a poor player

(This is the fifth and final installment of a five-part series looking at theatre education today. Please be sure to read Scott Walters’ companion piece over at Theatre Ideas.)

Dunkirk NY – So what in theatre education needs reforming? If I had to sum it all up, I would say that there needs to be a fundamental change in philosophy and approach. The focus of the educational effort needs to move decisively away from the pre-professional model and towards providing students the sort of education which gives them the ability to become active creators of theatre. They need an education attuned to the issues of their time, not ours, and one which develops an independent and critical mind that can turn what they see and experience of life into art. They need a subversive education.

Here are my practical suggestions:

• Reduce or even abandon the idea of producing a season. I think the notion of producing a traditional show or two is fine, but that needs to be balanced with trying to find ways for students to develop their own theatrical productions so as to discover how they like to produce theatre and what kind of theatre they like to produce. Teachers should be guides, assisting students by using their experience and talent to offer students clues and suggestions, but allowing students to experiment and fail. We need more laboratory work going on, more experimentation taking place.
• Establish programs where people interested in theatre education can go to learn how to teach well. I think without question the most discriminatory and hateful phrase I come across when discussing matters of education is “Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.” There is a response to that: “Those who can, teach; those who can’t teach go into some less significant line of work.” The very act of learning is one of the most significant human endeavors there is, and we cheapen it when we send in people who are not prepared to teach. It takes a lot more than the completion of an MFA to know how to teach, but unfortunately today that’s all you need. Interestingly enough, it’s often the case that the AEA card carries as much or more weight than the MFA, since it carries with it the illusion of professionalism. The teaching of theatre needs to be valued such to the point that we believe it’s important to educate the educators and give them the skills necessary to pass on not just knowledge, but wisdom.
• Establish programs of study which offer options aside from thinking about becoming a “professional performer.” The most opportune one seems to me to be programs which prepare students to become teaching artists. Since theatre is not built into many K-12 curricula across the country such to the point that you can actually be a teacher of theatre in high schools or elementary schools, the teaching artist route is currently the most practical. It’s also more adaptable to situations within a community setting, where teaching artists can go into social service venues and offer their skills for young and old. Finally, it’s also useful from the point of view of contributing to community theatre development (and see this post from The Playgoer for an interesting take on community theatre).
• Strengthen foundation courses in theory, literature and criticism. I realize this has a “back to the future” ring to it, but I think what’s at the heart of this suggestion for me is having a clearer understanding of what is actually possible to accomplish within four years of theatre education. Undergraduate education, at least, should concentrate more heavily on building a solid foundation in critical thinking, acquisition of knowledge and history, and the understanding of theoretical approaches. It never ceases to amaze me that we do not offer to young actors the opportunity to read and discuss all three (and some would say all four) of Stanislavski’s books, and yet we say our training methods are Stanislavski-based. Ask any young actor to articulate Stanislavskian principles of acting and you will no doubt get a blank stare. Why? They don’t read the material. Any university program can only accomplish so much in the limited time it has to teach a student. Do we really believe that all that time should be devoted to singing, dancing and acting in a theoretical vaccuum? Or are there other values we need to communicate which have far more significance for the art form? If we could say, broadly speaking, that undergraduate education should build the foundation only, and let masters programs and doctoral programs do the specialization in terms of skill-gathering and/or in-depth scholarship, we’d be better off. There is no need to create the illusion for an undergraduate actor that they are ready for Broadway at 22 with a BFA degree. That’s like saying your new house is in move-in condition when only the foundation has been finished.
• Open our resources to outside artists. We have in education so many resources; resources which would be the envy of any struggling company. We should offer those resources to outside groups when we can and let them experiment and “do their thing” within our walls. We ought to be producing far, far more new plays and original works than we do. If every educational theatre department did one new play a year, drawing that play from artists who lived within a 100-mile radius from their campus, how many more new plays would be able to receive a full production rather than being workshopped to death? It is abundantly clear that the regionals will not do this work, and it’s also clear that doing this kind of work is financially risky for small companies. So why shouldn’t educational institutions take up the banner, since they have almost no financial risk and they have the built-in facilities and talent pool to get it done?

I could go on giving more suggestions, but I want to make one final observation about this issue, and that is that I do not believe this sort of reform will happen from within educational circles. Like most institutions, theatre education is deeply conservative, and will not easily nor readily change. Why not? Well, take me, for example. I have it pretty good: I do theatre all the time, every day; I have two complete theatre complexes in which to work; I make an excellent salary; I have a house, a car, a wide-screen HDTV, computers, almost every sort of material possession you could name; I am contracted to work only 28 weeks out of the year for the salary I make; my wife and I have raised three pretty neat kids; I have tenure, and short of a criminal arrest or complete and utter incompetence I can’t be fired; I live close enough to an urban area that I can do professional work, yet enjoy life in a beautiful region with some terrific scenery. So why, I ask you, should I engage in any activity which would upset this lifestyle? Hey, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

The point is, major change almost never happens from the inside, because insiders have far too much invested in the status quo. They have made it comfortable for themselves. Change, generally speaking, usually comes from outside pressure. That’s what all the movements in the 1960s were about, outside pressure to change the status quo. Nobody, but nobody, is putting any outside pressure on theatre education to change.

And why not? Well, basically, nobody on the outside really values the role of theatre education, nor do outside artists see any potential gain for themselves in working for reform. Most people who have a theatre degree have a generalized reaction to it: they enjoyed most of it, met a mentor or two whom they connected with, but on the whole feel that they really learned nothing valuable for their current theatrical situation. The experience is simply chalked up to experience and then disregarded. The disconnect they feel from their education does not seem to translate into any sense that education needs reform. Education on the whole, it seems, just needs to be ignored.

I want to submit to you who are reading this that education is the single most critical human experience there is. Every moment of every day we are learning. Humans are born to learn. We must learn in order to survive. Everything we are we have learned how to do, and we have learned how to do it with the assistance of others, consciously or subconsciously. We learn to eat, to talk, to walk, to love, to make love, to laugh, to think, to hate, to fear, to fight, to die. Somewhere we learned how to write, to block a scene, to deliver a monologue, to light a set, to make a prop, to scrounge for money, to drape a body. Whether we learned it in school or not is immaterial; we learned it. Learning is at the heart of every human experience there is. Learning and education is at the heart of a free people, and only by constantly assessing and re-imagining what we learn and how we learn can we hope to maintain our freedom, as both a democratic society and an artistic culture.

I can write and talk about theatre reform until my fingers fall off and my voice goes hoarse, but nothing will happen without the added voices of those out there struggling to make theatrical art. This five-part series has been long, and intricate, and has tried to lay out the case for theatre education reform as comprehensively as possible, but all the intellectualizing and writing in the world cannot tackle the problem if the cause itself is seen as insignificant.

What kind of theatre we have in the future truly does depend on what kind of education we offer budding artists in the present. They system we have now, where young artists get one kind of training in the academy only to discover that they need to re-learn everything outside the academy is wasteful in every sense of the word. Artists and educators need to sit down and discuss at length this situation, but I do not think that either party will come to the table willingly. It’s my opinion, though, that theatre educators need a strong wake-up call which can only be delivered by practicing artists working and struggling to create theatre in society. We are the ones who are entrenched and comfortable; consequently we are the ones who need the most pushing and shoving.

What can you do? I would offer a relatively simple beginning; become an agitator with your own alma mater. And don’t be passive about it; be pro-actve. I often get requests from alumni of Fredonia to be invited as guest artists to talk to our students. This is all well and good, but it’s sort of passive. A more active approach would be to dig out a few Hamiltons, pay a visit to the campus, sit down in the place where theatre students gather, and engage them in conversation. Talk to them about what they’re doing, what you’re doing, find out what’s happening, and then let their professors know about what you heard and what your point of view is. You can even do this at colleges in your area. It doesn’t have to be your own university. Find a way to get involved. Offer students some opportunity to become engaged with what you do. They won’t come to you; they’re not trained to. You have to go to them.

When I first started out teaching in the mid-70s, I read a book entitled Teaching As A Subversive Activity written by Neil Postman (a Fredonia grauate) and Charles Weingartner. It’s still on my shelf, and when in need of some inspiration I dig it out and read parts of it. Here’s a sample:

“One way of looking at the history of the human group is that it has been a continuing struggle against the veneration of ‘crap.’ Our intellectual history is a chronicle of the anguish and suffering of men [and women] who tried to help their contemporaries see that some part of their fondest beliefs were misconceptions, faulty assumptions, superstitions, and even outright lies. The mileposts along the road of our intellectual development signal those points at which some person developed a new perspective, a new meaning, or a new metaphor. We have in mind a new education that would set out to cultivate just such people – experts at ‘crap detection.’ “

Theatre education is full of crap today. It will remain so unless we agitate for change from within and from without. The seed of future theatre breakthroughs lies in how well we educate young artists, or perhaps more fundamentally, if we are even willing to take young artists seriously. Perhaps the reason we care so little about education is that we do not value theatre students themselves as young people interested in self-expression. Educators see them as slates on which to stamp their version of “pre-professionalism” (at least their curricula see them that way), while practicing artists either don’t see them at all, or as misguided out-of-touch naifs. It is imperative for artists to become involved in this issue as well, both by agitating their own places of education, and by continuing to create a theatre that strikes some sort of chord for every layer of society. The entropic nature of all organic things requires that something new be created to replace what has gained maximum entropy, not to continue to waste time trying to bring balance to the old. If artists and educators can join forces to subvert theatre education from without and from within, we may have some hope of bringing in something new and promising. I’m trying to work on my part from within – can you work on yours from without? -twl