Theater in its time

There are many things in life that we rediscover, and it is interesting how - in the middle of a lecture - the skies can open up and a truth suddenly starts to blossom inside one's own head. This may not be a new truth, but the fit at the moment seems so apt.

I think one of the interesting overlooked aspects about theater is its relationship with history. Film interprets the story in its time and freezes it. Ever after it must be viewed with an understanding of the world and times in which it was made. We may interpret a film in present day, but the film itself is a thing of its period. It is an artifact the day it is published.

Theater is always a present interpretation. It is ALWAYS produced with a contemporary perspective on the work, because it cannot be truthful otherwise. Every person involved in the play experiences the world the day it is performed, and in an existential sense, it cannot be the same intepretation of a year in the past. A play is a live performance. Even a film of a play is a film bound to its time, not a play.

This semester it was in an introductory class of students with limited theater background, and I was trying to find connections to help them understand the way theater relates to its time. I used to use a clip from the 1992 film of David Mamet's 1982 play Glengarry Glen Ross, but that's so last century that few students have seen it. And I don't watch enough film to have a good alternative reference. The play is a good example of Mamet's tactics, known to all theater people, of a contemporary male aggression that is as compelling as it is fearsome. But if I point to it as a cultural marker, I have to remember that it is already 30 years old. And although I've not seen the play recently, I expect it is performed with a different sensitivity to what makes people angry and what makes them react as they must in the play.

I think the students get it. They grasp intellectually what was going on, but they can't get to the gut-level grasp of that open-range world, when all the old bets were off and the new ones had not been placed yet - before the crisis of AIDS and cultural revisionism of the 1980s and the Reagan years.

I find myself lecturing on America in the 1970s and about the social breakdowns of the era. It was the transition from the political and social turmoil of the end of the 1960s through the metastacizing of the drug culture. By the 1980s we had a full blown drug market and a hypersexualized popular culture, an anti-law-enforcement culture that had not been seen since the 1930s, major cities that you dared not enter at night, and a fuel crisis prompted by a failed effort to prop up a fraudulent power in Iran. It actually seems so much worse in retrospect than I remember feeling at the time. But all of that dysfunctional culture fed Mamet's writing, and by 1982, Glengarry was where he had to go to go over the top.

I think about the other playwrights that came out of the period, and I wind up assigning Sam Shepard's Fool For Love (1983) as a reading. I am fascinated by the construction of the story and how it moves from naked aggression to lyrical storytelling, and seems to end with acceptance of unresolved despair. It is a kind of playing out of our intentional abandonment of social frameworks in the 1970s. As artists and teachers we have reflected on this connection between art and its time and embraced it intellectually. But the moments when you see it in action make it profound.

I have to wonder what the effect is on my students. For them, typically born about 1990, the 1970s is as distant as the Depression was for me. It's old news and moldy history - and I can see my uncle wince as I said as much about his stories. My students are good people and they are going about building their lives on a different set of assumptions, ones framed by the more recent world that grounds their experience. They listen patiently to my grand pronouncements and grasp the outline, but their frame of reference to the history is only intellectual.

Ultimately, I understand that this only matters because I have lived to experience it. The intense experiences of the 1940s and 50s belonged to my parents. My students today will remember most the world since September 11, 2001. But that doesn't mean we should not try to understand the worlds that spawned the one we live in. It is through the arts that we may sense the real spirit of the times and its relevance. Whatever we do in theater, it always will be interpreted in the present, and therefore a reflection of and comment upon its time of performance.

Scenemaker
May 15, 2011

Summer and Theater

It's the season for profound transitions.

I'm reminded of my family history research and how the season affected life before air conditioning in places where it mattered. Before the Crash of '29 my eastern Kansas grandparents camped for a month annually in the mountains of Colorado. Resort areas of New England and the northeast still show the skeletons of a prosperous past of seasonal migrations before ubiquitous summer air conditioning.

We mark our calendars with seasonal changes in activities, but we seem not to require the amenities we once did. Some areas remain popular for shorter holidays, and amusement parks have become more extravagant. Air conditioning and expressway access have had a significant effect on recreation choices. Summer theater suffered as all theater did with the ubiquity of television, and now internet distractions. A few of the old established summer theater venues remain in the Northeast resort areas, but most do not.

I advocate hard for theater students to plan ahead for a residential summer theater experience, usually between junior and senior year. Often that means foregoing an established paying summer job, so they need to work it out. Most of my public university students live within an hour's drive from the university and remain heavily invested at home, so they don't really "go away to college" in the classic sense. Few had anything more than day-camp experiences when growing up. An 8 or 12-week, multiple-show, residential summer theater experience is a big step for them and requires some sacrifice. Whether they continue in theater or not, the experience is valuable for its own sake.

Some long-established resort playhouses continue to produce in the northeast and elsewhere, and they remain important for the development of theater artists. If students can get hired at least for cost (room and board) at an active multi-show venue, they get some important experiences under their belt:

--Many students face their first adult independence. The experience of beginning college is pre-adult and much more managed. Negotiations of relationships and personal space are more critical in summer theater because of the work intensity and jammed living arrangements.
--Students meet and must live with other artists of comparable or greater talents from other places and with other training. They get a different perspective on their own talents.
--People will be more blunt about the work. If one's work is good one will be highly regarded. If it is not, one will get the message. Usually.
--If they are successful, they will be able to list their first non-school reference.
--It is an important node in the network. Every working theater artist can cite an access or opportunity they had because of an experience or an acquaintance in their first summer theater.
--The learning curve is vertical. In spite of what one is taught in school, there is no definitive way to do anything -- only ways to meet the criteria for better or worse. The world takes practices that work.

Theater is a relatively small and mobile community of artists and the summer theater experience will lead to connections. Maybe it will be somebody who was there, when you were there or at another time. By knowing you shared an intensive theater experience, you have a perspective on each other that grounds a level of trust. Serious theater students need to plan for it.

Scenemaker
May 7, 2011

Personal Technology in Class

A feature in the Boston Globe this Sunday morning took on the classroom distraction matter - again. Apparently some universities are contemplating inhibiting classroom wifi. This relates also to the cellphone texting issues. I struggle with this as taking on a role I thought we agreed to shed 40 years ago.

At the college level, what is our responsibility as faculty to discipline our students' adolescent behavior? I've written before about my own approach, arguably a cop-out, that students are in college and old enough to make their own choices, even if they are bad. I have written that this perspective comes from my having lived and been educated in the late 1960s and early 1970s during the struggle by students to shed "in loco parentis" from college regulations. The argument then held that 18-year-olds who were old enough to die in war (then in southeast Asia) should be treated as independent adults. Certainly not like errant school children who did not understand the implications of their behavior.

But the media are hot and addictive. The idea of responsibilty at a given age is a matter of social attribution, not a biological condition. As an adult in the 1990s, I could barely contain my own eagerness to see what response there was to my emails or posting on chat sites. How can we expect rising adults to respond any differently with a laptop computer or a computing pocket telephone? The fundamental premise of social networking is encouragement of that addictive response.

This is hardly the first addictive social technology. Some have come and gone, like citizens band (CB) radio of the 1970s and 80s. Earlier ham radio had some cachet, but it required specialized skills, knowledge and equipment.

And the telephone. A highly controlled utility for a century, it blasted open with new technologies and social uses. Teenagers notoriously have been intensive telephone communicators at least since the 1940s, but housewives (an old 20th century occupation) also were ridiculed for their intensive use. Eventually, mobility was the key for telephones, and then it morphed into a comprehensive communication technology. We now have merged it all - telephone, telegraph, CB radio, repeater mobile radio and walkie-talkie. We also are merging it with power computing and data transfer. We're thinking now about all data and communication existing in "the cloud," everywhere and nowhere. We seem to be approaching a kind of communication Singularity.

Every one of these developments have had compelling utilitarian value, AND addictive appeal. Every age group is susceptible to the addiction, but it is most problematic for people who have not mastered their impulses - something that is counter-intuitive in our commercialized culture. Free enterprise thrives by engendering addictions.

But what does this mean in the classroom? What is the limit of our responsibility to enforce (not just encourage) student focus?

As I've written, I formed my approach to education when it was a meal to be offered, not force-feeding of young adults. Throughout my career I've seen that my job as a teacher is to present and structure the learning experience, to encourage and facilitate but not to force or enforce behaviors that make it work. With that approach one simply reports the degree of learning that one believes has taken place, as measured by examinations and quality of student work. One tries to employ pedagogical techniques that help students organize their learning - emphasizing the structure of the knowledge, connecting the dots, assigning work that involves integrating the knowledge and skills, encouraging creative thinking within a frame, applauding original thinking and evidence of integration, and creating assignments that require application.

The motivational piece is a bit more difficult. I admire faculty who make it work well. The yawns that greet my enthusiasm and excitement for the field and the material are pretty discouraging, but I often find I can't really interpret the responses of students with any accuracy. Students I thought were only vaguely present sometimes tell me later how much they got out of it. Others I thought were getting it, later show little evidence of having done so.

Student use of technology in the classroom makes me try harder, and I try to make sure that what happens in class is important for learning. I do have students with laptops open, and I tell them if they are going to watch a movie or surf the web, they need to sit in the back of the room. In the end, the classroom experience is what it is, and I put the responsibility on the student. Everything they need is there, and I am a resource for help if they need it. The exams are structured to tell the story. It's up to them. For better or worse, they're adults now.

Getting to Real: Rehearsal Check and Put-In

I just completed the first day of a load-in for Machinal, which opens in about 10 days. For a designer, the load-in or put-in is nerve-wracking. It's very demanding and the kick-off of the pressure period. On a given day and time, people start placing scenery on the stage. Your choices become commitments at that point, and reality begins to cut in. That really is what it is going to look like.

It can be very gratifying, but it's quite hard work and a long day. Whether you personally do any heavy lifting, it is busy with planning, consulting, organizing, directing. Protecting. You are indebted to an efficient and capable technical director and stage manager, but many choices are made in the spaces between the drawings and reality. Three inches more here. Reinforce there. Mask into this mark.

The designer usually sees at least a couple of rehearsals of a few parts of the play. The rehearsals one gets to watch only approximate the eventual performance. So what's the point? I always learn important things I didn't know were happening. I get a clearer perspective on the important moments and how they must play.

Rehearsals usually are in a different space where the setting only can be suggested. The dimensions are taped out if possible, but it's all two-dimensional. The actors wander through the space, crossing wall lines and levels, working with miss-sized furniture placed willy-nilly, often only vaguely related to the ground plan. Watching a rehearsal challenges your powers of visualization, but it's important to do if you can. I find that the play in my head is quite different from the play with the actors, no matter how much conversation I've had with the director.

It's also good politics. The director has a chance to point out problems. The director and performers ask questions and point out things they can't make work well. I usually find they aren't using things they didn't know they had, and I discover needs I didn't provide for. It's in a rehearsal that I can understand the implications of the director's casting. And it's in the rehearsal that those ideas we spoke of in design conferences take on a reality full of implications.

The actors also are aware of an observer. It's a bit of an intrusion on their private party, so they tend to game up a little. It's good for them, too.

But the put-in is the reality check, especially when much must be built in place. Sure, I worked with a model and a sketch, but is this what I really expected? My goodness, that platform is high up there. Damn, that area is going to be cramped. Will that castered platform really work the way I imagined? Is that color really going to work? Is that pattern too big for the space and audience distance? Is the amount of that color going to overwhelm everything else? Does this have the richness and finish that I want my work to have? Is it interesting? When the audience sees this will they feel like something exciting is going to happen? Will this set them up properly to receive the play? Will the quality of the design and level of finish tell them that they can relax because they won't have to forgive anything?

Finally, the put-in also is an exciting exercise, because it all comes together at once in a short period of time. It is wonderfully validating. The drawing becomes real and tangible. You dreamed it, thought it, planned it, drew it, and . . . here it is! You created a world.

Scenemaker
April 10, 2011

Launching a Design Project

Back into theater design again. I just left a design class where a student was complaining about the 2 to 3 hours he spent working on a model for Marlowe's Faustus. He's a good guy and really wants to get it, so I don't fault him. Somehow we don't really communicate the commitment it takes. (Perhaps because nobody would pursue it if they knew.) I told him that the design I'm working on now, a production of Sophie Treadwell's Machinal, got worked out in model last weekend - all day Friday, Saturday, and 6 hours on Sunday.

That time was just on the rough design model work. Not counting the sketching and research and conversations with the director that have taken place over the past couple of months. And it's a rough model - a design proposal, something to have a conversation about.

I explained that the advantage of model work is that it really is slow. I had done a lot of visual research and had a sense of where we wanted to go. I began with a short list of requirements that evolved as I worked, and I had a vague thumbnail of a visual idea.

I knew I needed three platformed spaces above the stage, so I cut three scale platform tops and posts to hold them up. Then I worked out the access. I also created the slipstage for scene changes I knew I'd need. I had already discussed most of the furniture needs and how the changes might be done (emphasis on "might be") with the director. I included a required door, and I created steps - three versions before deciding we could use a spiral stair and began to research that. I went back to the research and did some doodling to develop the look, then began constructing the model pieces to make it work.

This is designing in the model and it is a slow, evolving design process. In the following design meeting with the director we worked out more of the detail and flagged problems for scene changes and properties. The build TD was able to look at the model and flag problems he saw. The model doesn't show the final ideas but it leads to conversations about requirements and alternatives. Discussion begins on budget, materials choices, alternatives for positioning elements, the build sequence, and acquiring materials and a spiral stair. And things I failed to allow for.

So the director and the stage manager have the very rough model to work from for blocking and directing traffic. I have the feedback I need to begin working on the draftings for the design. I doubt that I will have time to do a finish model. Since the show is to be done in shades of gray, I really don't need to do a scenic sketch for painting. I may paint a construction elevation just to work out a pattern of grays, but I won't need a full scenic sketch. In a thrust stage arrangement, a perspective view is pretty artificial anyway.

This is how a design begins in a good way.

Scenemaker

No Experts at Home

It seems awfully unfair, and certainly frustrating. They just won't let you be an expert at home. Sometimes environments won't accept expertise that is too close to the problem.

In an academic environment, everybody is an expert. Everybody. At something. That's how we got here. But there are some kinds of light that just has to be used very carefully. And that is the expertise about how to do our jobs - as guides for our students, as professional educators, and as scholars and artists.

The university academic environment is so different from other educational worlds - the K-12 world and the corporate training world, for example. Those results-focused employments are constructed for maximum effectiveness. That educational structure is fed by intensive research on obtaining clear goals and measurable outcomes. Expertise is drawn from wherever it may be found, within and outside the unit.

The university environment is different. It is not so very far conceptually from 11th-Century Bologna when a collection of individual law teachers formed a guild so they could share resources and expertise. The teachers employed the administrators. (Let me repeat: the teachers employed the administrators.) The autonomy of scholars today descends from that tradition of independent experts and scholars collaborating voluntarily on matters of common - and unique - interest.

The key here is "independent experts." Today's academic department is a collaboration of independent scholars, who are in fact expected to advance their scholarship and scholarly production through their own focused interests. And they are selected for employment by the way that their work fits in with those who would employ them. Today, the faculty do not hire the administrators, but neither are administrators "the boss." And the faculty do select their colleagues in most cases.

So everybody is an expert, and there is no structured hierarchy of experts. Academic departments are flat organizations with a single, often elected, member to assume the organizational responsibilities of leadership. While he or she may make decisions regarding the distribution of resources, rarely are they "the boss." Advancement has only two or three levels and is colleagially awarded. Everything else is broad-based and incremental. In general. Some environments do find ways to encourage and reward focused activity for interested scholars, and it can engender some collegial unhappiness if not carefully managed. There are some variations and exceptions, but at the core, the individual faculty member is employed as an independent expert collaborating with other independent experts.

What happens then, when one needs expert advice on the work of the department or the faculty? Experts are brought in. From where? From similar departments elsewhere. One expert here will go there, and perhaps one from there eventually will go here to evaluate and advise on the work of the faculty and their collective efforts.

Some advice may be found locally outside of the department, advice being more welcome from the neighbors, and from resource centers. But advice from an expert on the work of faculty may be welcome at home among departmental colleagues only when solicited. And only as much as solicited. They do know that you know something and will ask you for it when it would be welcome. The complicated academic relationship with authority so complicates our working and personal relationships. But I wouldn't trade it.

College standards - again

The heat is on again regarding college study requirements. Another study has been done showing that college students are not studying, reading and writing as much as they used to, and they are getting better grades. Among the debates was an interesting discussion on Tom Ashbrook's On Point last week or so. Responses attributed the result to the standard grade inflation argument, the use of student evaluations for faculty promotion and tenure, and the suggestion that the push before college was more intense than college itself .

I don't know what to think. The humanities faculty have been saying this as long as I've been associated with higher education, and that's been a couple of generations now. About the only thing I can see that is real about it is that the expectation is B level for average now. It doesn't give you much room to reward excellence. I know that's true in my courses. If a student is consistently at C level I pay closer attention to him or her. Usually, for students below that level life just gets in the way - illness, family deaths, family conflicts, commutes, work requirements, transportation issues. I make offers to help or accommodate them, rarely with any takers. Sometimes students really don't want to do any more work than to pass. But it's kind of been that way for quite a while. I do know that I'm getting better writing from more students, so the push in the schools for that seems to be working. But that's really the only change I see.

My approach to education was formed in the ed classes I took in the early 1970s. It was a world of examining what you do TO students in educating them, and their right to utter freedom from the oppression of forced learning practice. What I learned was to put it out there, help students understand why it was important to learn it, but leave it entirely up to them. No hard feelings. Forty years later, the paradigm is actively interventionist, and we're attacked if students aren't learning whether they want to or not.

So it's possible I can appear not to care if my students learn. I don't have an authoritarian classroom, but I tend to rely on some pretty traditional techniques - lecture, presentations, readings, discussion, a little group discussion, lots of projects, and a couple of traditional mostly essay exams. The work itself isn't difficult - you just have to do it. Students have complete access to everything in the class -and more- on Blackboard, but mostly only the best students take advantage of it. But I do care - I just want to treat them like adults: here it is. The choices are yours. I'm here to help, but it's really up to you.

What I fail to understand is that I can hand out the exam and discuss the answers in the class before, and still get miserable and inadequate responses. It's frustrating, and when I started teaching I took it personally, but I know better now. They're measuring their trade-offs and accepting the result. In the larger scale of life, that particular lapse really won't matter much.

I really can't say much. I'll admit that I had to start college twice to get it right. After a required stint in the military, I learned to treat study as a job to be done, and it really was pretty easy at the undergraduate level with that attitude, even if I was working a paying job nearly full-time. Since I now have several degrees, I obviously got the system down. I think the good students do get the system down. I think the less good students may be working the system. But that's okay at the undergrad level. It's their choice and their money. It's just life.

Scenemaker
February 11, 2011