Being Better

Well, Pericles is open and good. We never managed to replace the noisy jack-chain in the bottom of the curtains that fly in and get moved about, but I think that the actors have been able to manipulate them in such a way to reduce noise. We tried all kinds of other ideas for the weights, but it was too last minute. If we'd thought about it earlier, perhaps before the chain pocket was created in the first place, we would have been better off.

While the opening of the show has been a relief, things feel less than awesome right now for me. I'm still waiting for a job to emerge and I'm struggling with some personal demons, while also diving head first into Orpheus Descending and preparing for SETC in Atlanta.

I ask myself, as we get closer and closer to graduation (just over 2 months at this point) what I'm doing and why. I felt a lot like this as I was leaving Grinnell, having been embroiled in nasty department politics and feeling generally burned out from four years of school. My time at Portland Stage really helped heal me and remind me of the passion that I'd followed into my college major. And now that I feel that I've found myself in this very familiar valley, I hope that whatever happens after May 6th will involve some more healing.

But what I have been trying to take away from the situation I find myself in is how I would do things differently. For instance, how will I be a better teacher and mentor? How can I keep students from being overwhelmed by academics at the detriment of their artistic development? How can I make the boring stuff, the red tape, the things that can't be gotten rid of be less important to the excitement of creating and collaborating and being involved in theatre?

I don't know that I have concrete answers as to what I would do, but I definitely can see the pitfalls. I had two lovely friends visit me this weekend and one asked me, where do you see yourself in five years. The honest/ideal answer is that in five years I'll be teaching. In five years I will be settling down with a family. But the reality is that I'm probably going to be teaching next year because that's the most tangible way that I can be employed. And while I won't have a lot of professional experience under my belt, I definitely plan on being the best theatre educator I can be, because I at least have a lot of experience in the system. And it's time to change it.