Directing 'Twelfth Night' for Children, Part II

By Kirk Woodward

[The second part of Kirk’s memoir of his work on Twelfth Night for audiences of children in central Virginia concludes the experience. The director completes the rehearsals and describes some of the performances in elementary schools and libraries around Lexington. At the end, Kirk also relates some of the lessons he learned from this work early in his theatrical career.]

May 11

Today Leonard worked with Malvolio individually, and I worked with Viola on being a boy and Feste on constantly being a fool – poses, expressions. Malvolio showed he got the idea of Leonard’s instruction (on which I gave him no advice), but only in spots, to Leonard’s discouragement. Viola, who takes any direction immediately, took to the boy business like a duck to water. She now has a nice first entrance as a boy. She marches out two steps – doesn’t like that kind of walk; marches two more steps, bigger – dejected, doesn’t like that either; then grabs her sword in a huge fighting pose, and freezes. Very funny and touching. Feste said, of his coaching, “I didn’t know if you wanted me to do that kind of thing.” He’ll work on it, I believe; he was a little better tonight.

At the rehearsal tonight I summarized to the cast what Lee had said, and split the group into two: Leonard and all but Feste and Malvolio and I went into the lobby and practiced graceful movement and bows (Leonard worked with Andrew mostly, trying to get him to loosen up). The three of us did the madhouse scene for ½ hour. Then the whole cast worked through the whole play while I stopped them constantly and said things like, “You could bow there, couldn’t you?” “Now add a pretty movement to get from there to there. No, no, pretty.” Some results. Then a refreshment break and a runthrough, up to the last two scenes, which we again didn’t do. It came along decently as a whole.

May 12

Today we met at the church again, and I had an idea which may help a lot. We took separate “bits” and small scenes from the play. With the person(s) on stage doing the scene, everyone else sat at the back of the auditorium and watched and listened. After the scene, I’d say, “React,” and anyone who had a comment would give it; sometimes we’d discuss the comments; and then the whole process would be repeated as many more times as necessary. Hoped-for results were to get the cast to see how much projection and physicalization is necessary to get anything across to an audience, and to draw on everybody’s minds for ways of improving scenes. It looks to me like we really did succeed. (Maria came up to me afterward and said, “Thank you. For the first time I don’t feel like killing myself.” I felt a little the same way.) Scenes became richer in detail and opened up. Three hours of this. Toby resented missing his supper. (I had cookies there, however.) Apparently a good rehearsal. It’s the first thing we’ve done that I’ve been happy about, and the cast seemed to respond. [This is a dangerous technique, because you never want actors to stand outside their roles by judging other actors. However, in this circumstance it helped.]

May 13

Saturday morning rehearsal at 9:00. We did a runthrough, which lacked energy and thought. For example, when Olivia said “Go” to someone, he would get up slowly and saunter toward the door. I gave notes, and then we worked the Viola/Captain scene, the first part of the letter scene, and the Viola/Olivia “’Tis my picture” scene, using yesterday’s methods. A few details were sharpened – suggestions led to the Captain’s being more mercenary, for example.

Leonard knows a lot (witness his very fine work with Malvolio, who is consistent in his physical characterization now) and he’s practical and common sense. I find myself asking his advice constantly, and usually taking it.

May 14

First dress rehearsal. Costumes, which are mostly here, are pretty. So is the set, now complete; I like it a lot. We used make-up; Lee Kahn suggested “heavy and stylized” but it was pretty light tonight. I don’t know the first thing about makeup. I had told Leonard he’d be in charge of it, and somehow I hoped he’d just do it, or someone would, but no one did, so I asked him for suggestions, accepted every one, and they went on that. After the runthrough he told the cast, “Heavier lines on the face.”

The runthrough, lo and behold, was right good. It looks – all of a sudden, it struck me – like a whole show, one we can go with and count on, although nothing like what I originally imagined. There were problems tonight, more in the last scene than elsewhere, so we worked that, punctuating, trying to get openness, clarifying sections, and improving focus of attention. My favorite change was when Viola and Sebastian rush into each others’ arms. I had them run toward each other – stop and look – rush to embrace. It’s much more affecting than before. I tried to get Sebastian to shout “MADAM!” in order to draw attention to himself on his first entrance, but usually he still doesn’t. Then we blocked the curtain call and ran the whole scene without stopping – except the Duke kept breaking up with laughter, so we kept going back to the start of the scene, probably six times, until we finally got through it without anyone’s laughing. An encouraging evening, since a whole show exists and is visible.

Tonight we also changed what Olivia does in the letter scene. Now she and Malvolio stand in ¼ position back to back, she talking and he mouthing the words. It’s much clearer, I think, although Maria says she still doesn’t think it’ll mean anything to the children at all.

May 15

Second dress rehearsal: Sue LaRue had all the costumes completed except Malvolio’s yellow stockings and cross-garters. At 7:00 we began taking photographs. I hoped to take all the shots in 30 minutes; we took exactly an hour longer. A real bore. I made a list of shots to take, but hadn’t thought – have never thought – about photo composition, so they may be good or they may be junk or they may be both. The photographer expected me to know! Depth and variety seem to help make good photos. . . . Then we ran the whole show. It wasn’t as good as last night but it had its points. Most of the problems were technical – for example, Malvolio threw his veil at Olivia; Feste, referring to Viola, pointed at Olivia inadvertently; Malvolio dropped syllables (“Play with some rich Jew” for “jewel”); Olivia, trying to look astonished, looked like she had cramps.

Many words were hard to understand, too. A properly run rehearsal period would teach the cast to discover and correct this sort of problem for itself. We finished about 9:45.

Our crisis for tonight was that Andrew was 45 minutes late for call. When he arrived, he said he’d been apartment hunting and his watch had stopped (he showed me a watch which said 4:10). My first inclination was to replace him in the show with Leonard; and Leonard, although I suppose he didn’t especially want the role (I didn’t tell him he’d have it, but I’m sure he knew), apparently felt we should replace Andrew. I decided to keep him, because of the late date, the photographs, and the cataclysm his replacement would cause the cast; but I told him it was concern for the show, not for him, that saved his hide. He appeared shaken. The cast probably would have been glad to see him replaced, at first; but quickly would have seen how much more they were in for now.

May 16

Final dress rehearsal began at 7:00, with makeup call at 5:30. Maria told us how excited the children were at Glasgow as she told them the story of the play; she said they remembered all the way through who Sebastian was. (We weren’t going to do the play at Glasgow, but because of some scheduling confusion Natural Bridge cancelled out yesterday and Glasgow went in.) I’d asked Betty for some children tonight for an audience, and they were there, but they hardly reacted at all. I thought the performance was mechanical. I told the actors they weren’t listening to each others’ lines, but simply waiting to say their own. They were surprised; they thought they were good tonight. I thought they were dull. Then Feste and Toby worked on the song at the end. Feste speaks it all, because I can’t imagine their working out the singing successfully. I tried to break up his lines for variety. He doesn’t understand the words of the song, and they’re hard to explain. The general problem with rehearsal was that the actors weren’t standing open, but were facing each other and closing themselves off from the audience. The audience tonight came with expectations, but was colossally bored, with some exceptions. We broke up about 8:30, in order to allow sleep for tomorrow. (“Party!” everyone shouted.)

May 17

First performance, at Glasgow. There wasn’t much excitement during makeup, but things went smoothly. The stage at Glasgow is small and the audience only about 150. The set was driven out in an Army 2½-ton truck loaned by VMI for a week along with a Sergeant First Class named Poorboy, who says he doesn’t know much about this Shakespeare. He’s pleasant and although he wasn’t required to, he helped with moving the set. The performance wasn’t bad. The audience cheered for Maria, who’s the school librarian, at the end, but they didn’t react vocally too much during the show. I thought they were watching, though. The cast had expected wall-to-wall tumult (so had I, although Leonard had warned me about that notion – I agreed but didn’t change my tune) and were upset when it wasn’t there. Still I think the cast was pleased, and relieved. It’s sort of a quiet show. It seems to tell the story. (Story outlines had been circulated, so the children knew it anyway. When Feste said, “What do you think? Is her brother really dead?” they said “No!”)

Then we traveled to Fairfield, ‘way on the other side of Lexington, ate outdoors (Betsy Brittigan, that good soul, is providing sandwiches – very tasty), and set up. Then – surprise! – the principal started sending students in early, so the auditorium was filled 20 minutes ahead of schedule, before Sebastian, who had been setting up lights, was even in costume. I’d told the cast that they could play with raising the audience reaction level by varying what they do before the play starts, trying different approaches. They hardly had a chance this time because of the surprise early start; but they did move out into the audience while waiting. The main problem with the performance was that toward the end it became a strain to hear (the auditorium is large), and the audience showed the problem by rustling and talking. The cast was disturbed by the noise; I told them it was simply a problem of intelligibility. When Feste started the Sir Topas routine in a big voice, the noise stopped. Maria’s and Olivia’s voices especially don’t carry well.

Someone at Fairfield asked Olivia today whether Peter Pan would really fly in our production.

Last night Leonard and I decided to have Andrew wrap his head in a bandage for the last scene. Today at the first performance he wore it across his forehead, like a headband. All he needed was a feather to look like an Indian. Leonard and I were as dumb men.

May 18

The Duke slept in this morning; I drove to his house, woke him, lectured him, and drove him back. Later Leonard said he needs a talk generally; he had a separate argument with Leonard; but I haven’t talked to him yet, except for this morning’s remarks.

The 10:00 performance was at Waddell, outside, in their “amphitheater.” The ground was muddy, but the school provided a parachute to walk on. It kept the costumes from being ruined. Lee Kahn warned me yesterday that the set pieces would fly like kites in the first wind if there were no extra weights and braces, but the set carpenter said no. We revised some bits that depended on a proscenium stage, and ran the yellow-stocking scene several times; it picked up some. Malvolio added a new piece of business, in which he sets his leg in Olivia’s lap. The audience was nursery-school through 4th grade. Before the show the cast played Frisbee, also tossing it up to the kids. The performance was good. The actors opened up; they improvised when necessary; and they showed great presence of mind. A dog started chasing actors; Feste chased it off stage, and Leonard calmed it down. The children loved the dog. Then, later, Olivia’s house blew over, not once but twice. The actors picked it up and went on. Audience response extremely warm. After the show, one little girl solemnly insisted on being hugged by Sebastian, who was moved almost to tears. I thought it was their best performance so far. (Leonard said no.) They did too, and attributed the improvement to the audience. I told them not to use the audience as a crutch.

The afternoon performance, after lunch, was at 1:30 at Lylburn-Downing. (The actors were lying down, resting, when the audience started coming in.) Feste keeps improving; he was better this afternoon, using the wide area in front of the stage. It was a good performance, but I thought I detected definite signs of out-and-out ham, and told the cast so, to their surprise. The audience rustled toward the end, but there was a lot of attention, and a good response. Olivia tends to mug a lot when she’s not careful; so does Sebastian. (Toby and Feste do and should.) Viola, Maria, and Malvolio are consistently in character. Andrew hasn’t the foggiest notion of what acting means; he has no ear and no timing and he indicates; he’s my biggest failure. The Duke is becoming melodramatic again.

Touring is a grind. I was exhausted tonight; the cast feels the same.

May 19

Only one performance, at Central. The Duke and Feste were late. Weather rainy. At the school, the principal turned out to be most unpleasant; he hadn’t wanted Olivia’s special education class from the high school to watch – “they’d better be quiet;” he told someone (we heard) that if he’d known seats had to be set up for the show (in the lunchroom/auditorium) he’d never have allowed the show to come to the school; and he gloomed at everyone. A real Malvolio. On the basis of a probably unfounded rumor that this man had once banned Purlie Victorious because it included the word “damn,” and over cast protests, I instructed our group to change our two “hell’s” to “Hades”. . . . I told them the children deserved every moment of pleasure we could give them, under circumstances like this. . . . The children in the audience were pretty rustic, and Betty and Betsy, who saw the performance, were upset by the noise they made, but I didn’t think they were any more unruly than the performance called for, especially since cues were sloppy and the end of the show was style-less and dragged. I told the cast this afterward; they were slightly surprised. I also told them that their moving through the audience before the play started was dull and not attractive, and I told them their cue pickup, from the yellow-stocking scene on, was awful, which it is. The audience seemed to like the play, I thought. (A later report I heard from a teacher indicated the younger children liked it more.)

May 21

For a 3:00 show, call was 1:30. The Duke was 10 minutes late; Leonard told him, and the Duke said so what? “What kind of attitude is that?” said Lee Kahn sharply. The Duke shrugged and went on. The performance was at the Troubadour Theater. We debated whether or not to do the whole in-the-audience routine (since it would be a partly-adult audience), and whether or not to leave the house lights on. To the first, Leonard said “yes,” so we did. For the second, Olivia’s and Maria’s pleas influenced me perhaps more than they should have; at any rate, we turned the lights out when the show started. I made a half-hearted little speech before everyone went downstairs, and debated aloud with myself about how to end the curtain call. (“Let’s not change anything now!” Olivia said.) The audience was mostly adult, but some kids. Toby almost began the show early, on what he thought were instructions from me. (I’m always assuming I’ve explained something when I haven’t.) I didn’t watch the performance except for peeking a little through the lobby door. I gather that Andrew fell off the stage at first; that the audience picked up sexual innuendos and plot twists that child audiences had never reacted to; and that the cast as a whole became sloppy and hammed it up a lot. I said this last to Viola afterward, when asked, and she was shocked, so perhaps she wasn’t sloppy (the word was Leonard’s), but the others seemed to think they were.

Some people in the audience liked the play a lot and a few didn’t. Applause at the end was long. I thought the cast seemed to be working consciously on cue-pickup today.

May 22

Two shows today; an early call. I got the Duke up at 6:30 myself, on request. Some groggy people. Neither Andrew nor the Duke had any sleep at all to speak of last night. We drove to Brownburg, a little school in a little town in a beautiful rolling part of the valley. After we were set up, we sat on the grass and rested; it was a high-point. The performance, when it started, had spurts of energy. At one point Maria kicked Andrew when he wouldn’t hide behind the wall fast enough to suit her. There may have been some personal motivation to the kick, too. The yellow stocking scene was limp and unfunny. The audience laughed often during the play, all the way to the end; curiously, the cast couldn’t hear the laughter, and thought the audience might have disliked them. Afterwards they signed thousands of autographs. Then I gave notes. I told them their performances were solid at the center but contracting around the edges, as though they were saving their best for some other time; as a result many routines, for example, the fight, weren’t as funny as they had been. I told Olivia she was the problem in the yellow stocking scene, since she wasn’t showing any real alarm at Malvolio’s behavior; and that cue pick-up was the other problem.

Then we ate on the lawn, and drove to Goshen, 15 miles away. Goshen’s audience was receptive too. There were some signs of boredom in the audience in the middle of the play. The last scene was extremely interesting. The first part of it, up to “I am Viola!”, was the best they’ve done it; fine listening and reacting. Then the scene immediately began to drag, and continued to do so until “. . . ‘tis Maria’s hand,” when Maria began a long laugh which sounded like it came from the Wicked Witch of the West. This baffled the cast so much that Malvolio forgot to do a whole piece of movement at the end of the show – fortunately not business that the audience would notice. Again, many autographs at the end. I gave Andrew a note – pick up his cues in the first scene – but otherwise gave none. Viola says she’s certain she’s going stale, becoming dull. “I keep trying to change it,” she says. (She appears remarkably consistent.)

May 23

Last show. 11:30 call; many people late. I talked to one actor about another one – something I should never do. We drove to Effinger School, eight miles out, ate, and set up in a rather leisurely fashion. I gave a short note beforehand about not doing any amateurish last-show stunts during performance; I don’t think this group would have in any case; at any rate, they didn’t. The audience wanted action, and tended to be restive in the talky scenes; but the long section of the play from the yellow stocking scene to the madhouse scene was excellent – the best they’ve done it. In the madhouse scene something happened which I should have foreseen, since I saw exactly the same thing occur with David Semonin’s Winnie the Pooh in Louisville this spring. When Malvolio stared ahead of him, indicating that he was in a different place from Feste, the audience followed his gaze to see what he was looking at. They expected someone else to run down the aisle. This wasn’t a problem until Malvolio began doing the scene with some conviction (only the last couple of shows). Leonard recommended a long time ago that we make a simple set of bars for Malvolio to carry out and sit behind; this would have solved the problem; but I didn’t take his advice.

After the curtain call, when the actors went into the audience, the children sat and watched instead of getting up; and they didn’t leave until the principal told them they could. Feste, however, did lead a row or two around.

Tonight was the cast party. The producers and the ladies who’d done costumes and music were very happy. The cast seemed relieved to be through, and pleased with themselves. And that was that.

OBSERVATIONS

1. The first several rehearsal days should have been spent reading the script while standing, and discussing it. (There was plenty of time in that rehearsal period for anything we wanted to do.)
2. Projection exercises should have been included from the first.
3. I failed to work hard enough. I was unprepared, and as a result the things I could have the actors do were limited.
4. On the other hand, experience is important. As I said to Lee Kahn, inexperienced directors often spend their time telling their actors to fly – because they don’t know how else to reach the results they want.
5. Although group-direction is not the only method of directing, or necessarily the best, it does seem that it can pay dividends, given a thorough knowledge on the director’s part of the play and of group-direction methods, and given the director’s ability to try other approaches when appropriate. It stands to reason that a director who aims for spontaneity and creativity, freshness, awareness, and energy in performance, will aim for those same qualities in rehearsal. In our production, growth was stymied – growth of scenes (a good routine or feeling would barely begin before it ended) and of the actors.
6. Still our production contained many good things – Toby’s clowning, Feste’s energy, Viola’s luminous and touching unsentimental character, Malvolio’s surprising dignity, Andrew’s fencing gesture, Maria’s determination, Olivia’s perfectly wonderful comic pathos (perhaps my favorite of all). The audiences were moved by the brother/sister reconciliation. We never had a bum performance, and a week or so into May we started working together. All these things are worthy, and I’m grateful for them.

Directing 'Twelfth Night' for Children, Part I

By Kirk Woodward

[In 1972, after he’d returned to the states from military duty in Korea, Kirk went back to Lexington, Virginia, home of our alma mater (which provided the Troubadour Theatre for rehearsals), to direct a children’s production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Kirk assembled a memoir of the experience from letters, notes, and recollections. ~Rick]

[The material that follows is selected from a larger document. My thanks to the many people who contributed to this production, and who helped save my bacon as a fledgling director, all those years ago. Lee Kahn, referred to several times, was the director of the theater program at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. —KW]

April 20

Tonight the new cast of Twelfth Night met at 7:00 PM. I passed around the copies of the adaptation I had written, intended to make the play accessible for children, although I hadn’t included any modern dialogue except for transitional speeches for Feste.

I welcomed everyone, and told them the project was exciting because it was a new script and because it would tour elementary schools in Lexington and the surrounding area. I said the cast will have to create its own movement because it will have to know what is involved in doing the show in different playing areas. We discussed schedule conflicts, and I made notes on them. Then we read the play aloud. I asked them not to put emotion into the reading, but to read as they would a newspaper, since characterization will have to come from interaction on stage. The reading made my original dialogue sound awful – I suppose it is. Along the way we discussed obscure transitions, obscure lines, and the possibility of modernizing archaic speech. I told them I was delighted to have them all in the cast, but wanted to know immediately if anyone felt he or she wasn’t really willing to put out the necessary work on the show. We discussed – rather, I talked about – the difficulties the play presented, and the necessity of making it clear enough for a deaf man to understand. It seemed like a pretty good session, although I didn’t try too hard to cover the fact that I have next to no idea how anything will be done. A good cast, and I tried to provide some excitement in attitude. Will try more on that line. Exercises tomorrow night.

April 21

Tonight’s rehearsal was intended for exercises; but there was a concert at school at 8:00, 3 actors were missing, and I didn’t feel like working anyway, so we only did 45 minutes of work. We did the storytelling exercise: a person casts the story and then tells it, and the actors have to do only what he tells them. It’s supposed to teach physicalization, but I suppose it was too abrupt a choice to succeed; the actors said they would rather have had an exercise where they all had to work at once. I see their point. I found myself constantly trying to assert my superiority and leadership, especially against Toby (I’ll refer to the performers by their character names), who’s a natural actor, a ham, and a leader. Insecurity on my part. I was glad when the session was finished. . . . Also, I talk too much about my aims, and of course have little idea what to do about reaching them. . . . Exercises can’t be used tactlessly.

April 24

First working rehearsal. This afternoon I spent time writing out the play’s major problems (I thought of fourteen) and looking over the script. Fixed dinner and ate. Looked at the clock, discovered it was 7:00 – rehearsal time. And I told the actors always to come early! Horrors. Mad dash. I was late.

I had no blocking worked out. We did selected scenes, so not everyone would have to be present. Putting that all together may be confusing. The procedure was to read once through; then to read again, while I stopped them and gave blocking; then to do the scene again, completely. Big, big problem: I tried to say too much on the first night, when they don’t even have characters in mind, much less characterizations. That’s something I’ve always hated in other directors. I was actually letting the actors do characterizations – much too early. Tonight I’ll stop doing that, and I’ll also mention to them that I realize now what I was doing. . . . I was excited; that’s why I said too much.

April 25

Had a session with Malvolio at 3:00. He read the garden/letter scene. I had him read it several times, each time visualizing in as much detail as possible, and each time increasing the physicalization of the visualization. That last part didn’t work; he barely moved. Maybe he’s not a mover. Then we did the “cakes and ale” scene, and I asked him questions leading to his adoration of Olivia, and his social position. The difficulty here was, I’m afraid I led him too much toward intellectualizing. Results, as a whole: not significant.

The Duke tried, not too hard, to contact me this afternoon; I suppose he was going to tell me he couldn’t come tonight; at any rate, he didn’t come. And this evening I got a call from Olivia, who said a friend of hers was having a nervous breakdown (she herself was crying) and that she’d come in if he fell asleep. I told her not to come. So we were minus two. I told the cast about the opening scene of the play: all the actors on stage, each one talking to everyone else and feeling affection for each other. The affection is the point. They faked it. (. . . Several days later, Maria said, “How do you expect us to feel affection for each other when we don’t even know each other?”) We blocked the first scene. I found myself not being clear about where a movement came in the script, or where a certain place was. Also, I didn’t tell the people who were blocking for the first night where houses, etc, were. Then, after another scene, we did the fight scene, which when I first blocked it was disastrously confusing. I changed it several ways; nothing worked at all. Finally I suggested a break which lasted ten minutes. We talked about the scene during the break. Somebody had an idea, somebody else had another. We tried them onstage; I changed a few things, and it finally looked all right. Finis.

April 26

This afternoon I had an afternoon session with Sir Andrew. He hasn’t done much acting, is scared, and constantly makes smart-ass wise cracks. I tried to point out an “internal” side of acting. I had him choose an age – he chose 40, about two decades above his own age – and show me his age, while waiting for a bus at the bus stop. Then I had him simply sit and concentrate on the age, and nothing else. It worked well; he had moments of really looking 40 through his body in the second part of the exercise. Then I had him relax completely and imagine how it would be barely to be able to move at all. Some success with this too. He’s to practice the age concentration using Andrew’s age, every night before rehearsal. The session may not improve his acting but it slowed him down a little.

Tonight’s rehearsal was a real embarrassment for me. We were going to do the last scene, where everyone comes onstage and discovers everyone else. I hadn’t thought much about it and my improvised blocking was an obvious failure before we were halfway through. I stopped the scene there and sent everybody home except Malvolio, Feste, Olivia, Viola, and the Duke. We did the other scenes in which they hadn’t been blocked yet; they were easy. Out by 8:30, to my great chagrin. It’s a SIN that I didn’t know what I was doing.

Tomorrow will be rough. We’ll have to put the whole show together; also, I have a production meeting, for which I’m not yet prepared.

The Duke is interesting; he plays with great melancholy and pathos. “I want to cry,” Viola said after a Duke scene. Will have to change his course, though; his pathos is dreary and boring, and will be especially so to a child audience.

April 27

First a private session with Feste. I had him do his opening speech, first normally, then in gibberish, several times. He did loosen up and expand some, but he still doesn’t talk directly to his listeners; he sounds stagy. With both him and Malvolio, the need is to overcome inhibitions about big movements, to expand and spread out.

For rehearsal we went straight through the show, leaving out bits that hadn’t been blocked yet. Before that we played the entrance/exit game, equivalent to a relay, where you run, touch a point, hurry back, and pass the baton or whatever to the next person. (The first time we used pigment jars, which got all over everyone’s hands and clothes.) Then we did it walking. They weren’t very good at it, although it’s simple. The object of the game is to build awareness of the moment when you come on stage, the moment when you go off, and the relation of others on stage to those moments; but here it’s a flop. . . . Then we blocked the last scene, better, but now there’s not much movement: Viola and the Duke on one side, Olivia and, eventually, Sebastian on the other side; everyone else in the middle.

After going through the show, we took a break; Maria’s dog was hit by a car in that time, hurting his leg, so she went off to the vet; and Feste left to drive to Washington and take a dental exam. The rest of us did several other scenes, singing them. This is supposed to loosen up the actors and give them new perspectives on the show. Occasionally I thought it seemed to help a little. It was fun, anyway. . . . Toby especially has an inventive mind.

April 28

Rehearsal today was interesting. I had the cast (minus Feste) stretch; stretch the mouth and tongue; and sing “My Country ‘Tis Of Thee” twice for projection. Then I had them surround Malvolio and do the kind of sounds and the movements Malvolio might experience after a long confinement. I hope to work this into a routine in the madhouse scene. Then Toby, Maria, Andrew, Sebastian went outside and worked out their own version of the fight scene, while I worked with the rest on Visualizing the Set (a description of the surroundings as they would appear to the characters). I don’t know if this achieved anything at all. Why do it at just this moment? Pretty arbitrary. Then I worked with the Duke/Viola first scene, but didn’t get the energy or drive I wanted at all. The Duke is deep in his melancholy. Then the fight group did their scene on stage; it is pretty good, involving a lot of nose-tweaking. Then we ran the play through from page 8 to the end, skipping the madhouse scene. A lot of the dialogue is terrible, and a lot of the blocking is awful. They will have to fix it themselves - which they should have been led to do from the first, if I wasn’t going to be any better prepared to give them blocking. I plan to figure out just what to do, during this weekend. Session with Malvolio Monday at 1:00; with Viola and the Duke at 4:30 Monday. The costume lady and I have been trying to meet with the cast ever since the production meeting. Today she was late.

April 30

Our little show is so far nothing but vague. It doesn’t look like anything; it doesn’t sound like anything; and it has no heart. We have 2½ weeks to correct the situation; and at the end of 1½ weeks it has to be set. Also, it’s probably too short – half an hour when it should be 50 minutes.

The basic problem, I think, is that I lost my nerve at first and didn’t let the cast shape the show by itself. Of course it looks like shit! I’ve known for a long time that actors’ contributions can add up to more than direction imposed on them. So the show has no style. (Not that group development is the only way! But it might have had a chance here.)

May 1

At 1:00 I worked with Malvolio on the VMI parade ground (to open him up some). I told him to rewrite words he didn’t like; to make transitions clearer; and to make gestures larger and more precise. We spent the whole hour on his “letter” speech; tonight, at rehearsal, when we did that scene, it became clear that he’d spent several more hours working on it. Good for him. A nice job. I wanted astonishment from him, though, as he reads the forged letter; it’s still not really there. At 4:30, Viola, the Duke, and I went on the campus lawn and did their two scenes in modern language. I had notions of using the new dialogue in the show, but didn’t like it so well tonight. At any rate, it helped them discard their sadness and pathos and reach some new energy, which was all to the good. Of course the actors were playing Bright Young People, not the Duke and Viola.)

At rehearsal, three people were late, and I was severe; later I yelled at people several times, mostly for fooling around and/or breaking character. We managed to get through page 9 – halfway. Some scenes improved. The actors still don’t feel very involved, and often don’t have much to do. I let Maria, Toby, and Andrew work out a party scene and piece of movement on their own and then added it. Viola and the Duke were both much better. I worked a little at the end with Andrew; I told him his character should be played as deaf and stiff. But by that time I was too tired to hope, even, to accomplish much. One good thing I did was to bring refreshments for the break. They loved that.

May 2

Tonight we rehearsed at the Presbyterian Church auditorium in the middle of town. It’s a small stage, like many of the ones we’ll be working on. I read the play aloud and thought about it some in the afternoon, but, as it turns out, I still have no conception of what it really means to work on a play, and to transfer that work effectively to something the cast does. It was a rugged rehearsal, grim in mood, and nothing seemed to work. For example, my idea to have a sort of surreal dance number as a way of getting Malvolio on stage for the madhouse scene didn’t go anywhere – it would take someone who knew how to get movement from his actors, and was getting it all along, to make it work. My conception and execution were vague and therefore failed. At the end, I sat everyone down and asked them what they thought. There were suggestions: keep everyone on the stage all the time (we’ll try it); more transitions for Feste. Everyone left feeling sorry for me and for the show; I know I did.

May 3

This was an afternoon rehearsal (later Lee Kahn told me he never schedules afternoon rehearsals except on weekends). It seemed to go better than yesterday’s. We tried the sitting at the side of the stage; it looked clumsy because people sat until the moment they had to go on (except Malvolio, who tried to make it work; he was big on the idea in the first place); it wasn’t controlled, and looked funny. . . . Used the set tonight for the first time. It’s simple; I like it.

May 4

2:00, session with Andrew, trying to build his military bearing, an idea which occurred to me two nights ago. Some small success – but is it hard to get him to think in terms of the stage! I intended for the cast to play the music within the play themselves, so at 3:45 Feste and, eventually, Maria had recorder lessons, and afterwards Feste and I talked through some more transitions and wrote them down. At 6:00 we rehearsed the scene where Malvolio comes cross-gartered to Olivia; it had been a real bore, but the group changed some things and livened it up a lot. They were so encouraged, in fact, that they wanted to spend more time on each scene in that way. I told them the reason the scene came around was that they found sources for energy within the scene – which I think is right. But we haven’t worked on specific scenes enough, it’s true.

Then at 7:00 we began to work through the whole play. I stopped them sometimes, and occasionally gave notes, but mostly there was too much wrong to stop. After a break, we did the whole play without breaks. It ran 32 minutes. 32 minutes!!! 15 minutes too short. How embarrassing! Now what do we do? Cast wasn’t thrilled with what they saw, either. I gave some notes, and then let everybody go except the people in the first Andrew/Toby/Maria/Feste scene, who were all about to drop from exhaustion by this time – but we worked their first routine once.

May 7

Today I added about a page and a half of additional dialogue. We put the lines in at the theater – some mutters and groans – worked through about 2/3 of the show, and then moved outdoors to Waddell School for a run-through, which was OK. It’s awfully late to be adding dialogue, which illustrates the fact that I didn’t struggle with the adaptation nearly enough before rehearsals started. I should at least have known how long it took to read it aloud. Then, the additions were easy to find; the scenes begged for them. I’d cut too close.

May 8

This afternoon provided one of those curious, accidentally, fortuitous events. As I walked into the theater, I overheard Sebastian and Toby discussing the play. They sounded unhappy and concerned, although practical rather than dejected. I shut the door loudly and walked in as if I’d just arrived, and got them to tell me what they’d been talking about. They suggested that the beginning of the show was confusing. (While Feste speaks, the people in both houses go to the doors, and look out, as if at a storm. Viola and the captain do their first scene in the aisle.) As a result of our talk I made a new beginning to the show, which we introduced tonight (at the church auditorium). The new introduction adds the “If music be the food of love” speech, puts all the speaking on the stage, and cuts out the rain-and-storm business I had in at first. Also, we added a start to each scene where the actors take a pose and freeze, Feste plays a short cue on the recorder, and the scene begins. Toby, who gave most of the advice, was good about it; so was Sebastian; they were trying to help. I had enough sense to be grateful, and to take nearly all their advice. The whole show has been moving away from my vague original notions and in the direction of greater simplicity of staging. Sebastian also suggested that, in the last scene, Viola wouldn’t leave her brother to go to the Duke as soon as she does now; but I’m wary of that, since that last scene is hard to block. . . . We worked through all the changes and transitions, and then did a runthrough, which was ho‑hum okay.

May 9

Afternoon rehearsal at the theater. We worked the long 3rd-from-last scene, then did a runthrough which lots of people watched, including, crucially, Lee Kahn. “They’re not open,” he said; “they can’t be heard. Your show’s not spoken. My second point is related to that: they’re doing it representationally, not presentationally. The word is style. This play is romantic as hell. I don’t know if it’s too late for you to work on that. Try telling them to imagine doing it with a flourish – if you want. Get those girls into costumes as soon as you can. They all walk like droopy boys. . . . I enjoyed the rehearsal very much.” Leonard Darby, our new stage manager, who was seeing the show for the first time, said, “It was dull.” The cast seemed fairly pleased with themselves, however, I think because they’re starting to see a whole show. Lee Kahn’s comments shook me to my shoes. They crystallized what I said earlier about the show’s not looking or sounding like anything – and he put it in theatrical terms.

May 10

Evening rehearsal. I talked about projecting and about Romantic style. Then we worked slowly through the play up to the madhouse scene, and then ran it through that far. Working it, I tried to get bigger speech (without much success, apparently; people in the audience said they still couldn’t understand much of the dialogue) and bows, sweeps, and flowing crosses. Olivia has little “feminine” grace. We kept saying a dress would help her, but when she finally wore one for the runthrough, she moved exactly the same, making tiny swishes while holding the skirt with one hand. Her voice, also, has a whining quality. Maria didn’t change much at all; her voice is pitched high, and on one level, and she can hardly be heard. Viola also is often indistinct, and I have to work with her tomorrow on moving like a boy, which she doesn’t do at all yet (as Lee pointed out), not because she can’t but because I never told her to. (“I was worried about that,” she said anxiously tonight. A sweet girl.) Malvolio lacks any distinctive movement style, and often stands or walks in a slovenly way. Toby is OK. Feste hardly ever varies his body position; he doesn’t look like a fool, ever; must work with him on that tomorrow too. The Duke was nervous and upset last night for external reasons; he left the stage in the middle of the runthrough, to our great astonishment, to get a cigarette and ask how the show was going. Leonard and I yelled at him, “Get back there!” and he went. Sebastian/Captain is so-so. Andrew started picking up the romantic movement idea, and at the end of his “challenge” speech gave me my first moment of delight of the rehearsal period by adding to his “Andrew – Aguecheek!” a beautiful fencing gesture – left arm and sword out, right arm curled above his head. During the runthrough the cast was dead tired, and it showed. During notes I used Andrew’s gesture as an example of what the whole play needs. (But he’s still the weakest link.)

[Kirk’s experience directing a children’s version of Twelfth Night continues in Part II of his memoir. Come back to ROT in a few days to read about the final days of the project and what Kirk took away from it.]

Disappearing Theater

I recently got some very disturbing news about my undergraduate alma mater, Washington and Lee University. In an e-mail from Bob Youngblood, a former professor of mine who’s retired now but still living in Lexington, he reported that over the past five years, little or no theater has been presented on campus. Of course, he was talking about student productions, not traveling professional or semi-professional shows, and he wasn’t referring to other kinds of performance. I haven’t been in close contact with my old college, though there are some former teachers with whom I keep in touch and, as ROT readers know, I just took a trip to Istanbul with a W&L-organized group. So when Bob wrote me that since his retirement, there hadn’t been many plays at the university theaters, I was shocked. I sent the news to my friend Kirk, who’s also a classmate, and he hadn’t heard this appalling news, either.

When Kirk and I were students in Lexington, W&L theater was a kind of orphan. There was no theater department (there as a Fine Arts Department) and the entire theater staff consisted of one man, Lee Kahn, the university theater director, who ran the small theater, directed the shows, scheduled the season, oversaw the set designs, maintained the rudimentary shop (where both Kirk and I worked briefly between graduation and military service), taught the classes, managed the box office and subscriptions, and everything else that was required to make live theater a presence on the W&L campus.

And he succeeded magnificently. Before Lee arrived in 1965, the same year Kirk and I did, W&L theater was mostly uninteresting and attracted little attention among the students (who got free seats as part of their Student Activities Fee). The fare in the ‘50s and the first half of the ‘60s had been mostly old chestnuts, almost nothing current, and the audiences were almost exclusively the little old ladies of Lexington. (From what Kirk tells me, the ‘30s was more interesting from many perspectives. His father, like mine, was an alumnus of W&L—in fact, our fathers were also classmates—and Kirk’s dad told him anecdotes of his own theater experiences at the Troubadour Theatre in the years before World War II.) Then Lee arrived, a young man (he was only 30) with a taste for challenging theater. He staged Waiting for Godot, his very first Troub production as I recall, and Richard II; Exit the King and The Homecoming; an adaptation of The Bacchants by a chemistry prof and the first student-written play seen on the Troubadour Theatre stage. And he produced the Marat/Sade while it was still running in New York. (W&L had been the first non-professional application for the rights to Peter Weiss’s play. Later Lee presented Equus before it was even released for amateur productions. He just couldn’t wait.) After the first or second of these challenging plays, the townie audience began to stay away—they were frankly scared—but students began coming around. (I’ll never forget one reported remark from a townie spectator after Marat/Sade, at the end of which the inmates of the asylum riot and scramble out into the auditorium: “If I want to see this kind of thing, I’ll stay home!”) Soon, it was hard to get reservations (admission was free, but no one was guaranteed a seat during the two-weekend runs), and proportionally there were nearly as many students who wanted to bring their dates to a Troub play in the evening as took them to the football games on weekend afternoons. Some students and their dates were turned away. The word got around—things were happening down on Red Square (so called because of the four big, red-brick frat houses that dominated the block) where the old Civil War shoe factory that housed the university theater stood.

That little building, which rumor always had it had been a brothel once upon a time as well, was barely adequate. It had no fly space to speak of, no right wing at all (beyond the stage-right wall was Henry Street), and the left wing was the stairway to the upstairs plus the shop. The backstage area, behind the set, was barely wide enough for an actor or techie to pass through without jiggling the rear wall of the set. (Right outside the theater’s back wall was Main Street. In fact, there was a disused door in that wall which from the exterior looked like the main entrance to the building—which it probably was in an earlier incarnation.) The dressing room—there was only one—was upstairs and served as the green room as well. But in this totally inadequate and inflexible space, Lee and the Troubs put on some marvelous productions. I spent some of the best hours I had in Lexington in the darkened house of the Troubs or on its stage. It wasn’t just interesting and informative—I learned a lot of what I still believe about theater in those days—but exciting. Godot was eye-opening—and Marat/Sade was mind-blowing. And one man made all this happen back then: Lee Kahn. Not only was he all there was, but he was the kind of personality that made such things happen—on stage and in the heads and hearts of students.

There was no theater department, as I said—Lee would help launch one in the years after I graduated—so all of the participants were from other disciplines. I was a German-French major, for instance, and Kirk was an English major. (There were also no women in W&L’s undergrad student body; it was an all-male college until the ‘80s. There were a handful of students’ wives and the occasional faculty wife with theatrical aspirations, but most of the women in our shows were recruited from the women’s schools in nearby central Virginia.) Lee offered one single-semester class in acting and one in directing; there was a theater history course and, if there was demand, a technical theater class. (In the years after Kirk and I graduated, Lee hired a TD who ran the shop when the two of us worked there in the fall of 1969.) None of us had much practical experience—a little amateur acting maybe and some high school theater, but there was no depth in Lee’s bench and he always drew a credible, and often superb, performance out of his raw talent—even if it was minimal or limited.

In the years after I left W&L, the school launched a theater department, expanding the course offerings and the activities in which students could participate, such as student-directed plays and student-written scripts. The university went co-ed in 1985; it was still a small school (about 1500 undergraduates, more or less) but the population eventually became about half women and half men. (Women had been law students since 1972.) In 1991, the Lenfest Center, a large, state-of-the-art performing arts center, was opened, a project on which my father, a committed W&L alum, was very active—in great part because of my special interest in theater and our friendship with Lee and Betty Kahn. The active theater department and the performing arts center were in great part tributes to Lee, who died of cancer in 1981 at the age of 46. If it weren’t for him, there would never have been a theater department or a Lenfest Center. He made them both necessary because he made campus theater a cultural and educational force that demanded attention and support.

Lee was succeeded by Al Gordon, the first chairman of the new department (whom Lee in effect hired as his own boss). Gordon was a music-theater specialist, but the emphasis on new and striking theater continued. (The Lenfest Center opened with a production of Evita, which had only closed on Broadway in 1983. In more recent years, Gordon, who’s now emeritus, staged Goethe’s Faust and other theatrically interesting projects, such as Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses just before he retired.) But somewhere between the end of Gordon’s tenure and the current chairmanship of Joe Martinez, something began to slip. Students stopped coming to the plays. I’m of the opinion that the plays or productions were no longer exciting to the student audiences and that that was the fault of the theater faculty, who selected and staged the plays. Bob Youngblood offers a supplemental reason for the drop-off in attendance and attention: the students themselves. First, he points out, “They’re the DVD generation.” He was one of my German profs and later taught Italian (which wasn’t offered in my day) and he took students on trips to Europe during the spring semesters. On a trip to Italy, he reports, he couldn’t get the students to take in the Umbrian countryside through which they were traveling because they were all watching videos on their laptops. Second, Bob says, “It's not their fault that they haven't been prepared for aesthetic experiences of any sort—artistic, musical, theatrical. . . . Drinking parties are attraction #1 . . . .”

A former Lexingtonian who had connections to the theater program when Kirk and I were there—and is now a professional stage manager in St. Louis—affirms that “it’s not the same as in our day for sure,” but she also asserts that “there is a lot more student participation in directing and playwriting” now than there was before the theater department was established. According to Bob, the dance and music programs continue because they charge admission so that the university doesn’t bear the whole cost of presenting concerts and dance series. Booked-in shows are also still offered; they also charge admission and aren’t subsidized by the school—but they don’t use student artists, either. There just aren’t anywhere near as many departmental productions with student participation as there was even just a few years ago. “The Golden Age is over, I agree,” concludes the Lexington native (who still has family there and stays in contact with the Lexington scene), and Bob characterizes the present state of W&L theater with the lament: “These are indeed hard times for theater at your alma mater.” Lee Kahn managed to engage the students 45 years ago—and we had our distractions at the end of the ‘60s, too—and he was only one man. But, Bob admonishes, “we can't apply our past to the present, alas.” “You're talking about your and my generation,” he adds; today’s students are interested in two things from college: “a social life” and “a high-5-figure job (a 6-figure one, if they luck out).” Intellectual and cultural growth isn’t on the agenda, it seems. He may be right; he’s taught these young people and he’s probably got a bead on their mindset. But I say that, given the recalcitrance of 21st-century college students, it’s still the faculty’s responsibility to find ways to engage them, overcome the electronic pastimes that distract the attentions of the students they’re supposed to be educating. If what you’re offering doesn’t engage them, doesn’t compete with DVD’s and the ‘Net, then change what you’re offering. Giving up the struggle altogether, throwing in the towel is the worst possible tactic. No one wins then—neither the students nor the university nor society at large. You can’t just throw up your hands and quit, with the excuse that it’s not cost-effective to offer plays to a student body who doesn’t come to the theater.

Bob writes sadly of the few students he had during the last years he taught—around the turn of the millennium—who weren’t taking the course “to satisfy the general ed. requirement.” This made me remember my undergrad curriculum. I’d gotten lucky: I got two years advanced placement in both French and German so that I was taking junior-level courses in my first semester. It was an obvious choice that I’d major in either French or German since I was already accumulating credits, but which of the two was my best choice? One of my German professors explained that I could major in both languages and not take additional courses for either program. The French classes counted as “cognate” credits for the German major and vice versa. I needed only to take one course in each language each term—which I would have done anyway. Because I would fulfill all the requirements for both majors and the distribution creds without taking a full load each semester, I could take courses purely out of interest and curiosity. So that’s what I did. I took courses in psych, sociology, philosophy, linguistics, several comp lit classes (Russian Lit in Translation, Modern Theater in Translation—known as Play-A-Day), as well as the one-semester classes in acting and directing and the two years then offered in Russian. (Okay, yes. I’m a geek. I took French, German, and Russian in college. And I loved every damned minute of it!) My point: Far from taking courses I didn’t want to just to satisfy a requirement, I took classes for no reason other than that I was curious about the subject. Because I could. I was in college to find out about stuff I didn’t know! I was monumentally curious, and college was an intellectual toy store. I couldn’t have had it better. Now, no one told me to do that—my German prof helped me see a way to do it—but that’s what the university ought to be doing now: figuring out how to encourage W&L students to partake in the vast array of intellectual and cultural pursuits available, including theater. (Ask me and I’ll tell ya, ‘above all theater,’ but that’s just me.) As Bob says, if they don’t see theater at home, as many students report, where else are they going to get that exposure but at college?

(It’s probably not relevant to my point here, but some of those extraneous courses paid off for me in spades later. When I went in the army, that linguistics course was the reason I aced the language aptitude test. That gave me the opportunity to write my own ticket for training at the army language school. Because I’d already started studying Russian, I chose the one slot available in that program and I got to spend a year in Monterey, California, learning Russian for the army. Because I already had German and French on my record, the Russian got me assigned to West Berlin, the best duty station in the U.S. Army, where I spent two-and-a-half of the most interesting years I ever had before or since. If any of that hadn’t happened the way it did, I’d have ended up in Vietnam where the life expectancy of a Second Lieutenant in Military Intelligence was estimated at fifteen minutes after we hit the tarmac at Ton Son Nhut Air Base. Intellectual curiosity can pay off—but only if you indulge it. Which you can’t do if the school doesn’t offer a broad-based program of courses and activities. Isn’t that what liberal arts means?)

As for what’s going on now, I don’t get it. Children aren’t born anti-intellectual—that’s something they have to learn. In fact, they’re born curious; exploration is their natural bent. (Play-acting is also a natural impulse, as it happens.) If the students aren’t still that way when they get to college, then they’ve been maleducated before they got there. Now, perhaps the problem starts in junior high and high school, or even before, but the colleges and universities that get hold of those students when they’re 17, 18, and 19 are responsible for what they make of those new charges. If they’re going to call them educated men and women when they leave campus, they have an obligation to . . . well, educate them. College isn’t job-training school. And liberal arts colleges are especially obligated to produce well-rounded, cultivated young people. The graduates are supposed to know more about heaven and earth than were dreamt of in their philosophies when they arrived. Colleges are supposed to open up new worlds for their students, not just reinforce the knowledge—and ideas—they already had. My roommate, who wanted to be a doctor (and made it, by the way), was frustrated because he didn’t think he should have been required to take all those non-science distribution courses. I was frustrated for the opposite reason: I didn’t want to pick a major because I didn’t want to be pinned down. I wanted to find out about things I didn’t know anything about before I got to Lexington. I was lucky because someone showed me how I could do that while following the program at the same time. (My roommate wasn’t so lucky: he had to take those liberal arts courses he wanted to skip. I don’t know how he feels about that now.)

I don’t know how different one generation of students is from another. I doubt they’re different from birth. My experience in front of a college classroom suggests that if there’s a difference with respect to intellectual curiosity and the desire to go to new places between some students and others when they arrive, the main influence was probably their secondary educations. Some high schools, I observed, opened students up to new ideas and others kept them on a short tether. Already at a developmental crossroads intellectually, some students arrived at college ready to explore new ideas, others wanted only to enhance the ideas they already held, and still others were just timid about anything new or challenging. In any case, however, they were all dependent on the university—the teachers, other students, the administration, the academic and extra-curricular programs—to lead them, like a collective intellectual sherpa, on an educational mountain climb. It’s a rare student who can do that on her own. But no student, no matter how ready to take off or how self-motivating, can go anywhere if the school takes away the mountain altogether. George Orwell posited that people can’t think dangerous thoughts if they don’t have the words, so his dystopic police state regularly issued new dictionaries with fewer words than their predecessors. Fewer words, fewer thoughts. Well, in the university, the same truth holds: fewer offerings, fewer intellectual challenges. If Bob Youngblood is right and the 21st-century student comes to W&L with no exposure to live theater or any cultural experience, little intellectual curiosity, and a focus on partying and prepping for a high-wage Wall Street cocoon, then reducing the courses and activities that might challenge that attitude by offering some unlooked-for outlets for exploration and self-enhancement is the wrong way to respond. It’s the educational counterpart to Newspeak.

Now, I don’t think the university is deliberately trying to constrict students’ intellectual horizons by reducing their opportunities the way Orwell’s Big Brother deliberately reduces the possibilities of individual thought. The school’s administration sees its actions as fiscally responsible and mandated by budgetary constraints. They’re responding to student interest, they’ll say. There’s no point in offering activities and pursuits, paid for with money that can be used elsewhere, of which few students partake. That may be true, but is it right? Not from my perspective.

Ten years ago, the university published a brochure called A Future Worthy of Our Past. I was heartened to see that the arts continued to be a prominent focus of the university's goals, "an essential part of every student's experience" as President John W. Elrod (1995-2001) wrote. This statement echoes what W&L's most celebrated benefactor, George Washington, wrote to the trustees of Washington Academy in 1798: "[T]o encourage the Arts [has] ever been amongst the warmest wishes of my heart." Is the present university administration living up to the spirit of the W&L of President Elrod—much less Washington’s. When he dedicated the Lenfest Center, Elrod’s predecessor, John D. Wilson (1983-1995), evoked not just any arts figure but the greatest theater artist of the English-speaking world, William Shakespeare, declaring that artists "hold the mirror up to nature" even when they show man as a "poor, bare forked animal." Wilson, an avid theatergoer himself, knew that the performing arts, whose new temple he was launching, could "show us the truth about ourselves," even as they thrust us into "that uncomfortable terrain" of the unknown and the challenging. Not much of that can happen, however, if there’s no theater to hold up that mirror and show us those truths.

I deplore that everything has become a matter of business. I agree wholeheartedly with Bob Youngblood, who writes: "I consider theater an indispensable part of a university's offerings and think, the price tag be damned, plays should be put on." Under President Wilson, there was a sense that campus culture, especially theater, was an integral part of the life of the university. Wilson (whom my parents and I once met unexpectedly at a performance of Rent on Broadway) supported W&L theater out of conviction, not cost-consciousness or bean-counting. Some things just shouldn't be dependent on the bottom line.

Perhaps what’s needed right now is an educational counterpart to the program Kennedy Center president Michael Kaiser launched 15 months ago, Arts in Crisis. Kaiser travels the country and works the phones to help struggling non-profit arts organizations like theaters, orchestras, and dance companies keep their audiences, find new donors, and engage in more effective planning instead of cutting productions and programs. Kaiser, whose assistance costs the beneficiaries nothing, sees cutting back as a disastrous tactic. “I feel like the creativity has been beaten out of us,” Kaiser has said. Cultural organizations are “so scared about money that we’re afraid to do really interesting, innovative work.” Well, that’s what the theater departments of Washington and Lee and similar schools seem to be suffering, too. Ironically, one of the organization administrators Kaiser’s program helped sums up the Arts in Crisis message as: “You don’t have to be just cold and numbers driven.” If that works in the non-profit field, why can’t it apply to the educational arts as well? Why not an Educational Arts in Crisis to advise administrations like W&L’s in devising ways to keep their programs operating at full blast instead of curtailing them?

Well, aside from a personal disappointment, what’s the loss? At W&L and most liberal arts colleges, few students are theater majors or even arts majors. So how are we diminished if all those business majors, history majors, language majors, chem majors, poly sci majors, English majors, and so on, don’t get much (or any) exposure to theater or other arts? I’ve said this before (see, for instance, “Degrading the Arts,” ROT, 13 August 2009), and I believe it firmly enough to say it again: The arts are an important part of our society. Artists are society’s whistleblowers and night watchmen. Art tells us where we’re going off track and when we need to make a course correction. Given that we need these voices, we also need to guard against the elements in our culture who would suppress and censor them. The list of even the most recent attempts to keep artists from speaking to us is a long one. The way to prevent the forces of suppression from prevailing is to be sure there are citizens who understand the value of art and artists. The only way to assure that presence in society is to be sure that all graduates of colleges and secondary schools in this country have a fundamental grounding in the arts, to understand art and appreciate it as part of their lives, not an extravagance or a luxury that merely decorates our culture. It’s schools like W&L that are the training grounds for the citizens of influence and perspicacity, the women and men who will soon be making the decisions for the country at large. If there’s a hole in their education where theater and art should be, there will be a dangerous gap in society. Universities like Washington and Lee must insure that arts facilities like the Lenfest Center are no less anchors of our freedom than the journalism and law centers like Reid and Lewis Halls, two legacies of President Robert E. Lee. They can’t be if they’re dark.

I’ll end with a statement I’ve quoted before. It’s from artist and writer William Blake: "Degrade first the arts if you'd mankind degrade." Excising theater from the campus life at W&L is a perilous step toward degrading the arts. Is that a step a school that honors George Washington and Robert E. Lee should be taking?

[Aside from “Degrading the Arts,” mentioned above in passing, I’d like to direct readers to another column I’ve written that bears tangentially on this topic. I make brief reference to my concept of a liberal arts education here, and in 1986, I wrote an essay for the W&L alumni magazine describing the uses I’d made of my liberal education in the real world. I’ve revised that essay as “Liberal Arts in the Real World” and I’ve scheduled it to appear on ROT on 24 July. In a way, I see “Liberal Arts” as a companion to “Disappearing Theater.” I hope you will return to ROT and see if you agree with my vision.]