a poor player

Dunkirk NY – I feel constrained this morning to clarify the difference between institutional decay and people working within institutions. One of the dangers of aiming any sort of criticism at a particular institution that it can appear that you are simultaneously criticizing the people working within the institution for being a part of that process. “Guilt by association” is a real danger whenever it comes to discussions concerning the the relative merit of any organization or the quality of its contribution to the culture.

As an example, one can point to the current national debate concerning health care. You will find very few people who believe that the current mode of health care delivery in this country is not broken. But you will find many people within the health care system who disagree as to how to fix it. You will find that some people are engaged in the debate so as to protect their vested interests in the current system, and you will find some people are engaged in the debate so as to produce deep systemic reform. Caught somewhere in the middle are the health care providers – doctors, technicians, and, I’m willing to bet, particularly nurses – who struggle on a day-to-day basis to provide quality health care to their patients. Most of them are probably people who sought careers in health care because they genuinely wanted to be able to help people and save lives.

So let me make something clear: while I do believe that the current institutional form of theatre in this country is a model I do not believe in, and one that I do not believe promotes the best that theatre can offer to American culture, I also do not believe that the majority of people working within this system are not working to deliver and promote the best theatre they can. The “baby in the bathwater” metaphor I’ve used to title this post is, to me, as clear a metaphor as they come. Hard-working theatre people represent the baby; the bathwater is a combination of the current state of Broadway and regional theatre, and, in my opinion, the dominance of careerism within that system. Throw out the bathwater; save the baby.

Another distinction I think is important to make is the difference between “careerism” and “career.” The idea of having a “career” is a product of the Enlightenment and industrialization, when notions of “progress” and “self-improvement” began to take hold, and increases in wealth and education made having a “profession” more possible for more people. A “career” (interestingly enough, a word derived from the Latin word carrera, meaning “to run”) came to be defined as the culmination of the various jobs or roles someone had across a lifetime of working. By the latter part of the 20th century, having a “career” became the focus of most people’s economic and educational pursuits, and thus we get the mentality of “careerism,” the conscious and deliberate focus on producing a successful career in some professional.

This is where things get so subtle and so tricky – how do you distinguish between building a career and succumbing to careerism? I don’t know; I am sure it’s another one of those impossible lines to draw in black and white. But I think this article from the NY Times about careerism in higher education can give us some indication of what’s happening. Some key paragraphs:

Consider the change captured in the annual survey by the University of California, Los Angeles, of more than 400,000 incoming freshmen. In 1971, 37 percent responded that it was essential or very important to be “very well-off financially,” while 73 percent said the same about “developing a meaningful philosophy of life.” In 2009, the values were nearly reversed: 78 percent identified wealth as a goal, while 48 percent were after a meaningful philosophy.

“There’s no immediate impact [to studying liberal arts], that’s the problem,” says John J. Neuhauser, the president of St. Michael’s College, a liberal arts school in Vermont. “The humanities tend to educate people much farther out. They’re looking for an impact that lasts over decades, not just when you’re 22.” When prospective students and their parents visit, he says, they ask about placement rates, internships and alumni involvement in job placement. These are questions, he says, that he never heard 10 years ago.

Careerism is a mindset, and in today’s cultural and economic climate it is a difficult one to fight off. As with any mindset, it tends to dictate actions and choices. Careerism can mean that people choose careers based not on their own personal desires but based on the need to have financial security. It can also mean that people can only see one possible path in any chosen career. In law, this can mean seeing corporate law as the only choice; in medicine, maybe it’s surgery or some other specialization. In theatre, to young people today it clearly means top-tier regional theatres, film/TV, and/or Broadway.

I love theatre people. Generally speaking, they are altruistic, sensitive to the needs of people, and positive about life. I am perfectly ready to believe that most people pursuing careers in theatre today have good intentions and want to create significant art. At the risk of beating poor Ms. Ruhl to a metaphorical pulp, you may or may not like Ms. Ruhl’s plays, and you might or might not call into question her personal ambitions, but it would be difficult to argue that she is not trying to produce some sort of significant art and contribution to the culture in a positive way.

Today’s young people are not to blame for their focus on careerism, because it is all they see growing up, it’s all their parents are asking about, and it is all they are exposed to through the media and their own education (see this Ben Brantley article in the NY Times on the cult of fame cultivated on Broadway). It’s like Plato’s cave metaphor: if you are chained to a wall and all you see on a daily basis are the shadows of reality, all you can believe is that the shadow ARE the reality. It should be the job of educators to cut the chains and lead the cave dwellers into the light. We are not doing this; we continue to show them the shadows. Our job is to give people better and more varied structures and opportunities, focus on the good that theatre can offer the culture, and better guide their careers away from careerism.  -twl