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Disclaimer: Sorry for the scattered nature of this post. I’m on the verge of moving to Chicago and my mind is all over the place. Theatre is an art. Theatre is a discipline. Theatre occupies the intersection of academic and emotional, of public and personal. But I’ve been recently thinking about theatre as something more—as a way of life. What lessons does theatre teach me that I take into the everyday slog? How can theatre help us get through a terrible Monday? It opens us to new ways of mourning, celebrating, dealing, healing, if we let it. Looking back, I know it’s helped me in a myriad of ways. Because of theatre, I better understand other people. I am less afraid to show emotion. When I started acting in high school, it brought me out of my battle-hardened shell. I could go on listing the boons theatre has given me, but for fear of being tedious, I’ll stop there. The point is that the lessons learned through theatre can be applied to everyday life, often to great benefit.
That’s not especially surprising. Theatre puts life on stage, so it makes sense that there should be some lessons embedded in the process. The truer the text, the deeper the lessons (it bears mentioning that realist, absurdist, surrealist, naturalist, and all other sorts of work can have truth; I mean truth of experience, not fidelity of representation). That’s why Shakespeare has remained popular for 450 years—his plays (at least, the best of them) are driven by characters, their relationships, and their experiences, and whatever traditional formats they align with are secondary, derived from the honest interaction of his characters. But I digress. You can view acting as rehearsal for life, placing yourself in situations you likely have never experienced and figuring out what actions and responses make sense in those circumstances. Acting has certainly improved my social competence—both in concrete skills and general confidence. My own character work got me in touch with myself. Working with my scene partners gave me an awareness for others’ perspectives. Especially as I matured through adolescence into adulthood, my theatre experience proved crucial for my development. And this is why we need arts funding. So our students and young folk learn to see the arts (theatre, specifically) as more than just fun. So our young ones can absorb all the lessons the arts have to teach—personal, social, cultural, scientific. So our society learns how to express itself. Maybe then it will learn how to listen, and maybe then it will heal.
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May 2020
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