The Theatre Journal Auto Archive: Janelle Reinelt

Theatre Journal's invitation to write about my personal intellectual history and the decisions leading to my career path triggered that old, familiar tune—"There's no business like show business." But one day late last fall, after a particularly prickly day juggling my associate dean job with obligations to professional organizations and several publication deadlines, I posed myself this more sober, if rhetorical, question. "How did I ever get into this business?" To my surprise, however, several highly vivid memories came immediately into focus.

Like many other theatre academics, I suspect, I started out as a performer. I was an only child growing up in the 1950s in Hollister, a small northern Californian community where I felt pretty miserable and isolated most of my childhood. The high school theatre program was the first place I ever really felt I belonged. I bought magazines like Photoplay and hid them from my mother, because "nice girls don't work in Hollywood," and from my friends, because I was flat-chested and wore glasses, and didn't want to be ridiculed for my over-reaching ambitions. In 1965, my senior year, our drama teacher dyed his black hair blond, donned blue contact lenses, and had what was then referred to as a nervous breakdown. He disappeared, and heartbroken, I saw the theatre (a converted classroom) go dark.

I paid my way through University of the Pacific, the liberal arts college I attended, on a debate scholarship, and so I didn't participate in theatre at all since I was away most weekends competing. I stopped thinking about a future as an actress, and instead imagined myself either a journalist or a lawyer. I majored in Philosophy. The theatre students seemed clique-ish, and I felt unwelcome and outside again. I tried to replace the camaraderie of the theatre with the debate team.

I was passionate about philosophy, especially ex-istentialism, Marxism, and ethics. Camus, Sartre, Kierkegaard, and Marx—these were the gurus of my college years. I missed the excitement and expression of the theatre, but found instead deep questioning and commitment to ideas about the meaning of life. With the Vietnam War on our doorstep, my male student colleagues were trying to decide whether or not to enlist, resist, or move to Canada. I was struggling to understand what ethically was required of me if I opposed the war. In his section on Freedom and Responsibility in Being and Nothingness, Sartre wrote:

We shall never apprehend ourselves except as a choice in the making. But freedom is simply the fact that this choice is always unconditioned. . . . Human reality can choose itself as it intends but it is not able not to choose itself. It can not even refuse to be; suicide, in fact, is a choice and affirmation—of being. By this being which is given to it, human reality participates in the universal contingency of being and thereby in what we may call absurdity. This choice is absurd, not because it is without reason but because there has never been any possibility of not choosing oneself. Whatever the choice may be, it is founded and reapprehended by being, for it is choice which is.

The uncompromising insistence of this stance shook me profoundly but also inspired me. As I learned about Sartre's ethical ideas, I also read his plays, especially The Flies and Dirty Hands. I thought about him as engagé, a word used in much existential literature to mean more than simply engaged, but rather totally involved in the events of the world in relation to the deepest personal introspection. Camus, deBeauvoir and Sartre—they were my heroes; they achieved the status of myth within my imaginative framework. As years passed, the romanticism of this impossible emphasis on freedom and subjectivity eventually became clear to me, but the utopian quest for a better world (even if, like Sisphysus, this means to toil at a never accomplished task) became a permanent theme underlying...