Editorial: One role of theater, and all art, is to challenge our ways of thinking

Art is about expression, experimentation, interpretation and challenging and expanding our way of viewing the world.

It's so much more than a pretty picture, a catchy tune or a clever story.

Professional theater groups for years now have been mixing things up with plays that are 400 years old. They've contemporized settings and altered the audience's perspective with nontraditional casting - such as all-black casts or men taking women's roles and women taking men's.

Hollywood, too, has taken traditional theater pieces and set them on their ear.

Think of Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes reading the lines of "Romeo and Juliet" to a backdrop of beach scenes, cars and automatic weapons.

Or "Titus," 2000's re-imagining of "Titus Andronicus," a lesser known Shakespearean tragedy, which weds traditionally armored Roman soldiers with motorcycles and video games.

How boring it would be to see a play you'd seen in your youth cast and set in exactly the same way today.

Daily Herald theater critic Barbara Vitello recently wrote about how some local theater companies are getting blowback for their updates of classics.

Oak Brook-based First Folio has received complaints from two dozen theatergoers who objected to the casting of Shakespeare's "As You Like It," which features a same-sex couple and three interracial couples.

"We realize that some of the decisions we make may prove controversial to some," First Folio's executive director David Rice wrote to the public. "We also recognize that those same decisions will prove inspiring and supportive to others. The nature of art is that it will, in fact it should, engender discussion and even controversy. If it does not, we are not doing our job as artists."

Paramount Theatre in Aurora featured an all-black production of "Jesus Christ Superstar" earlier this year, which prompted some critical calls and social media posts.

The theater is a place to free one's mind and live in someone else's shoes for a couple of hours. Seeing what you've come to know or think challenged through someone else's prism is the heart of the value of art.

One more thing to consider: in the late 16th century and early 17th century when Shakespeare was writing, every actor on stage was a man, even though the characters were not. And that means men sometimes wore dresses and kissed other men.

If you're a fan of Shakespeare, you'd probably hate to see interest in his work die out. For his brilliance to survive another 400 years, theatergoers will want to see themselves reflected in the casts that act out his plays.