The Need for Theatre R & D

Kudos to Rocco Landesman for coming back to engage the field about the "supply and demand" issue he raised (to great gnashing of teeth) at the New Play Development Program convening at Arena Stage. I have responded below a couple times to the issue, and no doubt will continue to do so -- after all, it is the raison d'etre for the Center for Rural Arts Development and Leadership Education (CRADLE). On Twitter, the hashtag being followed (suggested by Landesman himself, which again indicates to me that he wants a conversation -- again kudos) is #supplydemand. And while Howard Sherman may resist that hashtag ("Is it just me, or does everyone using NEA’s suggestion of #supplydemand seem accepting that this is equation to debate?"), I think that it does encapsulate the issues of audience development and geographical centralization that are important for artists to address.

What I want to discuss today, however, is an issue that I discussed briefly at the convening in a breakout session about devised work, and that Trisha Mead alluded to in a response she made to Landesman's blog post, where she said "non-profit theater should exist for the good of the culture- that the arts in general are the 'R & D arm' of our society." While Trisha was speaking about the relationship between the arts and society (and I'm not certain I agree with her analogy, but I'll have to think about it more), I'd like to talk about The Field of Theatre.

On the plane on the way to DC, I finally got around to reading an essay published last year in March by Hasan Bakshi, Radhika Desai and Alan Freeman on the Australian Arc Center for Excellence Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) entitled "Not Rocket Science: A Roadmap for Arts and Cultural R & D." I'd like to explore some of the ideas in the essay, but I'd first like to draw your attention for a moment toan analogy about another discipline: the sciences.

In the sciences, a researcher applies for a grant to run an experiment on a certain subject. He has a hypothesis to test, and a way to test it. If the grantor sees value in the experiment, it is funded. The researcher then fully designs the methodology of the experiment, runs the experiment, and then publishes the findings, with a complete review of literature and a clear description of the methodology and the findings, in a journal. The journal is peer reviewed, so at both ends of the process, the researcher's work is evaluated by qualified members of the field.

If we could look at a theatre production as an experiment for a few minutes, we see certain parallels. We often will seek funding for a particular project, and once the money is received we create the production. But the last part, the part I underlined above, is usually totally ignored. We don't feel the necessity of communicating to The Field.

The result of this truncated process is that The Field doesn't develop. Techniques and approaches remain local knowledge, known only by those who worked on the production. Vocabulary isn't shared and integrated. It is as if a scientist discovered a cure for cancer and didn't tell anybody about it, but instead just moved on to the next research project. OK, that's not a great analogy, but the point is that, across the country, theatre artists are reinventing wheels that already have the treads worn off them elsewhere.

When I first arrived at the convening, I ran into Ben Pesner, co-author with Todd London of Outrageous Fortune, and he told me he was reading the TCG publication The Artistic Home: Discussions with Artistic Directors of America's institutional Theatre that Todd London, Lloyd Richards, and Peter Ziesler published in 1993, and Pesner said that nothing has changed in 20 years -- the same conversations could be occurring today about the same problems. During one of the convening sessions, in a Tweet heard 'round the world, Polly Carl, the Literary Manager for Steppenwolf, said when she was head of the Playwright's Center in Minneapolis she and a research assistant had done a review of literature about the new play development processes and she said that looking over old notebooks, she realized "we regurgitate the same new play conversations every 5 years." Why? Because we don't engage The Field.

Admittedly, this ought to be a role for academia, but academia is filled with profs so obsessed with training the next generation of creative cannon fodder that we're not doing it either. Gotta get the fourth show of the semester on its feet! No time to think about The Field!

And I suppose it is a little intimidating to think that the things we discover in the chaos of rehearsal might be applicable to someone else somewhere else doing some other production. But scientists make that leap all the time -- the feel a responsibility to publish their research results, because others build on those results. At the convening, we spent a bunch of time, for instance, trying to define "devised." Heck, the first convening I went to was called "Defining Diversity." How can we ever make progress if we never get past definitions? To bring together that many high-powered, thoughtful people and to have them spend their time on definitions is a pity. But it had to be done, because nobody is communicating with The Field.

Sometimes the theatrosphere gets close, when a discussion goes on long enough to get beyond the initial position statements. But rarely, and rarely is it based on research.

Let's look at what Bakhshi et al has to say about this. Noting that R & D has tended to be defined in terms of Science and Technology (S & T), the authors notes that arts and cultural organizations need to recognize:

that the development of new products or processes, no matter how creative, inventive, or socially useful, does not constitute R & D if it remains tacit. The Frascati Manual [considered the Bible of R & D] requires R & D to clearly articulate research questions, apply dedicated rigorous methods, and produce replicable findings which can be made explicit for dissemination. The methods and outcomes of arts and cultural R & D must be explicit and capable of generalisation across the sector. This requires arts and cultural organizations to shelve the notion that the sources of art, culture and creativity are necessarily mysterious.

You're having flashbacks to college stats classes, aren't you? But I ask that you withhold your judgment a bit longer. The authors go on, in a section entitled Creative experimentation per se is not R & D, "experimentation and innovation in content and form are inherent to the arts. There is a sense in which every work is new." That's what we all claim, right? However, they go on, "if, as is usual in the arts and cultural sector, the knowledge created and the methods used are neither made explicit, nor codified, nor replicable for extension and use by others, sunch innovative activity falls short of the requirements of R & D -- even if it leads to innovation in the wider creative economy." In other words, it ain't enough to experiment, we need to generalize from the experiment and then share that knowledge widely. We miss both of these in the arts. We just do shows.

But what if the various people who do devised work, for instance, didn't only create a product, but tested out devising techniques, generalized the technique as a pattern (ala Christopher Alexander's idea of a Pattern Language for architecture), and shared the pattern to The Field for others to use? This is what Anne Bogart did with Viewpoints, and why Viewpoints has taken off as an approach to rehearsal -- she gave us a vocabulary, exercises, techniques and approaches that we could apply to our own work. Stanislavski did the same thing. "Proper, informed, structured R & D," Bakhshi et all goes on, "is needed for arts and cultural organizations to ride such great waves of change. It goes beyond mere individual artistic creativity, just as the knowledge needed to run a railway so vastly exceed the knowledge needed to build a locomotive, or the knowledge needed to electrify whole nations goes so far beyond the knowledge that produced the dynamo and the light bulb."

Applying this to our current Landesman-prompted discussion of #supplydemand, how can we complain about the fact that he is using traditional economic concepts developed for capitalist markets when we, as A Field, haven't developed our own terminology concerning business models or done our own studies about the effects of saturation on an arts market? The best we can manage is a few furtive gestures toward Lewis Hyde's The Gift, which we likely haven;t actually read all the way through, and some huffing and puffing about the importance of diverse expression.  But, as Bakhshi et al writes, "trialling new business models is urgent, as social and technological change makes old, often implicit, business models irrelevant." Surely every theatre company in America (or the world, for that matter) isn't operating on the same business model! How are they structured? How are decisions made? How is income generated and distributed? As Bakhshi writes, "The key point is that the knowledge be shared. This means it must be made explicit and have clear mechanisms for dissemination."

I know, I know -- that involves a lot of writing and thinking, and we want to be in the rehearsal room or at the computer creating our next work of art. But don't you think that scientists would much rather be in the lab than writing up their research? But they feel a responsibility to The Field. And consequently, the sciences advance, whereas we in the arts simply go in circles.

"The possibilities are immense," Bakhshi enthuses. "Arts and cultural organizations working with, rather than against, its grain, can lead social change towards a society more suffused with culture. They can embed themselves more purposefully and fully in ongoing social processes, and can create specific new ones. By learning from R & D-intensive industries, by allocating funds and specific intellectual resources to experiment and understand emerging ways -- aesthetic, social, and technical -- of satisfying evolving needs and demands and creating new ones, they can create their own knowledge about the changing sources of value in new forms of artistic experiences and apply it to yield innovations -- new processes, products, and systems -- for delivery."

By the way, I also think that the NEA needs to get on board with this idea. At the moment, most of their grants go to the creation of specific products, but I think that part of the expectations for anyone who receives a grant is to publish their findings. I know some of the documents I had to write when I finished my grant might be applicable in other situations, but my report disappeared into the files never to be seen again. This is also where a journal like HowlRound can contribute.

So the choice is clear -- we can continue "regurgitating the same conversations every five years," and spend lots of time never getting beyond defining terms, and allow people in politics and economics slice and dice us, or we can become intentional about our Field, and develop it as if we care whether it lives or dies. We're all smart people. Let's focus that intelligence on the broader issues.

More Thoughts on Rocco Landesman at the Arena

A few days ago, I wrote in response to Rocco Landesman's address to the New Play Development Program convening that began on Wednesday. In it, as has been widely reported, even by the New York Times, Rocco suggested that perhaps the nonprofit theatre system was "overbuilt," that demand is falling at the same time as supply is rising, and that we may want to consider "thinning the herd," as I put it on my blog post Wednesday night.

People didn't take too kindly to Rocco's statements. You could hear a collective bristle in the auditorium, one that increased in volume once the blogging world got involved. Trisha Mead called them "fighting words," which was then followed by posts saying that Rocco was calling for, in essence, Death Panels. J Holtam over at Parabasis, who like me was actually there, gets it about right when he writes, "But, I think, when you add up what Rocco was saying, it seems less like he's aiming at taking the little guys out of the equation and more like he's re-evaluating his funding priorities on the basis of what kind of work a theatre is doing." (italics mine)

Some people felt betrayed, writing "With friends like this..." There was a certain nervousness to hear the head of the NEA saying such things when the Republicans are once again suggesting that the NEA be zeroed out. Shouldn't he be the Number One  Cheerleader for the Arts? But the Chair of the NEA is more than that -- or at least, he ought to be. He ought to using the money that he has to make an impact in the field and to influence its development. To put it bluntly, I don't want the NEA to just spread money around, but to do so in a way that leads us beyond the status quo.

That said, while Rocco didn't say anything directly about funding only the Major Theatres, it doesn't take a genius to recognize that that's where his interest lies. While many have noted his background as a Broadway impresario, I think it is more relevant to note that he is a former student and protege of Robert Brustein, the former head of the American Repertory Theatre at Yale and Harvard and critic for the New Republic, who has long believed that the NEA ought to stop funding all these rinky-dink arts organizations and give the dough to somebody who knows how to use it (i.e., to Brustein). He's published these articles in many of his books. I remember when I was writing my dissertation about Brustein that he got particularly exercised about giving money to Folk Arts, which were just to darned lower-class for words.

The NEA is a grantmaker, and people like Landesman who lead such organizations are responsible for setting priorities. If we don't like the priorities, we need to argue about that issue, not throw a hissy fit about "how dare he." At least Landesman is out front with his opinions, so we can actually engage the issues directly, rather than having to tease out his opinions.

The slogan of Landesman's NEA is "Art Works," so if we want to engage this debate, we need to doing so on that basis. It's about economics and jobs and communities. Arguinf aesthetics is a waste of time; objecting to the use of the terms "supply and demand" is a waste of time. That's the vocabulary.

My argument is that, in fact, the nonprofit theatre isn't overbuilt in general, but it is overbuilt in certain places. We don't need more theatres in NYC, or Chicago, or Minneapolis, for instance -- that audience is largely tapped out, at least if you accept the idea that only a small percentage of people are interested in attending the theatre (I don't accept that, either, but I do think that developing a new audience means developing a new approach). One way to increase demand is to open new, untapped markets. If there are too many restaurants competing for diners in your city, then look elsewhere. My particular interest is the arts in small and rural communities, but it isn't only those places that are underserved. There are many medium-sized cities, suburbs, and other such places that are also being ignored by the lemming-like flow of artists to NYC in search of fame. There is a large swath of entire states in the midwest that have no TCG theatres at all.

This approach does a couple of things to make Landesman's job easier. First, it connects to his theme of Art Works. Second, it brings arts funding into a larger variety of districts, so that it is harder for politicians to score points against the NEA because their constituents in their district are benefiting. I know these ideas aren't sexy -- we want to talk about the wonderful things the arts does for the richness of humanity and so forth -- but we're talking about funding, politics, and economics and we need to talk that language.

So What Rocco did was send a warning shot over our bow. How are we going to respond? With hysteria, or focused resistance?

Arts Beyond the Margin

It seems to me that a thread that is running through many of the discussions reflects an underlying longing for artists to be integrated into a community, whether it is the community of theatre artists where they are working or the larger community that will attend the production. There are discussions about the extent to which people can be honest with each other, or the levels of transparency within an institution; there are discussions of the little things that can be done to make people feel valued, like having the AD pick a visiting artist up at the airport, or having child care available. But what all of these suggestions and discussions are trying to make up for is the fact that most of our institutions are made up of artists brought in for a short time to do specific productions. What artists want, in reality, is to feel the sense of trust and honesty that comes from being in relationship over time, and that just can't be created through a few gestures, as kind and generous as they are. You can't fake trust, you can't microwave relationship. Speed dating doesn't create a deep connection.

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As I expected, I ended up sitting at the center table for the discussion of diversity, representing geographical diversity. When we talk about, say, racial or ethnic diversity, we often talk about resisting marginalization, but being on the margin is to still be on the page. You can write in the margins. Geographical diversity, it seems to me, is beyond marginalization, off the page and scratching words into the tabletop or something. It's one thing to tell Rocco Landesman that instead of centralizing grants in the bigger theatres we need to expand our markets into underserved areas -- selling more tickets is something everybody can get behind. But it's something else entirely to suggest that the stories we tell ought to be those of the regions where we live. This totally goes against our current paradigm and suggests that perhaps reaching more and more people throughout the nation might not be as valuable as helping a specific community to fall in love with itself.

I listened quietly through most of the discussion, until near the end when David Dower prompted me to speak. What came out, I'm embarrassed to say, was pretty bombastic. It was something about the homogenization of storytelling due to the influence of the mass media, and that homogenization taking the form of stories about the urban experience to the exclusion of the rural (e.g., there is no CSI: Murphy, NC) and so forth, and ended with some wildly generalized statement about not finding portrayals of the rural experience in New York, at least not respectful ones. David responded that I needed to read Food from Trash and Say Grace, and Lisa Kron suggested the work of Ain Gordon and Sam Hunter. Perhaps so.

But the fact is that I don't really care in the least whether plays about rural themes appear on the NYC stage; what I want are plays about rural themes to be written by people who live in rural areas and produced in those areas, and I want the artists who are involved in those productions to be satisfied to have touched rural people without aspiring to Big City Recognition. And in our culture, that's just crazy talk.

That's where the beyond-marginalization comes in, because when all is said and done, my beef is with American culture as a whole, and ultimately I want out of it to whatever extent is possible short of becoming a survivalist. And that removes me from the discussions that are going on, which seek a way to more effectively join that culture. I don't like the idea of artist-specialists who create works of art and sell them to people. I think creativity should be democratic, an exchange of insights, viewpoints and stories based on authenticity rather than virtuosity. I don't think "excellence" resides in a work of art, but rather in its impact -- that quality and excellence is co-created at the intersection of the storyteller, the story, and the listener, and that that type of interactive excellence doesn't require virtuosity as much as connection. I'm looking for ways to create what my friend Patrick Overton of the Front Porch Institute calls the "poetry of place," art that enhances our sense of connection to where we make our lives.

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And that's what The Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue created by Melanie Joseph and Claudia Rankine, which I saw tonight, is about. Oh, sure, the formal element of a play originally performed on a moving bus rolling through the South Bronx is what will attract attention, but the fact is that the most important thing the play does is to en hance one's sense of the South Bronx as a place, a landscape with a dynamic present that is shot through with history. It is to the South Bronx what a Wendell Berry story is to Port William, KY -- perhaps with a lot less specificity about individual people, and a lot more poetic abstraction, but still an engagement with the details of a landscape. It's not a landscape that I personally find attractive, but if I lived in the South Bronx such a play might encourage me to see the triumphs and struggles etched within the buildings and parks of my neighborhood. It might help me move from being simply a resident to being a member of the community, a citizen.

On Rocco Landesman and Muhammad Yunus

After the first day at the Arena Stage's New Play Development Program convening "From Scarcity to Abundance," I have come to the conclusion that I have stayed away too long from writing on Theatre Ideas (and also on Rocking the Cradle as well). After a few comments, it became very clear to me that if I am known at all it is for writing here, and as busy as I have become, it is something I need to make time for.

And so....

The convening was opened by an address and Q & A session with Rocco Landesman. As anyone who has read this blog knows, his Peoria comment early in his tenure rubbed me the wrong way, as did a few other things. However, I must admit that I like his style -- you don't have to wonder what he really thinks about an issue, and he isn't afraid to provoke. Today was no different.

If you follow the Twitter discussion at #newplay, you'll see that several people took umbrage at his suggestion that if theatres were deer we'd have to shoot much of the herd. Indeed, Trisha Mead called them "fighting words." Landesman's conclusion follows directly and logically from a thought process that goes something like this: 1) it is appalling that theatre artists can't make a livable wage in the theatre (true); 2) there has been an explosion of arts organizations, and so supply exceeds demand (partially true); 3) the NEA has limited funds (true); conclusion: the NEA needs to give bigger grants to fewer theatres and let the other theatres go away. Call the cops!

Most people in the room wondered why we can't increase demand. Others objected to the likelihood that Rocco would give those larger grants to the larger, established theatres. 

I found myself reminded of Nobel Prize Winner Muhammad Yunus, whose practice of micro-lending has helped so many people in Bangladesh. He realized that the desperately poor were struggling for want of a few dollars startup cash, and he devised a way to get that money into their hands in such a way that it led to a sustainable business. As Yunus realized, a very small amount of money can have enormous positive effects. (Sidenote: I highly recommend Yunus' latest book Building Social Business, which can make you start thinking about a new business model for the arts.)

In order to help, say, the Guthrie or Steppenwolf and have a serious impact, the NEA would have to give an enormous amount of money, and so would have to reduce the number of grants it made. To have the same impact on, say, the Rude Mechanicals, the investment would be much less, leaving money left over to have another major impact on, say, Stage North in Washburn WI. Furthermore, such grants would actually lead to increasing demand, because while it may be that the audiences in the theatre capitals of the US are tapped out due to the sheer number of theatres making their home there, that is not the case in Washburn or other small communities. As a businessman, Landesman ought to know that one needs to look for underserved markets rather than try to expand mature ones.

But doing so would require the development of a democratic approach to the arts, rather than a careerist approach based on prestige. Like Republicans who seem to worry most about those who already possess the most, such a concern for helping the richest established theatres seems misplaced.

I encourage a national experiment in theatrical micro-credit.

A Week of Travel

New post here.

Another Reason Why We Have a Hard Time Getting Arts Funding in US

Sheesh.

A Lecture on Tony Kushner

[Cross-posted at the TACT blog.]

This is a lecture I will be delivering in one of my classes today

I’ve gotten to thinking lately about this class.   To me, our discussions seem sort of superficial -- l ike we’re not really engaged in any decent way with the material.   And I think it’s my fault:   Somehow, the questions I am asking, or the attitude I am bringing to class, is not asking you to dig in and find the really interesting stuff.

This bothers me because I have a very strong sense of what plays are for:  that we, as human beings, create stories not simply to “kill time,” but as a way of making our ideas about life more easily remembered.   So while we can laugh and joke about, say, Phaedra’s mother having sex with the bull, the underlying message is about uncontrolled passion.   It is trying to explain how people seem to “lose their mind” when they are suddenly obsessed with a person or an idea.   

Playwrights only write plays about things that are on the minds of the audience.  If nobody was struggling with passion versus social duty, then the story wouldn’t be compelling.  So this tells us about the French society. It is the same issue being wrestled with in The Cid.      And, in a different way, it is the same issue being wrestled with in The Misanthrope.  It is Aristotle’s question “how are we to live?”

 If you are a Jansenist, as Racine once was;  if you are a Jansenist who abandoned your religion for the theatre; if you are a Jansenist who has many affairs, especially with women in the theatre;  If you are a Jansenist who gives the same play to Moliere and his competition; if you are a Jansenist who, in order to get back to a respectable life, may have poisoned your mistress...  Then suddenly Pahedra isn’t just an academic exercise, it is the story of your life!    .The desire for an inappropriate partner.  How do you DEAL with that?   You WANT to do the right thing. but you don’t seem to be able to control yourself.

There’s a book by Jonathan Haidt, a U of VA psychologist, called The Happiness Hypothesis.  In it, Haidt says that our emotional side is an Elephant and our rational side is its Rider.  Perched atop the Elephant, the Rider holds the reins and seems to be the leader.    But the Rider’s control is precarious because the Rider is so small compared to the Elephant.  Any time the six-ton Elephant and the Rider disagree about which direction to go, the Rider is going to lose.   He’s completely overmatched. 

 The fact that this theme – the struggle between the Rider and the Elephant – is happening in a society completely committed to the dominance of the Rider, to the dominance of Reason, is no accident.  These are serious questions: how can I control this Elephant???

·         As I got to thinking about this, I was reminded of a lecture I gave a couple of times when I was angry at my students. Now, I’m not in the least bit angry with this class, so I haven’t been tempted to deliver this tirade to you. But as I read my notes, I thought: this is good stuff – this is stuff that you guys ought to hear! And truth be told, when I delivered these lectures in the past when I was angry at the students, it was hard for them to hear what I was saying because it sounded like I was just yelling at them. Sort of like that Far Side cartoon of a pet owner yelling at his dog in one box, and what the dog hears in the other: "blah blah blah blah Ginger blah blah blah blah blah blah Ginger." So I decided that you should hear this lecture, and hear it at a time when you aren’t in trouble!  hope you’ll be able to hear the message, because it is something I am passionate about. And I hope you will have questions or comments for me afterwards. Ready?

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I was angry with you Monday.Partly that was the onset of a migraine, but mainly it was frustration at your lack of interest: how will you keep other people interested in your work if you are so little interested in it yourself? And also your lack of respect – not of me, but of the art form that you want to be a part of. And I was angry at my own inability to communicate the reason why that respect, and why enormous effort and knowledge and wisdom, is necessary.

Monday before class I was reading playwright Tony Kushner’s impassioned speech to the Association for Theatre in Higher Education that was published under the title “A Modest Proposal” in the January 1998 American Theatre. How many of you have ever read American Theatre?  How many of you have ever read an issue cover to cover, not just an article or two? Well, in “A Modest Proposal,” Kushner stands in front of thousands of college theatre teachers from across the United States in 1997 – I was there to hear it -- and says that he thinks that all undergraduate arts majors should be eliminated, and instead students should receive a liberal arts education. I want to read a large chunk of this speech to you, because Tony Kushner is one of the most interesting artists we have today, and because what he wrote connects to why I was angry – in fact, may have caused why I was angry.

Kushner says:

ENTIRELY TOO MUCH TIME HAS passed without sounding my keynote: We should abolish all undergraduate art majors. I travel around the country doing lectures--after tonight I expect the invitations to dry up--and I am generally tremendously impressed with the students I meet and talk with, and generally unimpressed with what they know, and among these impressive and impressively undereducated students the worst, I am sorry to say, are the arts majors. And it isn't simply that they seem remarkably non-conversant with the pillars of Western thought, with the political struggles of the day, with what has been written up in the morning's paper--these arts majors know shockingly little about the arts. Forget literature. How many theater majors do you know who could tell you, at the drop of a hat, which plays are by Aeschylus, which by Sophocles and which by Euripides? Or the dates of any of those writers? How many undergraduate playwriting majors, for instance, know even a single sentence of ancient Greek, just to have the sound of it in their ears and the feel of it in their mouths? How many really know what iambic pentameter is? How about alexandrines? How about who wrote what in alexandrines? How many know the names of a single Chinese playwright, or play? Or of more than one or two African playwrights? How many have read Heiner Miller? Suzan-Lori Parks? How many have read more than one play by either of these writers? How many have never heard of them? How many know who Lessing was, or why we should care? How many have read, I mean really read and absorbed, The Poetics? The Short Organum?

And even if your students can tell you what iambic pentameter is and can tell you why anyone who ever sets foot on any stage in the known universe should know the answer to that and should be able to scan a line of pentameter in their sleep, how many think that "materialism" means that you own too many clothes, and "idealism" means that you volunteer to work in a soup kitchen? And why should we care? When I first started teaching at NYU, I also did a class at Columbia College, and none of my students, graduate or undergraduate (and almost all the graduate students were undergraduate arts majors--and for the past 10 years Columbia has had undergraduate arts majors), none of them, at NYU or Columbia, knew what I might mean by the idealism/materialism split in Western thought. I was so alarmed that I called a philosophy teacher friend of mine to ask her if something had happened while I was off in rehearsal, if the idealism/materialism split had become passe. She responded that it had been deconstructed, of course, but it's still useful, especially for any sort of political philosophy. By not having even a nodding acquaintance with the tradition I refer to, I submit that my students are incapable of really understanding anything written for the stage in the West, and for that matter in much of the rest of the world, just as they are incapable of reading Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Marx, Kristeva, Judith Butler and a huge amount of literature and poetry. They have, in essence, been excluded from some of the best their civilization has produced, and are terribly susceptible, I would submit, to the worst it has to offer.

WHAT I WOULD HOPE YOU MIGHT consider doing is tricking your undergraduate arts major students. Let them think they've arrived for vocational training and then pull a switcheroo. Instead of doing improv rehearsals, make them read The Death of Ivan Illych and find some reason why this was necessary in learning improv. They're gullible and adoring; they'll believe you. And then at least you'll know that when you die and go to the judgment seat you can say "But I made 20 kids read Tolstoy!" and this, I believe, will count much to your credit. And if you are anything like me, you'll need all the credits you can cadge together.

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Education, as opposed to training, I think, addresses not what you do, or will do, or will be able to do in the world. Education addresses who you are, or will be, or will be able to be. In your early years the processes of education and of training go hand in hand and are mostly indistinguishable. Practical, useful knowledge and the burgeoning of the imagination and the sowing of the seedbeds of moral integrity, communal responsibility and individual courage and daring all transpire more or less simultaneously in the very young, all can be learned by the stacking of blocks and the tying of shoelaces and the learning of multiplication tables and the successful manipulation of art supplies--and I'd better stop before I turn into Robert Fulghum. I think you know what I'm saying. After kindergarten, with the commencement of one's formal education, following grade school and up until one has reached young adulthood (which in my book starts at 21 years of age, or thereabouts): In the grand dialectic of life, in the dialectic between thought and action, one's formal education ought to speak more to the thesis, thought, than to its antithesis, action.

I THINK THIS IS SO BECAUSE I have so many women friends who have just given birth and they tell me it really, really hurts to have to squeeze that huge head with its tremendous brain through the birth canal, and I believe them, and it seems to me all that suffering shouldn't be for naught. If my friends are going to go through such misery to introduce new homo sapienses into the world, someone ought to see to it that these newcomers earn their fancy binomial nomenclature and become as sapient as possible. Someone ought to make sure their massive craniums are crammed as full as possible, otherwise I suggest the purchasing of household pets as a more pleasant alternative to seven hours of labor or a c-section. I think we should make sure these big-headed hominids become, as a result of being brilliantly educated, as deeply confused, conflicted, complicated, contrary, contemplative and circumspect as only years and years of sustained thought can make them.

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I was reading this essay before class, and I was beating myself up over the simple-minded vocationalism of this class, where I teach you a few measly techniques for taking apart plays. And I got here and started asking questions, and it became instantly clear that many of you hadn’t even bothered to read the damn chapter. To hell with Aristotle, Brecht, Hegel, Marx, and Kristeva – you didn’t even want to read seven lousy pages of Walters and Pritner.


And then when I took you over to the library, most of you wandered around aimlessly because – oh my God! -- there were other people on the computers. Standing there amidst almost a million books, most of you sat around waiting for a turn to use the computers. Why didn’t you browse? Why didn’t you know, through repeated use, exactly where you could find books about August Wilson or theatre criticism? And then some of you told me, with a mixture of bewilderment and pride, that you hadn’t been in the library for a long time, or that you didn’t like to come to the library, or you grumpily told me that you already knew how to use the library. Then why aren’t you reading? Why aren’t you cramming your head full of knowledge – all kinds of knowledge: history, philosophy, art, music, political science, feminist criticism. Do you think that what you know right now is enough to justify allowing you to use, even for one second, one of the most powerful tools known to humanity: a theatre? What makes you think that you have anything worth saying to anybody else


In one of my gen ed classes, I asked the students if I offered them a diploma for which they wouldn’t have to come to class, would they take it?  Half of the students said yes. Explain that to me. Explain why anybody is so damned anxious to become an unthinking cog in the capitalist machinery that they would willingly give up their one chance to actually learn something that might make the world a more interesting place in which to live. Why are they so proud of their ignorance?


I can’t answer these questions.  All I can do is say, loudly and with all the passion I can muster, that if you want to be an artist, if you want to be allowed to play with the powerful tool of the theatre, then you damn well better have something interesting to say. I don’t care how many good performances or effective designs your create while you are here, as long as you can’t think in any but the most superficial way, I have failed. As long as you don’t regularly go to the library and check out books just because you are curious, I have failed. As long as you would rather play video games than learn something that might illuminate a little corner of the world to you, I have failed. And I hate failing, because when I fail, it means YOU have failed, and the theatre will continue to be a wasteland of musicals made from movies and TV shows, and plays that are the equivalent of a post-meal belch.


I agree with Kushner: all undergraduate arts majors should be abolished, if by undergraduate arts majors we mean vocational training. On Friday, we will have a departmental post-mortem to discuss our most recent production, and what is the question that is most on everybody’s mind? Was it a good show? Did we do a good job? Did we think the set “worked”? Did we believe the acting? But nobody is going to talk about what the play said, and whether we actually believe what it said. Nobody is going to talk about how that message applies to us, and whether it is something we should take seriously. Nobody is going to talk about whether our community needed to see this play.


Because we don’t care. All we care about is how many butts are in the seats, and whether they applaud at the end. The arts, including literature, including the teaching of the arts in elementary and secondary school, are suffering because the artists and teachers don’t think anymore, and they don’t ask their students to think anymore.


If you want evidence of the vapidity of the world of theatre and film, watch Inside the Actors Studio any week it is on. The actors are charming, they are well meaning, and they can sometimes talk about their own work a little bit, but most of them have no ability to place their work within a context, to explain why their work is important to the society in which we live, to refer to other important works of art. And just what the hell do Jennifer Lopez, Ben Affleck, and Jude Law have to say about acting that we need to hear, much less about the arts? And if you need more evidence of the vacuousness of this show, think about the resounding idiocy of the portentous host’s, James Lipton’s, final questions

• What is your favorite word?
• What is your least favorite word?
• What turns you on?
• What turns you off?
• What sound do you love?
• What sound do you hate?
• What profession other than yours would you like to attempt?
• What profession would you like not to participate in?
• If heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the pearly gates?

These are narcissistic parlor games that any idiot can play. How can we go in front of a Congress that is filled with philistine idiots who want to cut arts funding and make a case for our importance when what we do is so insipid and shallow that we can’t defend it?

Now is the time for you to engage with ideas, to learn to think, and to actually DO some thinking and some talking and some arguing.  You can’t say, after seeing a play by Samuel Beckett, one of the most important playwrights of the 20^th century, “Well, wasn’t THAT uplifting.” You should be struck down by a bolt of artistic lightning from the sky for saying that. You can’t sit there like a petulant teenager pouting about having to be in by midnight. This is your education – do you really think you have nothing left to learn? You can’t sit there without making an attempt to think, to feel.

Because if you want to be a major in drama or in literature, you need to care. It isn’t that you have to like Beckett or Pirandello or O’Neill or Ibsen. It is that you have to open up your mind, open up your heart, open up your gut. You have to OPEN UP. And THINK about it – what it means, why it is in this anthology, what it is saying and how it applies to your life. And you have to do that not just in this class, but in all your other classes: in Humanities, in Political Science, in Biology, in Sociology. So that when you do a play, write a novel, teach a student, raise a child – you have something profound to contribute, something that gives you the right to read that book, do that play, teach that student, raise that child.

W. H Auden once said that “A real book is not one that we read, but one that reads us." You must become worthy of reading a great play. You must bring something to the table.

In the play Look Back in Anger – the play that started the revolution in the English theatre in 1956 – the playwright John Osborne has his angry young protagonist cry “Oh heavens how I long for a little ordinary human enthusiasm.  Just enthusiasm – that’s all.  I want to hear a warm, thrilling voice cry out Hallelujah! I’m alive!  I’ve an idea.” Me too.Yes, you are tired – we are all tired. But I have news for you: this is as rested as you will ever get. Once you get out of here and are working a job to put food in your mouth and a roof over your head, and you’re trying to create art in your spare time, you will be much more tired than this. And that is what it is to be an adult. How will you keep your imagination alive? How will you keep yourself inspired? How will you keep yourself creative? And how will you justify the effort that it takes to do that unless you have a reason for being an artist, a purpose for doing a play or writing a novel, a reason for being???

And so I ask you to start now, to start today. Show a little ordinary enthusiasm. Open up. THINK. ARGUE. QUESTION. If you feel angry about what I have said, ARGUE QUESTION – THINK. If you agree with what I’ve said ARGUE QUESTION – THINK. Form your own ideas, but form them within some context and with some rigor. Tony Kushner is right: you are a big-headed hominid that caused your mother a lot of pain trying to pass that huge cranium out – you owe it to her to use that brain thoroughly and completely.

With what time is left, I want to do two things: I want you to question me, argue with me, think with me about some of the things I said, and Kushner said; and then I want you to question each other, argue with each other, think with each other – in this class, or outside of class when we run out of time.