This fall I’ll be one of two students starting the Brown / Trinity MFA Directing program. When I was first looking at programs last year, I wouldn’t even consider Brown because 1.) it was too expensive for an MFA and 2.) I already spent 4 years at undergrad there, and while it was a fantastic time I’ve lived my entire life in the northeast.
Then I saw The Seagull at the Lake Lucille Project, directed by Brian Mertes and Melissa Kievman, and was completely blown away. Site-specific doesn’t even begin to describe what they do. The actors and designers camp in tents in the neighborhood yards, rehearse 8:30am-11pm every day for week, and then do the show once at the end of the whole thing. If Nina needs to go home, she gets in a boat and rows across the lake. If Konstantin’s stage is on the other side of the shore, the entire audience goes on a parade through the neighborhood to get to his play. It was truly remarkable work. I later found out that Brian and Melissa had just last year started to run the directing program at Brown Trinity, and it shot to the top of my list. The craziest part of the whole application experience was that I was initially rejected. It was a very complementary rejection, but I was still rejected. “Well, I’m sort of the last person they should be considering,” I thought and moved on with my life. Then a week later, I got another call: someone had dropped out of the process, could I come up to the interview? Now I’m starting with the program in the fall. Thankfully, they’ve found a way for me to not go broke while I’m there.
Brown’s motto, In Deo Speramus, translates to “In God we hope.” The future is uncertain, and all we can do is try our best to be our best, to be decent people to each other, to make the world a little better. I’m a white guy from an Ivy-league school, blessed with a family that has never been anything but completely supportive of me. I went to public school… in really fucking nice suburbs. I work really hard, I support myself and my work with a 9-to-5 and bust my ass to rehearse and rehearse and improve. At the same time, I’m exactly the type of student that elite institutions should be passing over; not that they always do what they should.
The problems of an elite theater and an unpopular theater are one in the same. Homogeneous artists start one big extended circle jerk and everything gets stale. Suddenly we expect everyone to sit silently in a little dark room and pretend they’re not there while a couple argues in a kitchen and it’s supposed to be riveting. Or be fascinated by the editorial nuances of Shakespeare, and how because he switched from Thou to You in a particular passage means that everyone else who’s done it in 400 years got it wrong (you’ve done this week’s reading, right?). This is a big fucking problem. It’s a resounding question we’ve got to answer in the work before we all end up in a museum next to Duchamp’s urinal. I’m trying really hard to do that. I don’t know how. Other people are trying to do it too, better artists than I, and that’s why I hate it when people talk about how theater is dying. It’s been around a long time and we will find a way to keep going.
I don’t know if going to Brown is practicing what I preach, and I argue with myself about whether it’s the right thing to do every day. But I do know that The Seagull was fucking awesome. I do know that I need to take a step forward in my work in order to help us all keep going. I know that I can take actions, on a personal level, to fix what I think is fucked up and be aware that things are, in fact, fucked up. So I’ll be moving to Providence in August to start my MFA, and I’ll be trying my hardest to keep listening and being a positive force for change. I’ll do my best. All I can do beyond that is hope.