On Agency and Higher Education

And Why "A Chorus Line" Annoys the Hell Out of Me

While I’m tempted to continue discussing the ideas raised in my first post “It’s Not Your Fault,” I’d like those of you who were interested and kind enough to subscribe to this newsletter to get a sense of the various topics I’ll be writing about in the future. So I’m going to devote this missive to higher education for theater artists.

There is a connection, however, between these two initial posts, one that will show up frequently in almost everything I write. It is the concept of artistic agency—the feeling of control over actions and their consequences. No, not just the feeling of control; actual control. For a variety of reasons that I won’t go into here (but might later), theater people, especially actors, have gradually lost (or given up) their agency. And it is the source of the emptiness of so much of American theater right now.

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I spent my career teaching undergraduates at a liberal arts college. I loved it. I loved teaching young people who, for the most part, were still capable of being inspired by learning new things about themselves and the world. Some of them went off after graduation to try to forge careers as theater artists, and they would experience firsthand the difficulties and dysfunctions of the so-called professional theater. After five years or so, and not surprisingly they’d often be frustrated and discouraged. They would ask me whether I would be willing to write a letter of recommendation for their graduate school application.

“Of course! I’d be happy to do that,” I’d tell them. Then I’d cautiously ask, “I’m curious about why you are considering this move?”

And almost always I’d hear at least one of the following reasons:

“I’m not getting as many opportunities to work in the theater, so I’d like to spend three years just focusing on my art.”

“Well, I noticed that most of the actors I see in the programs of professional theaters have graduate degrees, so maybe it would make me seem more legit.”

“I figure if I can get into one of the prestigious programs in New York (or Chicago, or Los Angeles), I’ll make some connections on the faculty who will open doors for me into the profession. Plus saying I’m a graduate of that program will open doors all by itself!”

“I want to grow in my art, and I need somebody to push me.”

Before I get started, let me be completely transparent: I have a doctorate from City University of New York. After several years as a freelance director, I went back to school and spent a year in an MFA Directing program elsewhere, and then realized I really was more interested in history, theory, and criticism, and wanted to devote myself to teaching. So dissuading people from going to graduate school would be hypocritical at best. Furthermore, I think there are several really good reasons to get an MFA or PhD.

None of the ones mentioned above are among them, however.

Here are three good reasons to get a terminal degree, as far as I’m concerned:

1. You want to teach at the university level. Without the terminal degree in your field, you are virtually unemployable in academia. This is the best reason.

2. You want to study a specialized topic. For instance, perhaps you were inspired by seeing a production of The Lion King and now want to learn everything about puppetry. In that case, trying to get into the Univ of Connecticut masters program in puppetry makes complete and total sense.

3. You want to study with a specific person. You have to be careful about this one, because too often it is just celebrity worship. Just because somebody can do something does not mean they can teach others how to do it. However, if you have met someone you admire or have had someone personally recommended to you, this also is a good reason.

But the usual reasons? Not so much. There are other, less expensive, ways to focus on your art that allow you to learn what you want to learn rather than what an institution wants you to learn; faculty may or may not be willing or even able to open doors for you in “the profession;” and as far as the prestige of high profile programs, well, that prestige is usually based on a reputation built by professors who have long since retired or moved on to other institutions. (I recommend reading Todd London’s tender and eye-opening book 15 Actors, 20 Years: Making Lives In and Out of the American Theatre as a necessary corrective.) Furthermore, you may not even be able to get accepted. American Theatre Magazine recently ran a valuable article by Allison Considine entitled, “The MFA Squeeze,” in which she explains that there are fewer and fewer MFA theater programs, those that remain have fewer resources, and often they are accepting fewer students. (This is particularly true for Directing Programs, who historically have always accepted far fewer candidates, and often only selected those who already have a resume with professional credits.)

But it’s the last reason I mentioned above—the desire to have somebody “push you”—that really gripes me. As far as I’m concerned, anyone who says this ought to be immediately banned from getting near a stage again.

Having somebody “push you” is nonsense. It’s lazy. It’s passive. It hands all your power and agency to somebody else, and worse, it makes somebody else do work that you are fully capable of doing yourself. It’s adopting the position of a baby bird in the nest, their beak open wide, crying out for the mama bird to shove the worm of motivation and education down their scrawny little throat. And after your two or three years in a graduate program are over, now what? What are you going to do when there’s nobody to “push you” anymore? Go back to stagnation?

This is the way employees think, not artists. It forms the pathetic theme of most of the songs in A Chorus Line, especially Cassie’s pitiful “Music and the Mirror,” in which she uses the phrase “give me” ten times (which doesn’t even include “help me” and “let me”), and begs for the director (and former lover) to “use me, choose me.” (And this in a play often described as a “Valentine to musical theater”—disgusting.)

There is no agency in A Chorus Line.

Before you even consider graduate school, you need to learn how to push yourself. There are many, many ways to learn and continue to grow as an artist through your own curiosity. One of my favorite movie quotes is when Matt Damon says, in Good Will Hunting, “You dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a fuckin' education you coulda' got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library.” Too true.

Stop being merely a consumer of “content” and instead start really studying the work of artists you admire. Spend a lot of time closely examining their work trying to understand what makes it unique, effective, powerful, imaginative. You have so many resources at your fingertips. You can stream plays, films, TV shows and closely examine a moment, a scene, an episode over and over again. You can read plays and books and interviews and educate yourself about the art form to which you want to contribute. And then you can figure out what kind of work you want to do.

Artists have agency. They exercise control of their own work. They don’t ask permission. They don’t need someone else to give them “something that I can believe in” (again, that wretched song—I’m sorry, this is getting obsessive), they figure out themselves what they believe in and then they do what’s necessary to make that kind of work.

But here’s the kicker: if you develop that powerful agency, I think you’ll realize that you don’t really need to go to graduate school at all (except for those few good reasons I mentioned). You can do much of it yourself.

And when you embrace that, that’s when an artist is born.