Photo by Alida Sullivan

“There are certain times when I sit in church . . .”  - Laramie Project

When I was a theatre student in college I had the good fortune of randomly picking an amazing powerhouse of a theatre program. Nothing anonymous here. It’s the University of Northern Iowa. Brilliant faculty, great program. I know that we are always wondering if we are completely preparing our students for the world outside. For me, I can’t say I was ready, but I was certainly as prepared as anyone can be.

Anyway, one of my professors there was Tisch Jones. I always loved going to Tisch’s lectures because they were filled with all kinds of new and wonderful things. She was my first directing professor. And I remember this phrase that she use to say.

“The theatre space is a sacred space.”

I listened. I believed that she believed it to be true. But I never really understood her. To be fair, there was a lot of things I didn’t understand, not just from Tisch but from Richard Glockner, the acting professor and especially Jay Edelnant, my mentor and an all around theatre bad ass. (You can quote me on that.) But what I found over time was that these things that I did not understand but wanted to, became clear as the years passed and I grew.

The things I did not understand did not leave me, they waited. And in the middle of a rehearsal or in a grad school seminar, or in a conversation with my students I will get this flash and then think, “So THAT’S what Richard was trying to get me to understand!” Ironically this most often happens as I am trying to get a student to understand something similar.

My mind kept going back to Tisch though. And I think, over time, I began to understand more. The thought has come back to me often as we work through The Laramie Project.

And even writing this down isn’t easy. Feelings that are difficult to translate into words.

But when you sit in the theatre and watch a show, particularly a show that draws the audience up close and into the firelight, you are opening up yourself to an experience. Trusting in the people on the stage to take you somewhere vulnerable and not to hurt you. Many people come into “Laramie” with a guard up. They know it is going to be sad, how could it not? I don’t blame them.

The play is written to earn that trust, and then take the audience through the events. To bring them to Laramie. And it does that very, very well.

That openness from the audience is paired with the actor who, if he has done his job, is also open to you. And so together you share an experience. Not just an audience member watching a story. A human being connecting with another human being and exchanging parts of our culture. Questions and theories, wrapped in emotion and humanity, in an effort to solve problems, to make the world better.

I will look you in the eyes and show you Catherine Connolly’s fear, but to do that I have to show you a little bit of my own authentic fear. In that moment, we grow. All of us.

And when you begin to look at theatre as a series of these moments happening show after show, performance after performance then it does, indeed, take on a sacredness. Like storytelling around the bonfire where our ancestors paired nourishment of body and nourishment of soul in one event and location. A ritual performance to improve our community. To improve ourselves. To connect us more strongly to one another.

And when I look at it that way, it really does seem quite clear.

Thank you Tisch.

Yesterday when I went to check my mailbox I received a letter. A quick look at the return address made me curious. It was from someone called I. M. Manley. Which would turn out to be really ironic because it was an anonymous letter condemning me for using taxpayer money to “fund your liberal agenda to the detriment of society . . . “

What did I do that was so awful? I staged a production of The Laramie Project, a play about the brutal beating of a gay University of Wyoming student and the reactions of the people in the down after the crime and during the subsequent trials. I also organized a NOH8 event that was enthusiastically engaged in campus wide.

I am not going to post a scan of the letter or print the text because this kind of bully is hoping for just that sort of thing. The majority of the accusations in the letter are nonsense. But there is one that I would like to address.

In the letter Mr. Manley states “How clever of you to put anti-bullying and gay rights together as one. The FACT is most folks are against bullying while soooooo[sic] many oppose gays’ destruction of society.”

Mr. Manley is apparently not against bullying himself. Hence the anonymous letter. But that aside, I agree that most people are against bullying. I think that there are a lot of people that don’t even seem to realize that some actions are a very passive sort of bullying.

In The Laramie Project we see this again and again as people in the town talk about their feelings about homosexuality. “You don’t pick up regular people.” (Gay people aren’t regular people?) “Live and let live,” which Jonas Slonaker so aptly translates “What, if I don’t tell you I’m a fag, you won’t beat the crap out of me for it?”

So why did we pair bullying and The Laramie Project?

Because bullying sucks, regardless of the reason that you are bullying someone. And we all know that bullying is a huge problem for kids, particularly LBGT kids. How do we know? Because we are losing them. Because things are so bad for some of them that they believe that dying is a better alternative than their daily life. And when we have a segment of the population that feels that way something has gone horribly, horribly wrong.

So we focus on this and we widen our scope. It’s not just gay bullying. It’s all bullying. And so many of our students, staff, and faculty turned out for NOH8 day as an affirmation that bullying of any sort is not okay with them.

Yep, I paired them. But it wasn’t clever, it was common sense. Because we’re all people. And the REASON that people are bullied isn’t important. The fact that they are being bullied IS.

Mr. Manley, wherever you are, you are an excellent example of exactly the sort of thing that The Laramie Project and NOH8 day defies. In fact, anonymous, bullying emails are even brought up in the play itself. They do not engage in dialogue, they do not create a space in which we can talk about issues, they do not have value.

I was not bothered by the letter (typewritten, with stickers), I was encouraged. I was able to use that letter in five different situations yesterday to initiate dialogue. And I will keep using it. Because of you, Mr. Manley, more people are having civil discussions about the issue. People are learning because you were ignorant and hateful. I hope that someday you can be a part of the dialogue.

And I hope when that day comes, the rest of us can put aside our judgment and come to the table ready to talk, listen, and learn.

I’ve been sort of dreading writing this post. I tweeted it was coming a few days ago because I knew I wouldn’t want to write it. As much as I tout the glories and benefits of failure I sure do hate when it’s my turn to fail. That’s okay though. The more I put it off, the more I thought about it. About the things that didn’t work at all and the things that worked really well. So as promised, this failure, like all the others has value. Real value. But first things first.

Google+ doesn’t really work very well for teaching online students.

There. I said it.

Earlier this week I pulled my classes out of Google+. Up to that point we had been using it for the communication portion of our online class. This was not the first time I had struggled with whether or not to continue using it for education. I wrote about my concerns at the time and did conclude that the benefits still outweighed the issues.

In the end, though Google+ does do a great job at creating a space for discussion and sharing, its basic structure make it difficult to maintain a healthy classroom environment that allows students to focus on content.

Let me break down why.

Circles and stuff. Google allows us to create circles and that is super cool. But students sign up for google+ in a staggered way and join over the course of a week or two. I wait until I’m pretty sure that I have every one and then share the class circle to the class but there are always a few stragglers. So I end up posting them separately as they arrive and they are rarely picked up by more than a few of their peers.

I have no control over how my students set up their circles. Unless I have them sitting in my office, I can only tell them what to do. I have no way to insure it’s done. This becomes a big problem when students start posting questions and assignments that need peer feedback. If their circles aren’t set up right, no one sees their posts and their feedback is minimal. There is nothing I can do to fix this.

“People you may know.” This is a great feature. However, many students think that these are the people that you should be adding to your class circle. I hadn’t realized how big a problem that might be until I had a student email me and ask me to make another student stop posting some adult cartoons. Turns out that the cartoon poster wasn’t actually a student  in the class but someone added from the “People you may know” feature.

Posting to Public. When ANY of the students or myself post something to public it appears in the class stream. There is nothing I can do about this. Students post pictures of families and general facebook stuff that MIGHT be of interest to the class or it might not but there is no way to filter that material out of the class material. This also means that if I wanted to share a political article or something else that clearly defines my belief system, my students are going to have access to that as well. In fact, they will feel obligated to read it. Because I’m their professor. It might be homework.

Sure I can tell them that if it’s posted to “public” it isn’t for them. But how many of them truly know what that means and how to distinguish between the two?

Emails. When you add Google+ to your classroom the number of ways that students have to contact you doubles. Which is a good thing. Except when it isn’t. While using Google+ a student could email me through their college email, send me a message in ANGEL, send a message to me through my gmail, or send me a message on google+. While I’m all for choices I realized that this can become really tangled and confusing. So when a student asks me a question that I can’t immediately answer I have to go back and remember where I was having the conversation with him about it. Plus if they ask about grades in the wrong place I have redirect them back to the college email or ANGEL. Some students are extra thorough and email you in all four ways. Sometimes a student will panic and be unsure if you got the first and then send them to all the others. Information gets scattered and cumbersome.

Sure I could tell them they had to pick one way to communicate with me but that sort of defeats the purpose of going to G+ in the first place, right?

Surprises. Right as I was pulling my class out of G+ the UI changed dramatically. Students who were still poking around in there were frustrated and confused. I had little warning and no ability to prepare my students for such a drastic change in their class experience. Thankfully we were already moving on. If we had not been it would have been a mess. At least in-house we are warned about changes to the system and dramatic changes always come with training and preparation time.

Time Vampire. More and more and more of my time was spent helping students troubleshoot google+. This was in addition to the help I was giving students who were slow to get oriented in ANGEL. At least in that area I have an amazing online learning department. But they don’t do Google+. It’s not their job. So I found that a lot of my contact time with students was spent talking about Google+, not about speech or theatre.

In the end I have to calculate it this way. Students only have so much time and energy to devote to a class. Whatever they decide that is, that is what I’ve got. How much of my time am I willing to give up to the system that the class is housed it? I’m not knocking google+. I love it! And I do think it has a strong value for education. I could see this being an excellent platform for hosting hybrid courses or graduate seminars. But for a totally online class where they are still utilizing an institutional LMS I don’t think it works.

An online class shouldn’t feel like an obstacle course. Students shouldn’t have to hack through technology to get to the learning part. For me, I think the best solution is to create a better LMS. All of the features of google+ are doable in an LMS. Including transparency and information integration.

So yeah, I totally failed out on this one. And as usual, I learned a hell of a lot of new things about teaching online. I’m not going to stop looking though. I’ll keep you posted.

It’s midterms. I hate midterms. We’re asked to give students some sort of evaluation of their status in the class, purely based on attendance. Currently attending. No longer attending. Never attended. It’s a simple thing. A paper work thing. An opportunity surely but this time of year drives me crazy. This is the time of year when you go back over your notes and look at each student’s work as a whole you begin to see the ones that are struggling.

There is a horribleness about dropping students. I know this isn’t rational but it is as if I am saying to that student “I give up on you.” And I realize that it isn’t my job to make students come to class and do their work. I can provide incentive but they are adults. I get it. But I also wonder how you fix it. I mean, how do people learn to work hard? How do people learn to value themselves?

Look, I’m not saying that we should lower the bar. Chase students all over town. But what I AM saying is something is still really wrong.

I guess what I’m asking is, how will these students get better? I understand that it isn’t and shouldn’t be our job to parent young adults. But simply stating that they should know better doesn’t actually help them know better. We complain because parents or daycare or elementary or high schools failed them. Ok. But if they have missed getting something that would help them be successful how do we make sure that they get it?

This isn’t a dumbing down of education problem. That has already happened. This is search and rescue mission. We have, I’d say, half a generation that is in serious trouble and the problem isn’t going to fix itself no matter how many articles in the Chronicle you publish. The problem is going to get fixed by other people. People who value value. People that are willing to move the scope of their attention from this semester to this century.

It’s a tricky problem isn’t it. We have to balance how far we are willing to reach out and meet a student with the integrity of the degree that our institution bestows. But there is a gulf widening between the educational preparation of students and adults coming into college and the basic minimum skills needed to start college course work. So that we reach farther to get the same students and the chasm only continues to grow.

All I know is that I turned in my midterms today. Students who were here two weeks ago are gone. I wonder what happened. I wonder if this is the semester that will end their quest for higher education. I wonder if they will be back. I wonder if there might have been a way to fix it. Keep them. Help them. Not a hand out. A hand up. Help them to build a strong foundation.

I don’t know.

I just don’t know.

I’ve been watching the interwebs closely this week as my Alma Mater has been shutting down programs and closing the art museum in an effort to keep the university financially stable. There is a lot of crying foul and controversy and while I empathize, I am overwhelmed with sadness as I see such a vital part of the college being eliminated, for whatever reason. With the economy so badly damaged I can understand the cuts. But I think to close the art museum is a bad idea. There is an important component that has to be considered.

And I think this is a pretty common problem. When a budget is in crisis and you look at the numbers, the arts seem like a safe place to carve away some of the “fat.” The problem comes when you lose all of the non-monetary benefits that a healthy arts programs give to an institution be it university or community college.

So in light of this knowledge gap I’ve decided to provide a quick summary of what an arts program can do.

Balance. An institution that is heavily invested in science and technology must see that at its advanced end, there is a great deal of art in how things work. The arts program gives your students the language to embrace and develop it. Because of that they become richer and more able to delve into the theoretical complexities of their field.  Artists and Non-artists need one another.

Marketing Gold. The arts are nothing if not visually interesting. You can only post a photo of a student taking notes so many times before those billboards get old. Arts gives you a cornucopia of styles of photos, whether those are taken by students or are of dancers, sculptors, or painters painting.

Odds for recognition. Not to be biased but if someone is going to come out of an institution and go on to be a recognized name the odds are it is going to be in the field of entertainment. Colleges and universities across the country are milking the names of those one or two students who are alumni and who went on to be famous. Even if they were only at the college for a semester.

Community perception. Like it or not, community members are funneled into your institution through the arts portal. Whether coming to see a play, a movie screening, a concert or a gallery show. The quality of those things reflects on the maturity of your institution. A patron who sees professional quality work in the arts will believe that there is professional quality work going on throughout your institution whether or not that is true. That doesn’t work the other way. A community member will not assume that you have a quality theatre program just because you have a successful physics program.

Technology. In this race to acquire and incorporate the latest tech many people fail to realize just how deeply imbedded technology is in the arts. Have you ever looked up at the lights in a theatre? Have you ever wondered at the modern marvel that a digital SLR is? And now with media and graphic arts we have art and technology intertwined so that the students we train in those feels must leave us with knowledge of the forefront of high end technology and a good idea of the direction in which it is headed.

Where arts students go. We like to joke that arts majors don’t get work unless it is in the food industry. It is true that few artists go on to rely on their art for their sole means of income. What that does mean is that an art degree can be a foundation for a myriad of occupational paths. Many artists find a home in advertising and marketing. Project planning. Design. Look around you. Everything you see was designed by someone. An artist. Everything you listen too. The building you work in. It is common to believe that art is without purpose. It is easy to watch a struggling play or sit through a painful screening of a students first short film and wonder what the hell the point of all this is (and how much did it cost)? We look at it and see the progress and potential because being an artist is a long journey.

Art is important. I can’t stress this enough. If you are skeptical, I understand, but let me ask you a question. What is your institution known for? My institution is known for Ag sciences and energy. Now, why does your institution feel that that project is so important to the community at large? In my case the answer might be to help insure that we can continue to work and thrive in the future when our oil runs out. But for what? Just so that our children and their children will be alive? Have enough food? Be good to each other? Or do we think about more. Do we think about making the world we are leaving our children a little better than the one that we got. Better how? Less war and hardship? Less pollution? Less anger?

I agree, that would be lovely but science and math is not going to be what gets us there. Not alone. Art is what helps us grow as a people. It gives us a broad and common identity. It belongs to us all. Art can help us see past our differences. Art can help us see how we are the same. Art is the voice of the people that cry out at injustice. Art is the collective sign of a community in mourning.

So that when you embrace art, promote it, you not only add richness and strength to your institution but cultivate the evolution of our culture.

And the coolest part is, as far as the artist go, you just need to give them a little room. One thing artists don’t lack is vision.

Last year at this time I was blogging about my first foray into student generated course structure. You can read about it here. The class ended up highly successful. This spring I tried it out again. But this time I gave them more agency. When they pushed me to add content I pushed back. As it stands it is one of the most dynamic classes I have ever worked with and it gets better every time I go back.

But something happened yesterday that absolutely blew my mind.

I keep stressing to them how important it is to ME that they have something to take away from the class besides a grade. And we do that in a lot of different ways. As we came up on the persuasive speech we had been talking a lot about figuring out who we are and who we want to be and how to get there. The persuasive speech is generally an academic speech with sources and outlines and things. I gave them the option to choose as a class whether to do that speech or a similar speech about why they are awesome.

Which is a much harder speech than you might think. But selling yourself is a good business skill. And you can’t sell yourself to other people until you have sold yourself to yourself.

We decided to have a vote after discussing the pros and cons of each. They were fantastically opinionated. And they wanted me to vote with them.

Not only did they want me to vote with them. They wanted me to do a speech too.

I have no idea what is actually happening in my class but it is pretty friggin awesome. And I’m going to give that speech. And we’re going to keep going in the direction we are going and see where it leads.

Either way it is stupidly exciting. I feel like I am winning teaching this week. For sure.

One of the things that we do in the theatre that gets us looked at with a little bit of suspicious is play. I once had an administrator walk in in the middle of a particularly heated round of Red Light-Green Light. To their credit, they never asked me to explain.

Here’s the thing about play. We all can do it. Any time. We matured over time and stopped playing as our intellectual interests became more complex and as our older peers, taught by their older peers, taught us that play was something only babies did. Grown-ups don’t play.

But we do. To satisfy complex needs. The impulse is hidden, buried, but it pops out.

Put a group of people together and run them through 4 or 5 rounds of Red Light-Green Light though and you begin to see that impulse come alive again. Competition breaks out. Cheating. Strategy. Stakes. Until the laughing group of students realize that they had just gotten incredibly invested in something that was not real. And that is the definition of acting.

Play is hard for adults. The need is there. But there is a great gulf between need and the heart we all carry around and that gulf is filled with things like fear, and insecurity. So that you have to give yourself permission to let go, to put down the shields and armor a little at a time and give yourself to being in the moment. The gunfighter on the hill. The princess at the ball.

I remember how industrial and productive the playground always seemed when I was a child. The merry-go-wheel turning at a constant rate, children running to jump on or dismounting gracefully throughout recess. The legs pumping, death defying swing pilots and dozens of running, shouting children. It was as much work as joy, the task we set to playing. We burned fun and tears and drama.

Actors need to stay in touch with that feeling because it is their bridge to the authenticity of the character. Once you have found the knack for letting go and giving yourself to the character, an actor finds that the process gets easier and easier.

But everyone needs to stay in touch with that part of them. Everyone needs to play a little. Everyone needs to fight the urge to stifle another persons desire to play. After all, all an adult is, is a grown up version of some kid somewhere. The industry of the playground transferred to the industry of the boardroom.

I had a major period of doubt about whether or not Google Plus was working as a platform for the communication portion of my online class. Some of the students struggled with the platform. Some students hated logging on to two different platforms. (Three if you count their college email account which believe me, they do.) To be fair, a larger portion really liked the benefits that they were getting, or at least didn’t hate it. But I think that we need to be vigilant against using technology for technology’s sake. Innovation doesn’t always lead to improvement.

A few days ago I was walking down the hall to grade the first round of speeches for my online speech class. It’s a long hallway but I noticed as I turned down it that it was noisy. The closer I got to my classroom the more I realized that it was my class waiting outside the classroom door. They were all talking and laughing. As more students joined us they all quickly scanned the room and figured out who was who. They did it quickly, by faces.

It dawned on me in that moment that this was different. I had noticed it before but it never registered. In my online speech class before I moved to Google Plus the students were quiet. They would come in and sit down. It wasn’t until they wrote their names on the board that they would begin to talk. Because they had never seen one another before.

I went back to the class and the previous speech classes discussion content on Google+. What I found was surprising. For a class size of 20 I was getting a discussion with 70-100 responses. In a typical online class I would see 50-70. Add to this that students are at times replying to more than one person at a time in their comments and the difference is staggering.

Add to THAT the fact that the students can effortlessly talk to one another one-on-one and the real differences add up between the two.

I’m not satisfied that Google+ is the perfect method. I do think that it is currently the best that I can do with the resources I have available to me. I think that the benefits do outweigh the problems. I hope my students come to understand that too.

One of the things I use to teach in Theatre Appreciation was that the job of a good critic was to determine What the Director was trying to do. Did they accomplish it? And was the attempt worthwhile. We talked about the various functions of theatre. That some was meant for pure entertainment. Some showcased an artist. Some was for education. Some was for expression. Some was for social change.

I taught a class at the University of Illinois called Social Issues Theatre. It was a laboratory class where we explored a different set of topics each semester. The students would learn about the topic and create performance pieces about them. These performance pieces came from the world around them and from their own experiences.

The Laramie Project is a larger version of that process done by the Tectonic Theatre Company.

The choice of the production is already making a few small waves here and there but the overall reaction to the play is positive. I wonder though if that is the climate of the community or a testament to the fact that I have surrounded myself with people who think like me.

I’ve spent the last few days really thinking about the show. I realized at some point in the last few weeks that this show is much more intensely personal that I thought it would be when I selected it last year at this time. There was a time when I would have been proud to do this show just because it’s a good show. Now I feel driven to do this show because I might be able to make a little bit of difference.

When you are in a position of power and privilege you must use your platform to give a voice to those that have none. And to be an amplifier to those who are not being heard. In that light, doing a work like Laramie feels weighty. Solid. Powerful.

Laramie is not the story of the death of Matthew Shepard. It is the story of a town who, through a thousand inactions, through a thousand silences, created a world where two young men could believe that it was ok to brutally murder a stranger because they were gay. That guilt falls on no single person. A snowflake seems to be made of air until you are shoveling your driveway.

In that, all of our communities are similar. And to take a story to your town about another town that let things go too far. That is a cautionary tale. A wake-up call. A herald.

So just as we cannot point to one source of hatred we must point to all and each other. Vigilantly watching, guiding the people around us so that we do not turn a blind eye when a gay teenage kills themselves and we do not let hatred destroy families.

A friend talks frequently about conserving so that our children have more. A better place to live. I talk about Laramie so my children grow and become their beautiful selves with no fear that an unaccepting community will attempt to damage and diminish them. The wonderful thing about that, that passion is that my friend’s work will benefit all of our children and my work will too. So that a generation of people working through passionate acts to make things better will, in a thousand actions, begin to change the evolution of a culture.

It’s been one of those weeks where you wander around sort of thinking about the large and absurdly complex world in which we live. I mean, think about our origins and the hunter gatherer mind evolving into a hive of such tangled attentions that I cannot fathom the amount of steps and people it would be to take a cotton shirt from its origins in the cotton field to my walmart store. Of course add in the label and the price tags and the designers who make them, the people that print them, the paper maker, the ink makers, the loggers the janitors. Thousands of people involved to create the item that you hold in your hand right now.

And I think a lot about art during all of this too. How our common spiritual culture has revealed to us and to the generations the painted landscape that makes up the living breathing essence of our people. And we look back at the art before us and it unfolds like a photograph to painting to a sculpture to a sunset. Starting as a simple copy of the things we see. Until one day. One artist somewhere thought, what if I didn’t have to copy what I see, what if there could be more. Or different. With that the shared mental canvas shifted and people began to experiment with form. With feeling. And our shared consciousness began to grow. But then they went further.

Brave artists on the edges started to wonder if you even needed the image at all? What if you just took the feeling that the image created in you, took it up inside your heart and changed it and gave it back to the world in a completely different form. So that the terrain of our culture becomes bright and colorful and alive. That is art. Art is the product of the collective feelings and experiences of an entire people. All of the art put together, woven, is our cosmic footprint.

So that above all else we have to be putting the power into the hands of new artists every day. Storytellers. Magic makers. That output belongs to all of us. We all contribute to the art in our space. By being doctors, teachers, janitors, and by being other artists. But just like the $7 tshirt from walmart the product that we get from an artists has been built of the contributions of hundreds, maybe thousands of people that helped make it possible. The artists inhales their surroundings and then exhales energy. Energy we need to survive. Energy we need to grow.

People have a tendency to believe that we are living at the tail end of a great time of art. I think that every culture has had that feeling. But it’s not true. Art doesn’t die, or run out, it just changes. We tend to believe we’ve thought of everything. Not much room for something new. We already know a lot of stuff.

We could not be more wrong. Tomorrow is so completely filled with possibility. And we’ve got front row seats.