A CATF in Context attendee, front left, asks a question to the event panelists on Saturday morning in the Center for Contemporary Arts. Tabitha Johnston

SHEPHERDSTOWN — Throughout each season of the Contemporary American Theater Festival (CATF), a variety of TalkTheater events are held, relating to the plays being performed each season.

TalkTheater attendees get the opportunity to delve deeper into the topics of the plays they see and expand their understanding of them, through input from CATF’s playwrights, directors, cast, staff and professional partners. On Saturday morning, a full crowd made their way into the basement of the second building of the Center for Contemporary Arts, for the first TalkTheater event of the 2023 festival season — a CATF in Context on “The Role of the Artistic Director in American Theater.”

“We’re in a hinge moment, where there’s room for a lot of growth,” said “The Overview Effect” director Courtney Sale, before commenting on the future of the theater industry. “We’re in a time of unprecedented polarization, and I think we respond to things, conflating ‘I don’t like’ with ‘It’s not good’ or ‘I don’t understand’ with ‘It’s not for me.’ The death of curiosity is the death of art, so the challenge is, we are living in somewhat incurious times. In a compassionate moment, I can look at that and say, ‘That is fear.'”

Sale is the Nancy L. Donahue Artistic Director of the Merrimack Repertory Theatre in Lowell, Mass. She is also a CATF veteran, having directed plays in a number of previous seasons, including Bekah Brunstetter’s “The Cake,” Allison Gregory’s “Wild Horses,” Allison Gregory’s “Not Medea” and Ellen Fairey’s “Support Group for Men.”

“For me, right now, there’s just this whole set of decisions and choices that have been raked off, so the scales of how much disappointing I have to do have increased,” Sale said, referring to decreases in theater funding and attendance. “Those are the days when I think, ‘Maybe I should just get an application at the Rite Aid.'”

"The Overview Effect" director Courtney Sale answers an audience member question at the first CATF in Context event of the season on Saturday morning in the Center for Contemporary Arts. Tabitha Johnston

According to CATF newcomer Susan V. Booth, who is directing the world premiere of Jeffrey Lieber’s “Fever Dreams (of Animals on the Verge of Extinction),” the theater industry has proven to be an enduring art, so it will likely bounce back from its current decline sometime in the future.

“We are so freely saying, ‘In five years, half of our theaters will be gone,’ and I don’t believe that to be true,” Booth said. “We have seen some really daunting loss, reductions and constrictions. But this is a durable art form!

“Depending on your stance on who really thought this practice up, I go with the Greeks. The Greeks created democracy and theater, pretty much in the same time and same place. There’s nothing coincidental about that, because democracy’s founded on the belief that multiple points of view must coexist. Theater is based on the same premise — we must have divergent points of view,” Booth said.

To learn more about CATF’s TalkTheater events, visit https://catf.org/buy-tickets/#talk-theater.

CATF intern Gabrielle Richardson hands programs to a couple attending Saturday morning's CATF in Context at the Center for Contemporary Arts. Tabitha Johnston