Attention!
When the lights go down, you’ve got their attention.
It’s yours to lose. When you lose it, you don’t get it back.
This applies to a play, concert or movie. It also applies to any creative endeavor in or out of a theater.
Everything comes from the theater. Sitting around a campfire telling stories about that great deer hunt is the original theater in the round. Cave art leads to the proscenium leads to the cinema leads to the television leads to the computer leads to the mobile device in your hand capable of connecting you to every human as well as every story on the planet.
Everything is fighting for everyone’s attention. Every day everyone sees thousands of stories scrambling to be noticed.
Whatever you’re working on will be lost forever if it doesn’t capture and hold someone’s attention.