a poor player

Dunkirk NY – It is going to be a busy day today, as I return to classes for the last three weeks of the semester and prepare for acting juries, the presentation of 14 one-act plays from my directing class, and finals. So I had better get this post done now, or given today’s schedule (which runs until probably 11PM) I might never get another chance to write it.

What have I learned in the 30/30 challenge? I’ll give you a bullet list: Continue reading ‘30 Days/30 Posts – The Wrap’ »

Dunkirk NY – I am cheating a little again, because rather than reply to Scott’s comment in my post of yesterday, I will make my reply a separate post. For convenience, here is Scott’s reply to Theatre 2.0:

Is this a problem to be solved, choosing one or the other, or a polarity to be managed, maintaining the strengths of both? Theatre 1.0 is not necessarily one-to-many — that is a model that became dominant in the scientific age that led to realism. Web 2.0 is not a many-to-many, really, but rather a your-turn-my-turn medium. Is there anything that stops theatre from doing that, other than this rigid attachment to the idea of the specialist-artist and the consuming-public?

Like you, I am equally drawn to Thoreau and Shirky, but I don’t think they are mutually exclusive. I don’t think…

Continue reading ‘Theatre 2.0 Part 2’ »

Dunkirk NY – Lately my thoughts have been swirling around between the world of Henry David Thoreau and the world of Clay Shirky. Thoreau was noted for his observation that Texas and Maine, once they were connected by telegraph, may have nothing to say to each other. Shirky has observed that the internet allows all of our concerns to have equal and valid weight, and that in the digital age Texas and Maine are so interconnected that their concerns are similar and mutual.

Continue reading ‘Theatre 2.0’ »

Dunkirk NY - I understand the term “Black Friday” as the day that ushers in for me the darkest time of the year – literally. The next 60 days are the days with the least amount of daylight in them, and of course I can expect from this point on a series of winter events such as snow, slush, freezing rain and the like. Today is grey and rainy, which at this time of year is considered a good day. Any day which does not bring snow is considered a good day.

I would like winter better if I had a snowmobile, but of course they are too expensive and used too little to justify their cost. But I did go snowmobiling a few times with a friend who had one, and I must say the I really, really enjoyed it. Traveling along trails through the woods is a fantastic experience. It’s a way to get lost in the woods and see a lot of open country and actually feel like you’re going somewhere. The inns and stops along the way make it possible to have a destination in mind and then return home.

Particularly exciting to ride is Alleghany State Park. Just getting to the park via snowmobile trails is a challenge. Once there, the trails lead all through the park and then into Alleghany National Forest in PA. You can travel a good 70 miles via trails and get pretty close into central PA by the time you’re done. It’s really a great way to enjoy winter.

I had also found that another way to enjoy winter is snowshoeing, although you have to be in pretty good shape to go very far. The best, of course, is to go snowmobiling to a nice place in the woods, and then pull out the snowshoes and find a nice trail to walk.

My recent foot injury has prevented me from starting up my winter routine of exercising, which is the way I fight the winter darkness. I have been staring at my treadmill waiting for the day I can get back on and go, but the ache in the bottom of my foot still remains. A little blue light therapy and some exercise will have to serve for the time being until I can splurge for that snowmobile. I am willing to take any and all suggestions on fighting the blackness.  -twl

Dunkirk NY – Happy Thanksgiving! Do give thanks for what you have, but take a moment or two to be thankful for what your friends and neighbors have as well.  -twl

Dunkirk NY – The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. So wrote Henry David Thoreau in 1854 in his famous tome on simple living, Walden. On this Thanksgiving eve, I wonder if people are eager to talk about what they are thankful for because so much of the rest of their lives has this quiet desperation about it.

I count myself among those about whom Mr. Thoreau is speaking. But I wonder if, when he talks about despair, he is talking about personal despair, or the fact that a person can despair for people and conditions around him.

I think the cause of my own internal despair is the continuing and seemingly unstoppable cultural slide into mediocrity. I do not know how to stop this slide, and even if I did, I do not think I have the talent or ability to do so. The onslaught of cultural mediocrity is so massive and so intense that I have no words left to describe it. Continue reading ‘A Quiet Desperation’ »

Dunkirk NY – You must read this post on Createquity. It is a wrap-up of the recent NEA Cultural Workforce Forum, and it’s excellent. I have been reading these rather obscure reports from the NEA for awhile now, and basing a lot of my critique of theatre curricula based on its information, but this is the first time I’ve seen the NEA actually hold a forum on this information and discuss the findings. It’s very interesting stuff.

I want to sort through the wrap-up in more detail before commenting on it, as well as try to get in the actual webcast (which is not yet archived). There is a lot to take in here, and a lot of ramifications for arts education. It will take a bit of time, especially over the holidays.  -twl

Dunkirk NY – Well, well, well – it appears I was asleep at the switch when my blogging tag-team partner Scott Walters started up TheatreIdeas again. Amazing what post-tenure review will do for a man!

And you know what? That gives me a day off, because this post counts for today’s posts, but you get to go over and read the latest from Scott instead of me – a great post entitled Standards of Education. And for those of you not in the know, Scott and I are in the planning stages of creating a joint blog which we hope will debut after the first of the year, a blog that concentrates on issues in theatre education and curriculum. We will probably make the joint announcement once it’s up and running.

Speaking of theatre curricula, this came in concerning a new MA program in Applied Theatre at USC School of Theatre by way of API News. It has me wondering if the notion of community arts education isn’t something that needs to happen more at the MA level than the BA level.  -twl

At the Game (note the World Series Yankee Cap)

Dunkirk NY – Last night I attended a basketball game between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Philadelphia 76ers. Two of my department colleagues and I had bought tickets early in the semester in the hopes of seeing LeBron James and Shaquille O’Neill play on the same team together. Shaq was unfortunately out with a shoulder injury, but LeBron was his usual outstanding self. It was a decent enough game.

More striking that the game, however, was the sensory overload of everything that went on around the game. In fact, it could be said that the entire event was really one huge piece of entertainment where a basketball game broke out every once in a while.

It was the first time I’ve experienced an indoor Jumbotron. Yikes. The thing is large, and assaults the eyes with non-stop images. The LED ring around the entire arena is always animated. Spotlights and mirror balls. The Scream Team and the Cav Girls. The Wheelchair Cavaliers at halftime. The kid traveling teams. All manner of dance routines. Jumbotron interviews. And at the beginning of the game, the unbelievably dramatic introduction of the players, complete with flames spewing from the Jumbotron (video taken with phone). Both my colleagues and I sat in stark amazement, wondering how we could ever get anything like this in our shows, knowing that we couldn’t. We can’t compete with that (can we, JT?). When you realize that 20,000 people in that arena get exposed to this on a regular basis, and that’s what they expect entertainment to be, you really despair of live language-based theatre ever making a real comeback with the general public. The sensory overload is off the charts.

So I had to counteract that today with a scooter ride on an unusually lovely late November afternoon. My ride took me down to Long Point State Park on the east side

Long Point State Park

of Chautauqua Lake. My foot is still hurting from last Monday’s accident and causing me to limp slightly, so I was unable to hike any trails. Rather, I sat by the lake, remembered it was the anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and thought to myself that it all began to go downhill from that moment. Kennedy’s administration remains for me a time where the arts were still on center stage in the American public, and the NEA was formed out of that spirit of culture. So much has been lost since then. The silence of the ride after the assault by decibel of the basketball game provided a welcome relief and proved to be a soul-calming experience.

I’ve been having trouble with words of late, because it has seemed to me that words no longer can contain or explain many of the thoughts and feelings I have swimming about in my brain, and I seem to be unable to convey myself adequately to students with my words. The contrast of last night and today put that in some focus. From the overload of images, sound and sensation to the quiet of the woods, the soft lapping of the lake on the shore, the rush and slight chill of the wind around and through the body as I move down the road, words themselves seem to play a very small role in all that. I am thankful for that – no need to explain anything to anybody.  -twl

Dunkirk NY – If there is one decision I made in my life which I truly regret, perhaps it was the decision not to move to Seattle WA in 1977. Had I done so, I probably would have been in on the ground floor of the Seattle theatre scene, and my life no doubt would be quite different.

I was in NYC at the time, had just left the NYU MFA program, and was trying to think about what to do next. As a city, Seattle had always fascinated me from the moment I first visited it in 1976. My wife and I had developed a plan whereby we would move to Seattle, get jobs, and after a year to establish state residency requirements, I would audition for the University of Washington’s MFA acting program and hopefully get to study with Duncan Ross. But the lure of a full-time high school teaching job in upstate NY, an area I absolutely love, lured me away from taking the risk of moving to Seattle. I actually turned that job down initially, but they came back a second time, and I thought that to have that job offered twice to me meant that I should take it. I quit after four months at that job. Eight months of nearly penniless living later, I was enrolled in the MFA at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, mostly as a means to escape debt.

It’s not necessarily the road less traveled, but the road not traveled that comes back to haunt you.  -twl