By Amanda Knox

ArtsWest Theatre’s 2015-2016 season bears a loaded title: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness Success. It promises to confront a theme with which all Americans are familiar but appreciate across a full spectrum of perspective. It is the American dream: what it was, what it is, what it may turn into, and what that says about who we, as Americans, are.

It is an ambitious theme, especially post 9/11, when the shock of that tragic attack still resonates, uniting and dividing us. To open up the conversation, ArtsWest gives us Green Day’s rock opera about dejected and lost innocence in the post-9/11 era, American Idiot.

Even more ambitiously, ArtsWest is offering two ways to experience this musical. One is the Observational, where you sit back and enjoy the show from the comfort of your seat, as you would expect to. The other is Immersive, where you’re up on your feet, traveling through and around the stage, glimpsing into the different perspectives of the three separate protagonists in a nonlinear adaptation of the show.

ArtsWest artistic director Mathew Wright has this further to say about the production:

How does American Idiot set up and contribute to the season’s overall message about the American dream?

The season is about how we define the “American Dream” in an America that is undergoing a rapid series of paradigm shifts. Among the things that are coming to the foreground in our national conversation is the widespread inequality of many kinds that is turning the American Dream (creating a life of happiness through a degree of opportunity and the possibility of financial stability) from a “dream” to a necessity. At the same time, this growing necessity is a growing impossibility for many (most?) people.

American Idiot looks at young people trying to navigate a path through the land of opportunity they’ve been promised and searching for a meaningful existence in a country that’s in a confusing state of crisis and flux. They are inundated with and immersed in a loud and thick wall of media that they can’t sort through. They want very much not to follow blindly and to become their own people, but they don’t know where to even begin, and so they wind up taking the path of least resistance, which is to disconnect from the real world.

We begin with American Idiot because it speaks to this immediate moment, today, right now, in 2015, with an election looming – and because it concerns the struggles of young people whose country America is about to become (and of whom only 45% percent voted in the 2012 election, which was itself down from 51% in 2008.)

Why is your production of American Idiot both observational and immersive? Can we expect the productions to follow to also push the boundaries of form?

Part of the reason is because the material is already a hybrid – on one hand, the “story” has a pretty linear narrative – on the other hand, the form (in terms of lyrics and structure) is very abstract and poetic.

So in one sense, the reason to do it this way is simply that the material uniquely affords you the opportunity to, and we are at a point in the life of the American Theatre where we have to be seeking innovation in form if we want to deliver content to people who could find it in more exciting and accessible forms elsewhere. But the more important reason is that the message of this material hinges on being able to access the inner life of these characters – difficult when the form is a huge epic rock opera. The approach they’re taking has allowed Eric and his creative team to create something that is simultaneously epic and intimate. In many ways, this echoes the form of the source material, the album, which is designed to be consumed in two ways – on a personal, intimate level (via headphones or in your car with friends) and on a huge, removed level, performed by its creators in enormous stadiums with 40,000 other people.

Green Day’s album American Idiot was released in 2004. American Idiot the musical was first performed in 2009. Is the story still relevant?

In fact, I think the material has grown in relevance. One of the most basic things American Idiot speaks to is the complete inundation and saturation of the media in our lives. The stakes of real world events becoming obscured by a media who paints them as entertainment events is nothing new. However, I think the digital media revolution has exponentially increased this, even since 2004. People don’t need to go to CNN.com because everything you think you need to see is on your Facebook wall. Even when you do turn to CNN.com, it’s useless because the “Politics” section of reads like TMZ. As many people have noted recently, we can’t talk about the issues because everything is painted as a huge, glorious, and wildly entertaining soap opera – because of this disconnection, the true consequences of these issues (and the decision-making that goes with them) is not palpably felt. That first Republican debate felt more like a bizarre issue of Celebrity Apprentice. The problem with that is that the person who wins the reality show controls the direction of a nation, and by extension, the world.

When I was a teenager, and I wanted some human interaction, I had two options – call someone on the phone, or leave the house and go see them. Today, I could spend a full 24 hours refreshing Facebook, commenting on posts, reposting posts, text messaging folks, writing emails, tweeting my thoughts, Instagraming what I see, Snapchatting random moments of my life, and feeling “connected.”

Why pay attention to actual reality when you can plug yourself into a fully immersive, customizable virtual reality you carry in your pocket? The real world is always a scary place and right now, there is some seriously high stakes stuff going down. At 31, I sometimes want to disconnect and take the path of least resistance. I can’t imagine how teenagers feel.

Is there something that your 2015 production will bring to the table that these past performances haven’t?

The beauty of American Idiot the musical is that it brings the ideas in the lyrics of the album to life by putting them in the mouths of characters in relationships and in crisis in front of us. This production in particular brings an unprecedented level of intimacy and access to these characters and their story – you can’t disconnect from the material because you, the audience, are living inside of it literally inches from young people who are crying out for help.

Green Day’s American Idiot will be performed at ArtsWest Theatre (4711 California Ave SW) September 10—October 11, Wednesdays through Saturdays at 7:30pm, Sundays at 3pm. Run time is 90 minutes with no intermission. Tickets cost $15—$39.50 and may be bought at the box office or online: https://artswest.secure.force.com/ticket.