a poor player

Dunkirk NY – I mentioned in the last post that one of the “big lies” perpetrated on theatre students is that they get to work in near ideal conditions for their time in school, something they won’t get a chance to do for a long time after. I’d like to take a more extended look at how colleges perceive the creation of art. This is a topic that goes a bit wider than theatre, and I think exposes the deep conservative nature of artistic training on most campuses.

When was the last time you read or heard about a really good controversy concerning a show produced on a college campus? Or an art exhibit? Or a music concert? They seem to be extremely rare, and even when they exist, they hardly raise any fuss outside the institution. I guess the closest I ever came to creating a major fuss was in a production of MacBeth where I had one of the witches in the fourth act vision scene bare a breast under very low light. It raised a stir with the local Baptist minister and some local high schools because they wanted to bring their students to the show and assumed they were going to get a “traditional” rendition of the play. And that sort of says it all – the expectation is that universities will present us with “traditional” art in traditional ways, the “high art” that everyone talks about. There is absolutely no expectation that universities will produce any sort of original art whatsoever, but rather act as a museum of art in every possible way. Shakespeare will be done as “Shakespeare,” classics are expected, and high art will be enjoyed by all.

I have always found it something of a contradiction that in almost every other segment of the university tradition, a combination of preserving the past while exploring the present is accepted. The sciences in particular take this route. Students learn established principles of the past in science, but in terms of research they work with their professors to explore new areas of investigation. But in the arts, the name of the game is not creation; it’s re-creation.

Now, actually I have no objection to re-creation in and of itself. Oftentimes it’s very helpful to imitate and re-create so as to gain understanding. It used to be traditional for artists to copy major works to understand principles of composition, brush stroke and color. But it was always understood that eventually you’d go on to take that information and make it your own and grow from there.

This mindset is not at play in theatre education. You learn the past, all right, but there is little, if any, thought given to obtaining the skills necessary to be a creator rather than a re-creator. The theatre season constantly reinforces this. In most college settings, theatre seasons have to pay for themselves to some degree. Audiences pay the freight, and in most situations the last thing you need to do is piss off your audience by offering anything which is not traditional.

Indeed, the idea of the theatre season for most colleges has almost nothing to do with training their students, but with satisfying a paying audience, one that most colleges cannot afford to lose. At Fredonia, I have noticed over the years a marked decline in the size of our audiences. Even musicals are not drawing like they used to. If you were to take out of our audiences all students required to be there (I’m willing to leave there those who are there of their own volition), all students who are friends of cast members, all family members, and all faculty and staff, the resulting number of members from outside the college would be dismally small. Even leaving in the faculty and staff, it might not fill up a third of the theatre on a given night. And, of course, people in the Fredonia area tend to be older, and they are retiring, moving and dying.

Do you give this kind of audience new, experimental, innovative theatre? Of course not. Why? They don’t want it. They want their university to give them the classics, so they can feel liberal, educated, and maybe even slightly superior (sidenote: I’ve begun to notice the blatant “snob appeal” approach of public radio when they ask for donations. It’s caused me to stop giving). If you gave them something unusual, they will stay away in droves, and that of course affects your production budget and bottom line. Hence, no theatre season.

But would that be so bad? Why must theatre departments feel they need to produce seasons at all? If it’s the case that there are relatively few audience members, why go through all that trouble? Is it really the best type of training?

If theatre is to become more innovative, I think that the time we take to produce a theatre season might be better spent allowing students to be creative rather than re-creative. Given the opportunity, young people can be astoundingly expressive. If the usual time spent in rehearsals were spent as time learning how to write and do shows in found spaces, we’ve be better able to make some breakthroughs, perhaps, in theatrical form, in writing style, in thematic content, and perhaps in many other areas.

I did witness one period of time in my experiences at Fredonia where a group of BA students actually did attempt to “break away” from the department to some degree and become their own producing group. They came to the realization that, as BA students, they were not required to participate in the theatre season beyond fulfilling a technical assignment (BFA students must audition and play as cast). So they auditioned only for those shows they wanted to audition for, and used their “free time” to create independent productions. They produced That Championship Season in the local opera house on their own. They wrote a play called Understanding Women which combined short film with live action. They formed an improv group called Random Acts, again using the local opera house as their venue and performing at midnight. It was an interesting time, as you could in some ways feel the rift between this independent group and the students who worked in the system. They went on from graduation to open Vision Theatre in Riverhead NY, where they produced a combination of new works, multimedia theatre and improv comedy alongside standard fare like The Zoo Story, Always, Patsy Kline and What The Butler Saw. The theatre survived for three years, but eventually folded due to financial difficulties, something they did not have to deal with to any large extent in college. No group of students since then has ever been so daring and independent in approaching their training.

I can’t say that today these students are any more or less successful than any other students who have come out of our department. They continue to struggle in their careers. But I can say that they have a far different outlook and vision for their theatre careers, and certainly no illusions. They are still creative people, not re-creators. And I think that’s what we should be after in looking at how we think about their practical training. There has to be in our productions some sort of better mix of creation of art and re-creation of art. The art of the theatre cannot be simply about the past; it has to contain some element of the present and the future in terms of its direction.

College and university theatre departments have an abundance of riches when it comes to resources, and it seems to me that these resources need to be placed in the service of artists both in and out of the university. We need to produce more playwrights and give those whose plays need full production for development the chance to have a full production. We need to bring in guest artists to give us more of an idea of what’s going on outside the academy and help us to help our students be better prepared. We need to offer our venues to creative people for rehearsal and exploration, and give our students the opportunity to work with them in residencies. At the end of last year we had the Neofuturists from Chicago in for a few days, and from what I heard it was pretty electric. How can we do more of this stuff to turn our theatres in laboratories rather than museums?

I have often said that, in some ways, theatre departments are really misnamed. More and more they are becoming Departments of Show Business, with their narrow focus on the Broadway/LORT model. The balance here is out of whack; there are far, far too many theatre programs which pursue the “business” model, and far too few which pursue the artist/scholar model. Without having to get too deep into an argument about what art is, I think the business model is one which does not allow for much artistic expression. If theatre departments want to be worthy of their name, they should do more to create the sort of atmosphere in which theatrical expression, theatre as art, can be pursued. Or else change their name; truth in advertising. -twl

PS – See Scott’s Addendum on theatre training and its connection to the business world. It’s a most interesting perspective.