Responding to Unreasonable Hopes

So, Tom over at TACT looks at a young student with a seemingly unreasonable and unshakable faith that one day, he will be famous. He says:

He is a victim of what I have come to call the “fame factor” in theatre education. It exists not only in theatre, of course, but across the culture. Created almost entirely by the pervasiveness of mass media, young people no longer pursue success; they pursue fame as well. The writer of this email simply believes he will be famous someday and win the Academy Award, and he needs nothing but the simple fact of his belief in that idea to make it come true for him (except maybe a little more help from me with his acting, as if I could make such a difference – another illusion).

(...)

The sad truth is that, for all their dreaming of fame, the statistics say that most of our students will not achieve their dreams. Perhaps for 15 minutes, maybe. If we want to be honest educators, we need to start telling students the truth, and build better options for them for their theatrical futures. It can be done if we have the will, and perhaps if we are willing to re-think our own dreams of fame.

99 Seats disagrees strongly, saying:

Let's think about it this way. A student in a history seminar takes a liking to the course work, even though she's not a major and writes the professor a message saying, "I know my last paper's haven't been great, but I'm really excited by this material and the coursework and I want to be the best student I can be. And, who knows, maybe I'll wind up as President and can invite you to the inauguration! I hope so!" Do you think the professor should respond with, "Well, since no women and only 43 people have ever been President of the US, it's not a very realistic or conceivable goal. You should think about your other options right now!"? Is that going to further this student's career? Their growth? Honestly, we wouldn't even expect a teacher to say that. And way more folks have won Academy Awards in acting (nearly 300) than have won the presidency.

When I first read the exchange, I was very solidly on the side of "Let-them-have-their-dreams." After all, we're living in the "Yes We Can" era when hope turns out to be a strategy, in some regards. And if you don't aim high, you won't have anything to lose out on. Either you settle now, or you settle later -- or, if you're one of the lucky few, you look out on Oscar night and say "And thank you to Professor Tom Loughlin for always believing in me."

But then I read a little further down my blogroll, and I saw Ian Moss' response to the Internship conversation:

Here are my thoughts, in brief. I think there are two separate issues going on here. First, we should make a distinction between internships and “working for free.” There is a name for working for free; it’s called volunteering. Volunteering is done with the understanding that the volunteer is doing it for the good of the cause; the volunteer’s reward is the good he or she is doing for the community or the world through his or her work. An internship, on the other hand, is explicitly supposed to be an educational experience. In this context, whether or not the internship is paid is of secondary importance; what really matters is the nature of the internship, and whether it really is educational or is just an excuse for the hiring organization to unload some undesirable tasks on an unwitting subject. ... As such, the real issue is truth in advertising...

Emphasis mine. But I think that concept of truth in advertising is the bridge between the internships and the advice conversations.

There's two possibilities of the mindset of the young student coming to Professor Loughlin for some words of advice:

1. The student who looks ahead and sees a wasteland of terrible, strenuous years up until his hard work and talent pays off and he wins an Academy Award.
2. The student who thinks that he's talented, will find an agent who appreciates him and opens the right doors, and will win an Academy Award.

In other words, does the student know what he's getting into? If he knows what he's getting into, then who cares if he dreams big? He's going to need a big dream to make long hours at poor pay worth it. He's going to need to have something real at the end of whatever bullshit internships and volunteer gigs and summer-stock in Atlanta in a bear suit sweating bullets or whatever other horror stories are waiting for him.

If the student knows what's coming in the near future, then I say yes -- full speed ahead, batten down the hatches, and we're all behind you. But if the student has no clue how hard the real world is, then as a Professor (or really a human being) you are honor bound to let him know. This is not an easy thing you are going to do.

Throughout all of my training, I have been read the riot act ten ways come Sunday about how hard this is. Long before Outrageous Fortune, I knew I was going into a shit field with shit pay and shit conditions. My father always counselled me to take a second major in something that it will be easier to support myself on an entry level job, and I followed his advice (sort-of) without ever giving up my personally megalomaniacal dreams.

In The Audacity of Hope, Barack Obama talks about the state of race in America, and he says:

To think clearly about race, then, requires us to see the world on a split screen to maintain in our sights the kind of America that we want while looking squarely at America as it is, to acknowledge the sons of our past and the challenges of the present without becoming trapped in cynicism or despair.

Our mentors, teachers, and professors should be preparing us to enter this field with this split-screen vision: to see the world where we want it to be, and to know the world as it is.

I am here because I dream big.

My dream is that, like Bertold Brecht, I can offer new ways of tackling the theater, new tools for expanding its influence. So that people will use my writing to clarify their thinking and have some measure of debt to me in their own. Part of this dream is that when I write things, it will be published -- and not only that, but that I'll be on The Daily Show making the things I like relatable to the 17-35 market. I dream that I'll have my own little theater where I can make what I want and that it will find the audience that it resonates with, that I'll be considered part of the conversation, and that I'll while away my years in happiness.

But I also know that for the next few years I'm going to have to split my time between doing well at a job that isn't related to my personal life dreams, and working hard in evenings for little-to-no reward and likely at personal cost. Maybe I've accepted too much of the toil, and I should be holding out for better conditions, but the size of my dreams has not (hopefully) divorced me from reality. I hope I have the energy and the day job to be able to grind away at this however many years it takes to hit even a fraction of that dream.

This is not the only dream I've ever had.

When I was a child, I wanted to be President so very badly. Unfortunately, I can't:

No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President...

So instead, I dreamed about the Supreme Court. My hero is Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (although I'm jealous of Taft for being both President and Supreme Court Chief Justice), whose utterances became central pillars of judicial precedent. He could write a phrase like "clear and present danger" and not only would it be a central legal tenet, it would also be the catchy title of a best-seller.

Why didn't I go and pursue Constitutional Law? Why did I give up on a dream and a life-path that will, let's face it, probably be more likely to pay off in the end than some pipe dream about experimental theater?

Because I realized, watching my aunt struggle through positions as a law clerk, that I realized I wasn't so enthralled about everything that leads up to being a chief justice. I didn't like all of the small things that lawyers do; all of the paperwork drafting and the contract reading and everything. Sure, some bit of it appeals to me, but long before I'd get to face up to judicial philosophy I would probably burn out on the tiny things that I'd be forced to do.

And that's why theater is the only place I can really truly belong -- because (like in a relationship), I love it so heartily at its worst. And I know what its worst looks like.

So to sum up: if that students knows the worst, and is committed to the worst, in sickness and in health, for richer or for poorer, for all the days of his life -- then let him dream. But only if he knows the worst.

And only if he's read that stuff about internships. Seriously, they blow.

On The Meaning Of What We Do

Scott Walters picks up on an important question -- the important question -- posed by Tom Loughlin:

When you stack up the general public’s statistical disinterest in theatre against the general economic condition of the art and the artists themselves, the rational mind has to question why anyone would continue to pursue such a statistically trivial career. Or worse – why anyone would ever educate or train someone to pursue this career. You can choose to take the high road and produce aesthetic arguments supporting such a choice, but only in a first-world country where basic needs are by and large taken care of can this argument actually take place. There are many places in the world where no one is arguing about how many plays or whose plays get produced every year. You own career, stacked up against these statistics, makes for a sober reckoning.

Scott's answer:

Our society is built on stories. We communicate our values, our ways of interacting, our aspirations according to the stories we tell each other over generations. The idea that there is value in helping others who are in dire need, for instance, which underlies the Haitian relief effort, is passed on from generation to generation by the stories we tell that reinforce that value. Without that story, or with a more dominant counter-story, such admirable behavior would likely be scarce.

I think I'll take a crack at answering the question, because the question goes back to what my goal was when I began this blog, the philosophy that underlies how I try to approach theater, politics, and everything.

There's a lot of evidence to support the theory is that what drives humanity to create the complexity of our civilization is our ability to communicate. Mankind makes discoveries, and then it shares discoveries with one another, and passes them down. Mankind discovered other ways to encode that communication -- first carved into stone, then written on pages, printed, broadcast, and then finally put into the digital sphere.

You can look at the history of science. A theory begins with a single man making a statement. Someone responds to it. Someone adds on to it. Someone criticizes it. Someone corrects it, someone else rebuts the criticism. The conversation evolves the ideas, and it only evolves as we respond and add on.

That's what culture is. Culture is an aggregation of everyone's attempts to join a cultural, historical conversation about today, tomorrow, and the future. It's a big conversation, much of which is chatter -- Twitter, in a way, is a microcausm of the language. There are conversational threads like the permanent conversations about sex, about governance, about happiness. There are conversations that crop up and rage suddenly in a context and then fade away as people move on (is the Leno-Conan thing going to be important in 2011?).

I'm reading up on mimetics lately to try and support this idea but the idea is this: our society is built on two things: the fitness of our bodies, and the fitness of our ideas. In fact, at this point, we stress the fitness of our ideas more than the fitness of our bodies, because they are far more flexible and pay back to the fitness of our bodies much quicker.

That's what we're doing here in the theater: we're trying to enter this big cultural conversation in the ways we know how. We've got things to say, memes/ideas to spread, things that we hope will add to the survival of the species. We're a tiny shred of society's conversation, or a sliver of its imagination. We're just individual neurons firing inside the great mind of society.

Can we guarantee that our firings are doing something? I don't know. Ask a neurologist which brain cells are "vital" in the working of the brain. We lose some all the time. Often, it's the connections between brain cells which are more important than the neurons themselves -- and that's the conversation.

I forget who it was who first implanted the meme into my head that playwriting is the supreme act of arrogance -- writing as though people care about what you have to say. But the truth is, people are surprisingly interested in what everybody has to say. And we don't have to reach everyone ourselves -- we just have to be 6 degrees away from everybody.

One of the important memes that this conversation includes is, as Scott notes, generosity. That conversation goes so far back in history we can't remember where it begins, but you can see it in the Gospel ("Give to other people, and you will receive. You will be given much. It will be poured into your hands--more than you can hold. You will be given so much that it will spill into your lap. The way you give to other people is the way God will give to you."), and you can see it in the Gospel of Wealth ("In bestowing charity, the main consideration should be to help those who will help themselves; to provide part of the means by which those who desire to improve may do so; to give those who desire to use the aids by which they may rise; to assist, but rarely or never to do all.")

As we debate the issues back and forth, in sermons and books and advertise and put on plays, the ideas evolve. They get more specific. When I was young, it seemed like people wanted to help Africa, so they sent food and clothes. Then African economists got together and pointed out that buying food and clothes and sending money was counterproductive in the long term. Nowadays, it seems like we've refined our tools for giving. All of a sudden there's microloans, we're debating whether it's more effective to use pesticides or mosquito nets, we're talking about how closely linked government reform is to international aid. A century ago, we didn't even have a movement that believed that people in other countries might be as worthy of our aid as people in our own.

How often is theater at the center of the debate? Not all that often. But then again, how often is any of the 6 billion people on this planet at the center of the debate? The new rabidly self-aggrandizing type of person typified by the Balloon Boy family or the Salahis is the compulsion of Americans who do not want to be at the edge of the debate, do not just want to be one neuron in a mass of coordinated neurons -- they want to drive the debate. The Salahis, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck; people who aren't content with chiming in with their two cents.

Let's just keep the conversation rolling, so that our ideas can literally evolve and hopefully make us more fit as a society.