Theater director on why kindness needs defending right now

Director Taibi Magar knows what you're thinking. When a musical adaptation of "Wonder" opens with a plea for kindness, some people will roll their eyes. In a moment shaped by division and loneliness, the message can feel almost naive.

But Magar's production, premiering this month at the American Repertory Theater, isn't interested in naive. It's interested in what happens when you actually sit with the idea that our differences might connect us rather than separate us.

The musical follows Auggie Pullman, a boy with a facial disability, as he moves from homeschool into a public classroom. It's not a simple story about acceptance. Instead, it moves through multiple perspectives—Auggie's, his family's, his peers'—each wrestling with what it means to be seen as different, and to see others clearly.

The script comes from Sarah Ruhl, a MacArthur Fellow and Pulitzer Prize finalist. The music and lyrics are by A Great Big World, the Grammy-winning pop duo. Actor Nathan Salstone, who plays Auggie's imaginary astronaut friend, describes the score as something that "pulls at your heartstrings and makes you feel like a kid again." It's the kind of detail that matters—not because it promises to fix anything, but because it suggests the production trusts emotion as a real force.

For Magar, theater's power isn't about changing the world directly. It's about changing the people in the room. "One of the great gifts of the theater is our capacity for imagination," she said, "and imagination is a required skill for social justice. If you can't imagine it, you cannot fight for it."

That's a different argument than "kindness will save us." It's saying: before you can build anything different, you have to be able to picture it. Before you can picture it, you need to feel it. Theater does that work.

The show runs through February 8 at the American Repertory Theater. Tickets are available on their website.