermined destinations.

As I prepare to direct "The Wanderers" in London, I write this not as program notes but as an urgent call to my fellow artists, to board members, to audiences who still believe theatre can change us: we must stop making safe art about difficult subjects and start making dangerous art about universal experiences.

The False Safety of Familiar Forms

Too often, when we encounter a play about Jewish experience, African American trauma, or any cultural inheritance, we retreat into the comfortable prison of "authenticity." We stage Holocaust plays with reverent darkness. We approach stories of displacement with sociological earnestness. We treat inherited trauma like museum pieces—important, educational, untouchable.

This approach is not just artistically bankrupt; it is therapeutically useless. It turns the audience into passive consumers of other people's suffering rather than active participants in the transformation of universal human experience.

"The Wanderers" rejects this approach entirely.

The Artist's Workshop as Theatrical Laboratory

In my staging, the protagonist Abe exists in what I call a "creative workshop"—a transparent environment where the act of artistic creation becomes visible, manipulable, dangerous. When he writes about his parents, they don't appear as memory figures or psychological projections. They materialize as theatrical beings he can direct, reshape, argue with.

I have him literally drawing their scenes on glass panels. As he draws, they enter the mise-en-scène and begin to perform. This is not metaphor—this is theatrical technology. We are watching creativity work in real time, seeing how artists transform inherited material into active imaginative possibility.

This staging choice confronts our industry's deepest fear: that the creative process itself might be more interesting than the polished product we usually present. It's also possibly pretentious nonsense, but we'll find out together.

Genre as Liberation, Not Decoration

One element that will either vindicate or humiliate my entire approach involves Julia, Abe's imagined correspondence with a movie star. Rather than presenting her as a consistent psychological character—the way we've been trained to expect in our well-behaved realistic drama—she appears throughout the evening in different cinematic genres: space opera, superhero narrative, spy thriller, 1960s domestic melodrama. Each transformation has its own musical score, its own performance style, its own visual language.

This choice emerged from a simple observation: when we fantasize about people, we don't imagine them consistently. We cast them in different movies depending on our mood, our fears, our desires. Today's romantic comedy becomes tomorrow's horror film when the phone doesn't ring.

Our stagnant theatre insists that characters must be psychologically coherent, that fantasy sequences should feel integrated, that audiences need clear emotional through-lines. But this is precisely the kind of creative settlement-building that has made our art predictable. Real psychological experience is genre-fluid, chaotic, symphonic.

By allowing Julia to be superhero and housewife, astronaut and spy—sometimes within the same scene—we're not trying to be clever. We're trying to capture how the imagination actually works when it's allowed to wander freely rather than follow prescribed dramatic paths.

Whether this creates profound theatrical experience or expensive confusion remains to be seen. But it's certainly more honest about the messy, contradictory nature of desire than another evening of consistent character development.

The Nightmare Becomes the Creative Team

Perhaps the most disturbing—and therefore most necessary—element of this production involves Abe's inherited nightmares. In the play, he suffers from dreams about Hasidic figures coming to claim him, echoing his mother's deepest fears about losing her son to religious orthodoxy.

In my staging, these nightmare figures become his creative collaborators. They help him write. They move his furniture. They adjust his staging. What was once terrorizing becomes productive.

This is provocative because it demonstrates that our inherited fears—the psychological material we most want to avoid—can be conscripted into the service of new creation. We don't heal by avoiding our demons; we transform by giving them new jobs.

To boards and funders who worry about "difficult material": this approach doesn't minimize trauma—it transforms terror into agency. Or it's a complete disaster. Time will tell.

The Glass Stage: Transparency as Artistic Technology

Our set consists entirely of glass panels that can become mirrors or windows depending on lighting. This creates a literal metaphor for artistic consciousness: sometimes we see ourselves reflected, sometimes we see through to new possibilities.

But more than metaphor, glass functions as practical theatrical technology. Characters appear and disappear not according to realistic logic but according to creative necessity. The audience watches the artist manipulate his inherited material in real time.

This transparency serves audiences in ways that traditional "fourth wall" realism cannot. Instead of pretending they're eavesdropping on someone else's story, spectators become witnesses to the creative process itself.

The Stagnation Problem

Our industry has become addicted to emotional manipulation masquerading as artistic depth. We mistake audience tears for artistic success. We confuse respectful treatment of serious subjects with serious artistic investigation.

This addiction has created a generation of theatregoers who attend theatre to have their existing feelings confirmed rather than transformed. They want to leave feeling like good people who care about important issues, not like people who have encountered something genuinely mysterious about human experience.

"The Wanderers" refuses this transaction.

The Wings We Give Our Dead

The most seemingly absurd element of this production—characters who put on removable angel wings—actually represents something we all do but rarely acknowledge. When Abe writes about his parents through the characters of Schmuli and Esther, he gives them wings because this is how we remember people we've loved and lost: as bigger than they were in life, more beautiful, more wise, more tragic than ordinary human beings ever manage to be.

The wings are playful, theatrical, obviously artificial—because our idealization of the dead is also artificial, a creative act rather than biographical truth. We don't remember our parents as they were; we remember them as the angels we needed them to be.

But here's what's interesting theatrically: by making this psychological process visible and literal, we allow the audience to recognize their own mythmaking. Everyone in the theatre has given wings to someone. Everyone has made angels out of ordinary, flawed human beings.

The CNN Interruption

Throughout the evening, whenever Abe's wife Sophie appears, his fantastical creative world is interrupted by harsh domestic reality—CNN breaking news, domestic chores, the grinding necessities of survival. She exists without musical score, without genre transformation, without wings.

This creates dramatic tension, but more importantly, it prevents the audience from escaping entirely into artistic fantasy. Reality keeps asserting itself. Imagination must negotiate with the mundane world.

This staging choice acknowledges something our industry often forgets: great art doesn't transcend ordinary experience—it transforms our relationship to it.

A Call to Dangerous Practice (That Might Not Work)

To my fellow directors: stop protecting audiences from the complexity of creative process. Let them see how artistic transformation actually works. Or let them watch us fail spectacularly trying.

To producers and board members: trust that audiences can handle sophisticated theatrical language. They are more intelligent and more hungry for genuine artistic experience than our market research suggests. If I'm wrong about this, we'll all learn something valuable about the limits of human curiosity.

To audiences: come prepared not to have your existing feelings confirmed but to discover psychological territories you didn't know existed. Fair warning: you might leave more confused than when you arrived. I consider this a feature, not a bug.

Theatre's power lies not in its ability to represent familiar experience prettily, but in its capacity to make visible the invisible processes by which human beings transform inherited material into new creative possibility.

We are not in the business of entertainment or education. We are in the business of metamorphosis. Whether we're any good at it remains an open question.

"The Wanderers" premieres not as another worthy play about difficult subjects, but as an experiment in creative methodology—a workshop where audiences can witness artists attempt to become free in real time. The attempt might fail. The methodology might prove ridiculous. The glass might simply reflect our own pretensions back at us.

But here's what I know after twenty years of making theatre: our current approach—safe, respectful, predictable—is definitely not working. So we might as well try something that scares us.

The stage is glass. The transformations are visible. The nightmares have been given new jobs. Whether any of this actually helps anyone is between you and whatever wings you've given your own dead.

This is how theatre becomes dangerous again. Or how it becomes laughably pretentious.

Either way, it beats another evening of beautiful suffering, respectfully presented.

Igor Golyak is a Jewish-Ukranian-American theatre director whose work explores the intersection of memory, creativity, and transformation. "The Wanderers" opens in London this autumn.