Dunkirk NY – It appears there is no escape from examining your life and career once you’ve retired. By any objective measure I had a pretty good career. 42+ years of teaching something you enjoy is not really a bad way to spend a working career. Not many people in my profession get to do what I have done, which is making a working career out of the theatre. The combination of teaching and performing was every bit as satisfactory as I thought it might turn out to be. And yet…
What troubles me most when I review my working career is the question “What good have I done?” When you’ve been a teacher, you put a lot of things out there for students to consider and absorb, but you never really get any clear idea of whether or not you’ve offered something tangible and lasting. If you’re an architect, you can see the building you’ve created. A financial adviser can see how she’s helped people earn more money. A sewage plant operator can go home knowing they’ve played their part to preserve the environment. A carpenter or any other tradesperson can see the ultimate result of their work. A teacher? Not so much. And especially not in the arts.
This idea is compounded by the fact that the arts are not appreciated in today’s society on the whole. Generally and broadly speaking, the arts as a function of culture are marginal at best beyond the reach of pop culture. When you have spent a career training young people for work in the arts, you have to inevitably accept the fact that most of them will never have careers in the arts. They will eventually find careers elsewhere, doing something less creative and more financially secure. On a percentage basis, the success ratio of students who actually make a living working in the theatre is very small.
Why, then, did I spend so much of my life working in the theatre? On melancholy days I feel it’s because I was selfish, because it was something I enjoyed doing. When I was younger perhaps I had some notion that training young actors would somehow be valuable to the eventual growth and resurgence of some sort of theatrical renaissance, but of course just the opposite happened. The arts will probably be “zeroed out” in the Trump administration, and the NEA and NEH will be discontinued (at least for the Trump years). When you look at the reality of the condition of the arts in this country, it’s hard not to come away with the notion that you spent all that time training people, not for a renaissance, but for the demise of theatre in any significant fashion. There will always be pockets of activity, but from a cultural lens the reaction will be mostly akin to how people react to the Amish: quaint, but old-fashioned and fundamentally impractical.
I watched All About Eve last night, the movie that probably has the most quotable quotes about the theatre. It occurred to me that the theatre depicted in that movie was probably the theatre I imagined myself being a part of. I did not know in 1972 that it was already dead and out of fashion. Perhaps, if I had known, I might have found something more useful to do with a working career.
But I had some fun. And fun is never anything to regret.
“The Theatuh, the Theatuh – what book of rules says the Theater exists only within some ugly buildings crowded into one square mile of New York City? Or London, Paris or Vienna? Listen, junior. And learn. Want to know what the Theater is? A flea circus. Also opera. Also rodeos, carnivals, ballets, Indian tribal dances, Punch and Judy, a one-man band – all Theater. Wherever there’s magic and make-believe and an audience – there’s Theater. Donald Duck, Ibsen, and The Lone Ranger, Sarah Bernhardt, Poodles Hanneford, Lunt and Fontanne, Betty Grable, Rex and Wild, and Eleanora Duse. You don’t understand them all, you don’t like them all, why should you? The Theater’s for everybody – you included, but not exclusively – so don’t approve or disapprove. It may not be your Theater, but it’s Theater of somebody, somewhere.” -Bill Sampson, All About Eve
“Every so often some elder statesman of the theatre reminds the public that actors and actresses are just plain folks, completely ignoring the fact that their whole attraction is their complete lack of resemblance to ordinary human beings. We all have that abnormality in common. We’re a breed apart from the rest of humanity, we theatre folk. We are the original displaced personalities.” -Addison DeWitt, All About Eve
