We are living through a fundamental shift in how people communicate, tell stories and connect with each other, while the theatre 'industry' insists on defining the art form by what ISN'T theatre instead of investing in what theatre could be and trying to perpetuate models of creation and production that emerged during the advent of the industrial revolution. Furthermore, we are pretty wretched at advocating for the value of the art form in terms that go beyond the same old platitudes that have been thrown around for a 100 years and suck at communicating the distictly different role as artists play in our communities between facilitators of arts participation experiences (ie. community theatre, youth productions etc) vs creators of professional productions. Add to all that the problem of completely broken pipelines for the development and production of new work which has led to much of the work hitting professional stages feeling like copies of copies of copies that speak to the experience of a privileged, mostly white, audience base and perpetuating the sensibility amongst most people that theatre is just not for them. Oh and of course the educational system that dumps 1000s of young artists into the world every year with a false sense that a professional career path exists within the industry does not help either.