The Work of the Fool

We do the work of the Fool. It is the Fool’s business to gather up the bits and pieces of the real, possible world and juggle them into a new order - an order that is at once surprising, delightfully improbable, and a little dangerous.

In Revels, we create a past that never was. We bring together classes and ethnicities that never would have come together. We mix genders and ages in ways that defy known custom. We portray an era of good fellowship and compassion that has no precedent in recorded history. We show a world that never existed - except for the two hours that we bring that world to life on our Revels stage. For those two hours, we live in that world and we invite our audience to inhabit it with us. We do so in the hope that they will develop a taste for that world, a hunger for it.

And we hope that when they return to their world of the real and the possible, they will want it to be just little more surprising, delightfully improbable, and even a little dangerous. We hope that they will gather up the bits and pieces of that world, and juggle them into a new order. We hope that they will join us in the work of the Fool.

-David Parr

Spoken in circle Sunday, December 18, 2005.