Any Wikipedians in here? The Wikipedia article on community theater is, IMHO, pretty bad. I've never done Wikipedia before, but I'm going to volunteer to work on this one.

 

The article starts out with the UK definition of community theater: "a movement of professional theatre companies which developed in the 70's, 80's presenting plays for specific communities with common interests - local, or regional. The plays represented the lived experiences and concerns of these communities, had a radical approach and were performed in local community centres." It goes on a little more about this, and I get the sense that it's what we Americans would call "activist theater," or maybe "guerilla theater."

 

I think that's a significant enough difference right there to warrant this being split into two articles. Later it gets into the US-style of community theater ("am-dram" in the UK), but there's definitely some bias in there, and it's hard to tell in some cases whether they're talking about  community theater-UK or community theater-US, like here: "Though community theatres are generally more traditional in nature in US, in UK they are innovative , all forms of theatre are practiced in these non-professional venues." After this, it states that American community theaters mostly put on musicals and children's theater -- shallow interests for shallow people, I guess -- and includes this thought: "Community theatre in its US form and Amateur Dramatics in the UK is often ridiculed or lampooned, reputed to have lower quality than professional theatre." It disavows that notion in the next sentence, but still!

 

The article is also very poorly-written, as you can probably tell from the samples, and there are no references to back up its statements.

 

Anyone want to help?