The Children of Theatre: A Manifesto
I wrote the following several years ago while in the midst of an ill-suited MFA program in Theatre Pedagogy. Looking at it now I feel slightly sad that I am no longer on an academic track because there are so many things that needed to be changed in so many theatre departments.
I still believe everything that I wrote in this manifesto–which is unabashadly extreme and idealistic, as all manifestos should be–but it is simply not my battle anymore. At the moment. For the nonce. Who knows, maybe I’ll pick up the mantle of theatre education somewhen down the road. In the meantime, I offer up this manifesto and dedicate it to all my friends who have stuck it out and who are now teaching theatre at colleges and universities across the country.
The Children of Theatre: a Manifesto
A manifesto is, by necessity, naive, willful, arrogant, overly simplified, angry, heartfelt, completely right and completely wrong. These are not the values prized by academic writers, which is why now is the time and the place for someone to come out and say that theatre departments are diseased and should either die or be treated. For many, the treatment will be worse than the death.
We are here to tell you, having seen close up and personal, that theatre departments all over the country are treating their students with the utmost contempt and neglect. Of course, this contempt is disguised by the facade of professional training.
Let us start with the premise that theatre training should not be vocational training in order for graduates to get jobs selling Chryslers or Ipods ore Bud Light nor should it be to place graduates in the latest sit-com or reality TV show. You do not get a BA or BFA in Painting in order to do the diagrams for airline safety manuals or illustrations for Time magazine. Honestly, are you training artist or employees? When the department head of a theatre program notes that a sophomore girl should lose twenty pounds and dye her hair blond … well, it’s pretty fucking obvious now isn’t it. When we pay lip service to teaching history but let students get by who can’t construct a proper sentence or spell Stanislavsky, again, it’s obvious.
“It’s hard,” you bleat.
“We need to give the student’s a sense of the business,” you simper.
“If our kids get film work then our program will be more attractive and will generate more money,” you whine.
Blah blah blah and cod-fucking-swaddle. Maybe we shouldn’t have theatre departments if all we are doing is sacrificing our student’s capabilities as artists and as people for the greater glory of Soap Operas, Commercials, Broadway and “Holy”-wood. Just give up the pretense that we give a shit about their creative powers, about their intellectual capacities, about their potential to find their own voices in a society bent on silencing passion and integrity … give up the pretense and set up some vocational training centers. And yes, we can still call them conservatory programs.
But a Bachelor of Arts? A Bachelor of Fine Arts? Are you really providing those? No. You are sacrificing these passionate, selfish, earnest, deluded, dedicated children. The Children of Theatre who are being crucified upon the insecure egos of academic directors out to prove that they are just as good as “professional directors; skewered by department politics and power plays; thrown upon the flames of sexist attitudes about beauty and appearance. (more…)
