The Secret Life of a Theoretician

The Secret Life of a Theoretician Hollis Huston I am not a professor, but I once played one in a university. A long time ago, in a universe far away, I wrote a dissertation about William Charles Macready. Though that dissertation was not an important event for the world, or even for the small world of theatre history, I still recall that research because Macready and I belong to a very select class: we both became actors out of financial necessity. I now make a middle class living solely from my performance skills. I occupy a place in the world to which your students aspire, a world that I once avoided by teaching others to seek. Look closely into my eyes, however, and you will see that they are unlike the eyes of your students, for there are no stars in them. This is not a dream; it is a life. This is not a fantasy; it is a living. I am not saving the world, or even my soul; but I am paying a mortgage. My occupation is good to me—but less because of anything it does/or me than because of what it does not do to me. I live an obscure life of intermittent labor deep in the bowels of unreasoning practice. Though this life suits me strangely, it does not obsess me, and I would give it up for a better offer; but I lose no sleep expecting that offer. I spent twenty years of my life in the academy, and now I live outside it. I taught myself, while I traveled in your world, to theorize, and now I cannot stop. In "The Business" there is no place for theory. If I persist in theory, I do so on my own responsibility; and my work is a dirty secret that I keep to myself. Yet the loneliness of the theoretician's secret life is not greater now than it was when I visited your world. I should not say such a thing without explaining myself: I must specify what I mean by theory and portray for you the intimate relation that entwines the best theory and the best practice. Fortunately, this panel [ATHE 1994. See "Editor's Comment." Ed.]was convened to portray that relation, and so in describing my peculiar experience I shall not stray from the point. The Business looks very different to one who draws his living from it than it does to one who draws his living from the teaching of it. That courtesan Showbiz, who found me out where I hid from her, shows a different face now that she supports me. I see her every morning with her makeup removed, and 123 124 Hollis Huston I find that she is neither so beautiful nor so terrible as I had thought. I could live without her, but I stay with her out of sheer pragmatism; for our arrangement , now that I have changed my place in the world, seems a good one: I get more from her than she takes from me. A teacher who takes his knowledge to market, and lives on its cash value, looks back at his teacherly assumptions from a great distance. I remember that we believed, my students and I, that The Business was glamorous. The teacher's living hangs on that misconception, for who would endure the terrors of performance training if she knew both the odds against success and the obscurity of success once attained? The working artists whom I meet again each day— even those who find more work and make a better living than I do—are known chiefly to each other, and their names will neither elicit grants nor launch productions . Once in a great while, a sniper of the press may mention one's name in a "review," but even favorable comments are rarely noticed and seldom accurate . Stardom is so arbitrarily bestowed that it cannot, simply cannot, be a rational goal. If you are to live in The Business, therefore, the work itself must suit you. It suits me. It suits me, however, for dumb and animal reasons that have nothing to do with the reasons your...