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On Not Buying a Statue

I was twenty-three years old when I applied to grad school. That part matters. I was more than a year past my college graduation, long enough to have a real job and a reasonable-for-New York apartment in a “transitional” neighborhood. But it was also a short enough time that for me everything was transitional—I had a job but not a career; I wasn’t sure that the city I lived in was the one I wanted; I knew some stuff that I was good at, but not how to make that matter. If I had gone to grad school straight from undergrad, I think I would have been disappointed by how serious it was by comparison, and I almost certainly would have come out the other side terrified at the enormity of the rest of my real-world life stretching out before me with no possibility of a grad program to run back to. If I had waited longer to go to school, I would have had a life that would have been harder to give up; it would have been a sacrifice and not just a risk.

When I found dramaturgy, I said “Oh, that’s why I didn’t know what I wanted to do, because I didn’t know that this amazing profession existed!” I realized of course that it would be hard to find a job doing this, and so it seemed like going to a respected MFA program would provide me the best shot. I applied to most of the places you’d expect, but ultimately Yale won out for its great balance of theory and practice. And I liked that everybody had such an appetite for what they were doing, that they even poured energy into extracurricular productions. It all seemed pretty thrilling, and I have to say, I wasn’t disappointed. The exuberance and passion and commitment among the students were incredibly inspiring. It gave me energy when I started to flag — a necessity because doing everything all the time can be exhausting to the point of insanity. I certainly had classes that were boring, rehearsal processes with collaborators I didn’t get along with, and political frictions that wore away at the educational experience. But overall, I genuinely loved it, and I’d do it all over again.

Going to theater school makes you want to be part of a theater that largely doesn’t exist in the present culture.

In fact, I did do it all over again — in my department, you can stay on and do a DFA after your MFA, so I signed on for another round. It was that second set of years that ushered me out of the theater. If I’d stuck with just the MFA, I probably would have gone into a job as a literary manager at some reasonably well-established theater, and I would have been pretty happy. But then I spent three years in deep contemplation—ostensibly on my dissertation, but also of the life that was going to come after. I loved being a dramaturg; I loved dramaturgy as it was practiced in the rarefied world of school, but I looked around at the larger professional landscape and just felt like there were so many years of frustration waiting for me. Going to theater school makes you want to be part of a theater that largely doesn’t exist in the present culture. Anything that anyone has ever posted to HowlRound about the compromises, or imperfections, or limitations of the profession—I felt that.

In your twenties you can have a vocation, in the truest sense of being called. In your thirties your job is an important part of your life, but it isn’t your life itself. I was almost thirty when a friend asked me what I wanted my life to be like in five years and I was surprised to hear that my answer contained nothing that was specifically was tied to theater. I wanted a job where I was respected and where I could use the abilities I’d developed, but maybe that could come in a different way than I’d expected. So I graduated and I moved to Los Angeles, and through a process that would be its own blog post, I became a creative executive at a television studio.

So go to school, learn whatever you can, meet the people you want to work with, but just remember that all of that experience is just raw material and you can make of it what you want.

Five years later, I miss plenty of things about the process of theater making, but so much of what I loved before I still have now. I still work with writers (in fact, with many of the same playwrights); I go to casting sessions; I give notes on performance. All of the skills I honed in grad school, I use now in another medium. Perhaps the most important thing that grad school gave me was a talented bunch of classmates. I wouldn’t have gotten my first job in LA without the help of one of them, and I’m working on a project at a network now with another. So go to school, learn whatever you can, meet the people you want to work with, but just remember that all of that experience is just raw material and you can make of it what you want. It’s expensive, but you’re not buying a statue, you’re buying the clay.

 

Hands shaping clay on a spinning pottery wheel.

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A discussion of the pros and cons of an MFA program.

MFA Series

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"Going to theater school makes you want to be part of a theater that largely doesn’t exist in the present culture." This is so true. I did not, and probably will not, go to grad school, although there I times I long to do just that. But what I long for is that theater experience that is only available in school, as a student, and I don't really want to be in school, a student. I'm well past that, in fact. Not well past learning, no-never, but well past School. But that mirage of the theater I got from my undergrad theater conservatory? Powerful and so attractive, and so, so unattainable.