2002-02-03 - 02:57
I can't stop thinking!

We return now to the old familiar it's-3-AM-and-I-should-be-sleeping-or-working theme. It's not as bad now as it has been in the past. I have to do a lot of reading for the class I just added, and I have to figure out the topic for my next Hum paper, but I've got all of tomorrow to do the reading, and the paper is on The Tempest, with which I have a reasonable familiarity, so that should be okay.

I added this new class, American Musical Theater, on Friday (the last day we could add classes) after dropping Techniques of Acting. Still not sure I did the right thing there, but I think it was best on balance. I've mentioned before that we have only one acting teacher, of whom I'm not a big fan. I think I've also mentioned that I'm not a big fan of our theatre department as a whole. There is really exciting, creative work being done here--by the students. There are students here who are amazingly talented, I would even say brilliant, and I find them inspiring where the faculty is not.

Here's the thing, though. I have not had a chance to work with the Theatre Crowd (I call it what it is; there's nothing intentionally exclusionary about it [which is why I decided not to call it the Clique], it is simply the group of talented actor-polymaths who all know each other and basically own the theatre department) since my arrival here. I have not done *any* theatre since my arrival here, outside of the acting classes I've taken. I have tried out for almost every production that has taken place here since I arrived, and been cast in exactly nothing. (I haven't even been pulled for tech. My only involvement with any production has been set design for my friend's thesis show last fall.)

Let us leave aside for a moment (and I probably will return to it at some later date) the social issue, the feeling of not belonging in what one thought would be one's social milieu. Let us also leave aside the encroaching feelings of a) inferiority (*everyone* gets cast in #&@%$ directing scenes! do I suck that much?) or b) unfairness (I *know* I can at least act better than *her,* what's she doing in everything?). Let's concentrate on practical concerns. I am halfway through my sophomore year in something that once promised to be a theatrical type major, and haven't been in a single production. This leaves me with very little experience of the ins and outs of student productions. It leaves me with not a heck of a lot of practical experience, period--the last non-Rocky show I did was four or five years ago. Having no contacts built up in the department will make assembling a performance thesis a tricky business. And most of all, never having the opportunity to work with the people who inspired me to stay in the theatre department makes the whole thing kind of pointless, doesn't it?

And this just builds on everything I was thinking about last semester with The Stuff[1] and wondering what the hell I was doing sitting around reading Max Weber at a time like this. And that got me on my whole Poli Sci kick, which I'm feeding now with the U.S. Congress class, which is going well, but the theatre still calls..

Part of it is Hedwig's fault, you see.. As a show it reawakened my not-very-dormant performing instinct, and I'm doing a Hedwig number for the Drag Ball. It also indirectly caused me to break out my Rent and JC Superstar soundtracks. All of this influenced my decision, when I knew I wanted to drop Techniques of Acting,[2] to take the American Musical Theater class instead. What with that being a subject that I actually want to learn something about right now.

Another part was the thesis production I saw this week, a stage adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night. The cast was entirely T.C. and all the better for it, of course. It was a very tight six-person cast, with the four "suppporting" actors playing a series of roles in the life of the main character, played at two different ages by the thesis-ing leads. I was really struck by the rapport among the cast, who were very comfortable with each other, and by the way that the actors who played multiple roles made the transitions cleanly and seamlessly. In terms of performance, the moments that I took away from this show came from those four, not from the "leads," who are very solid actors but didn't have material as interesting as what they gave their co-stars.

Anyway... it was a really fine show, and I saw it twice. I'd like to write an in-depth review just of that, actually, but I don't know that there'd be much audience for it. Point was, it was yet another example of the impressive work being done by our acting students out of their own motivation, and it made me wonder even more about whether I'm doing the right thing by drifting out of the theatre department. Especially by drifting towards Poli Sci... who am I kidding, thinking I can ditch the arts for a really hard academic major with so many requirements to catch up on that I'll either be here an extra year or spend my remaining undergraduate summers in their entirety taking summer classes? Never mind whether I'm *able* to do it... I could if I really put my mind to it. The question is whether I could actually bring myself to put my mind to it, knowing that to make up the requirements it would basically be all Poli Sci all the time for the rest of my college career. And I don't want to do that. The Theatre requirements, on the other hand, are just ass-easy. I've practically got them now, and I didn't take any theatre classes last semester because I had that really bright idea of doing a Religion-Theatre interdisciplinary major, and boy, don't get me started.

Yeah, okay, I'd better go to sleep. More whining will follow.

[1] Steve Wasserstrom, our Professor of Judaic Studies, says that when he was in Israel a while back they had a name for their own situation; they called it "Ha matzvah," "The situation."[3]

[2] Further info on that class, since it didn't fit in my narrative: It's on Commedia, High Comedy, and Shakespeare. I'm uninterested in Commedia, I'm not terribly gripped by High Comedy either, and while, as someone in my Hum conference observed, Shakespeare is indeed God, I've done enough Shakespeare in my time that a few weeks more or less won't make much difference. Oh, and it's a little improvisation-heavy, and I SUCK ASS at improvisation. Maybe that means I should do more of it, but... ergh. Must. Not. Start. New. Rant. Must. Go. To. Bed.

[3] I am probably misremembering and misspelling the proper phrase. Corrections welcome.

[also edited 1/1/03]

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