The Rats down the Walls Story

When I took psychology in college I learned one thing: psychologists are not like you or me: psychologists need psychologists.

This was a team-taught class (it was the seventies) and each member of the department took his (as I say, the seventies) turn introducing us to his speciality and presumably to the rigorous discipline of psychology at large. Psy-cho-lo-gy. From the Greek . . . I remember:

The child psychologist brought Dapper Dan to school and taught us, make-believe, how to hold a doll or a baby. The biopsychologist offered to meet outside class: I’m at the pub . . . every night, he promised us (in lecture) I’m not gonna lie to you nothingbad is going to happen just fromsmoking a joint ordoing some linesof coke. (It was the late seventies.) The social psychologist (I swear) was terrific one-on-one but he panicked in a group (like in a class or lecture) and the expert in abnormal psych felt compelled to wear a big, long microphone hung around his neck on a big, long cord even though no one else had.

I remember one time in that class the rats escaped from the lab upstairs and crawled down the carpeted walls of the lecture hall and descended on this circus. I was crying I was laughing so hard; people were exploding in little pockets whenever vermin announced itself tickling a fat pink leg there was shrieking jumping papers flying and the expert on perception just droned and dribbled on. He was nearly deaf and he slurred his words so you could never understand and he never noticed when I left before the bell.

No one had ever mentioned rats in class in lectures or anything.

Now I teach (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and I notice that all of us in academe notice the silliness of the other disciplines we can’t imagine how they can think that how can they be that way how can they believe what they believe?

Those anthropologists! we say when the anthropologists leave the room don’t they know they’re the ones who make the natives restless? Those economists! why didn’t they buy low sell high? Hmmm? Those art historians! looking at pictures with the lights off. Really!

Every discipline is caught up in its own importance to itself. Every system of thinking is concerned with doing its business and putting to rest putting aside sidetracking quashing squashing repressing questions that go to the root of its assumptions and which might threaten its existence and the livelihoods of its practitioners if those assumptions were too rigorously shaken if the question of faith in those assumptions was introduced.

What we do in the theater is make theater. It’s as simple we tell our students as that. From the page to the stage and we teach them the process the recipe for success, mentioning Aristotle and Stanislavski and Harold Clurman as if that covered the history of it.

In the theater too, we presumably have our presumptions, our repressed memories, the secret things that would haunt our dreams if we had dreams (if we really were such stuff as that). But like the bourgeois burghers we’ve become, we cling to what we have (our process!) and relish that. We offer our thanks for the cud on our plates and whisper secret hosannas for our self-satisfaction.

If I could blow a hole in the whole thing now I would torpedo the Ark as Ibsen said. But for lack of space of mind of determination of understanding in the spirit of the celebration let me say just one thing. let me say WHAT MY STUDENTS WANT, WHAT THE THEATER NEEDS.

I teach (I think I mentioned) and a couple times a year, some student comes to see me to discuss her future. It’s easy now, for us who were raised without one, to take this talk of FUTURE lightly but I don’t; I remember the guts the effort the power the humility the humiliation it takes to twist one’s lips to shape the words: I WANT TO BE AN ARTIST for the first time. To speak those words or similar ones in the presence of another is to take the whole enterprise of one’s making being outside the realm of sleepless pillow whispering into the arena of failure. From daydream musing to telling your parents forget law school, from the page to the stage of living.

My students are smart, almost every one of them,

and if they get so far as making such a statement, they know (a little) what they are saying, at least in practical terms: I WANT TO LIVE IN A SMALL APARTMENT, I MAY NOT HAVE HEALTH INSURANCE . . . I WANT TO FORSAKE THE LIKELIHOOD OF BENEFITING FROM THE BOUNTY OF MY LAND, and I WANT TO GO TO GRADUATE SCHOOL.

This last may or may not be the most gruesome of all the realities they have to face but it’s the one they figure I can help with. And so they ask my help. And so I try.

When I was a boy even before my brush with psychology I was working as boys did as boys do on integrating my anger into my small town suburban self. Close your eyes and repeat after Joe Orton: Teach mehow to rage correctly.

There was no rigor to my alienation it was (I admit) a tiny jump for me from disco to The Clash I could only feel not think yet the ideology of my taste I only knew it was important— ideologically and experientially— that the experience be both thought and felt in its full expression. Whether the fabric was leather or Quiana was immaterial; what was crucial to me was that the alienation I felt be made palpable in the living of it that my difference (as they say) be performed.

I kept by my bed The Theater of Revolt and learned a grammar of anger. I cut classes and read back issues of TDR and Theater in the library, marvelous, mind-opening times uncovering Ionesco, Genet, Baraka, Beckett heroes all to be enshrined with Joe Strummer. More, I found promises in these pages of artists and critics living committed lives (or seeming to) now and not far away. Andre Gregory run out of my hometown, the Becks run out ofAmerica and Artaud runout of his mind (perhaps) with the delirium of his commitment to the theater and to living an honest, probing, engaged intellectual and creative life.

These are the experiences I try to keep in mind as I talk with my students now and I listen to them articulate what they want from their training. More than anything they want the opportunity to commit fully, physically and intellectually, emotionally and psychically, to the discipline of making theater. They want to consecrate themselves to the work, engaging their minds in interrogating the discipline’s limits, marrying their bodies to the process of incarnating its possibilities.

Like I was like you were maybe they are naive they want to levitate to breathe in the Other to dance the fervor dances to learn to mingle THOUGHT AND FEELING AND BODY together. They are far enough along, in their working, in their living, to realize how hard this is but not far enough yet to have given up.

For them it’s not enough to make our little trek from the page to the stage and back again (like peasants hauling buckets from a well). They want to burn like Artaud in the fire those buckets (half filled or half empty) could never extinguish, the fire of a moment’s possibility realized precisely deeply completely and shared.

It’s what we all say, most of us, or some: When we lecture on the Greeks, quote Nietzsche from index cards, teach commedia fisicofolia dada meyerhold brecht artaud brook everyone we read about in Theater and yet . . . when it’s time to teach my students their future we ask them to stand in line: the body people over there the tall the good looking the headshot hopefuls over there the thinkers in the short line step right up.

My students can’t understand why the system we have trains people to be half an artist (at best) and calls it the whole.

My students ask me about training programs that offer Ph.D.s in Acting. They assume that doing acting is complicated enough that it requires thinking about it and theorizing about it and doing it.

My students ask for programs that will allow them to focus on the creation of their own work as writer-director-designer-performers. They assume that since so much of the work they admire is based in this aesthetic, it is possible to study it.

My students ask for programs that will allow them to think through the making of theater and to investigate alternative processes for its creation and presentation. They assume that the academy is the place for such research.

My students ask for programs that will allow them to be active as both intellectuals and creators. They assume that because all of the artists and theorists they’ve been reading are both intellectuals and creators, there should be programs to train students to be artists whose work has both intellectual and creative significance.

But what we have is a system of training that helps us continue to feed a system of producing. Many graduate programs brag that they are PROFESSIONAL training programs which I suppose means that they are EXTRA rigorous about focusing on feeding this system of producing and squashing quashing repressing any consideration of alternatives.

We train people to play the roles that the theater has to offer and the less willing our apprentices are to question those roles the better.

A young woman wrote to the dramaturgy listserv asking about programs in graduate study my goalis a career as a production dramaturg I wept or I would have if you could weep online; that’s like craving a career in dental hygiene, what kind of goal is that?

Our training programs are mostly market driven now but welcome to the nineties (has anyone been paying attention?) markets change. We’ve been making theater like this in regional theaters by middle management committees since the seventies (or so). No one not a single person has had a career as a production dramaturg. Yet our Professional Training Programs more and more are training people for careers that haven’t been and functioning as conduits for loans fifty thousand dollars a dramaturg or more.

What reason do we have to believe that our provincial palaces our monuments to civic pride have more staying power than the old Globe? Is it because the funding climate is so good? Because the body of work we’ve produced has been so substantial? Or because we are unable to imagine a world that’s different than ours? (Not a terrific characteristic, I’d suggest, for theater makers . . .)

As we cater to the students whose goals are to learn to do things our way and turn away (or confound) the students who want to be given the tools to reinvent the theater, we refuse to pay attention to the rats on the wall and make it possible perhaps for those who come after to ignore the walls entirely.