I am officially done with my college education. I am done earning credits, achieving grades, and ultimately attaining my degree. My life, up until now, has essentially been mapped out for me. Pre determined by the educational system that I have spent three quarters of this life participating in. Now I am considered an adult. A young one, and so I am one that still has room to make mistakes. I have to decide where my life is going. But even that sentence screams out at me, because ultimately I know that my decisions make very little difference. Whatever will be, will be. And so it goes. No matter what decisions I make, my life will unravel the way in which it’s supposed to. This is something that I put a lot of faith into, and though I have ideas and theories about what I’m doing, I also know that those have very little bearing on the reality of my situation. None the less, at this juncture of my life, this wavering ground between college and adulthood, I should take stock of what is important to me, what the world means, and where I see my life going from here. I should also try and figure out how I’m going to get where I want to be.
There are some things that I’ve known for a long time and are only just now becoming more apparent to me. Namely that I don’t particularly want to work in commercial theatre. There isn’t anything wrong with commercial theatre, per se. I still think that it is a better way to spend your evening being entertained than by sitting in front of a television or computer immersed in advertisements. I personally though can’t do it. I might, at some point, because let’s face it, I’m an artist and I need to eat and if I can get a decent paying job, who am I to say no? But I know that I want to work in theatre that matters. I want to tell stories that aren’t being told. I want to do theatre related to activism. I want to give voice to the voiceless. Don’t confuse this. I don’t want to speak on behalf of them. I want to give their own voices room to speak. I want to participate in theatre that evokes change. Theatre that gives face to the oppressed. I want to do things like On The Edge of the Knife, and The Vagina Monologues, and the Peace Project. These projects that I have been involved in that have been some of the most meaningful and amazing experiences of my life. I want more of that. I want to participate in / create theatre that causes catharsis in the audience. I want to bring people through emotional changes. I want to enlighten them. I want to help people understand the universe and their place in it. Let’s face it, I want to understand the universe and my place in it. I want to live and breathe activist theatre. I want to change lives with theatre. I want to raise awareness for causes of great importance to me.
I minored in Women’s Studies. This is probably the most liberal major / minor that my conservative Christian college offers. My education in Women’s Studies has taught me to participate in the world in a different way. It has taught me to think critically about the media that I consume, the things that people say, and the world in which I live. I have learned to acknowledge my privilege, and not apologize for it.
I have learned to value narratives. That is an important part of theatre. The part of telling stories. In women’s studies we learn the immense power of personal narrative. It’s the reason why the Vagina Monologues are so successful and powerful and moving. Telling our stories, giving voice to our own personal experience is an empowering and beautiful thing. Sharing stories is immensely important in building connections between people, and also in giving voice to the voiceless. I hope to promote personal narrative through my theatre work. I hope to put to stage the stories of my fellow humans. I want to tell stories that may not seem significant. I want to interview people and write scenes and monologues based on their stories and put them on a stage for an audience. I want to discover something about how we all function as part of a community by interacting with that community and dissecting it. I want to splay everything onstage for all to see. I do not want to do this in a voyeuristic or exploitive way. I certainly don’t want to capitalize on the stories of others. I simply want to make people aware of the story of the other. I want to bring people together through theatre.
I want to work with children. I want to spend time with children and write their stories too. I want to put their lives on the stage. Children are magic and innocence. Their imaginations run wild and they are not limited by our grown up ideas and knowledge of the world. Instead they are limitless in potential and knowledge that we have forgotten. I want to experience more of that. I want to get kids interested in writing and theatre. I want to teach them what I know about the power of sharing stories. Children are amazing vessels who can make magic out of the energy we put in them, so I want to put as much energy as I can into them. That, and I happen to be four years old at heart, so it helps to hang out with people my own age.
I want to travel. I would love to do a tour or a traveling show, even a circus perhaps. I would be thrilled to do that as part of my early career, now when I’m in my 20s and have no major commitments or ties to places. I want to see the world because I want as many stories as I can possibly gather to write about later. I want to meet people. I want to interact with others and learn. This is part of why New York has been so good for me. I have been able to on a daily basis interact with new people and have new conversations and learn new things about new lives. I have been able to do character studies on such a diverse range of people. I have observed the way people dress and what that says about them. Despite my lack of ambition to ever be a costume designer, I have done hours of research just by perceiving people’s dress on the street. The way that people present themselves to the world, and what that says about who they are. I make these judgments constantly walking through the city. I get to imagine stories and lives for these people and I want to talk to more of them and learn what the real stories are. I want to travel around the country world and meet people. Learn their stories. Write about them.
I want to spend time with my family. Despite all of these grand ideas of what I want to do with my life in the near future, I also want to spend as much time with my parents as I can in the next two years. Both my parents suffer from chronic illness and their quality of life has greatly diminished in the last two years, as well as their life expectancy. So, though I want to travel a lot and spend time getting to know people, I also want to spend time with the people who instilled all of these values in me and cherish them while I can. This is important. This runs in conflict to my other plans / desires for my life in the next five years. This is something that I have to figure out. Especially as my parents aren’t even in the same part of the country, (Dad in Illinois and Mom in California).
I want to learn more about directing and have more directing experience. I have absolutely adored the experiences directing that I was able to have throughout college, including to observe a professional director in the rehearsal process here in New York. I seem to have a knack for directing and it is something that I am very interested in pursuing. I have considered graduate school to pursue directing, but I feel as though experience will benefit me more than schooling would at this point. I’m not sure if this is the right philosophy to have, but graduate studies cost a lot of money and I already have student loans. I would like to gain more opportunities to observe directors directing. I would like to gain experience as an assistant director. I would like to make it a goal to read more books about directing. I would like to work on small directing projects and to gain more and more experience that way. I want to talk to directors and find out how they got to where they are now. I will pursue this by contacting Azar who is a friend of Val, Steph, and Kristi at the New Group and who is actively working as a director in Chicago. I had the chance to meet her randomly after a show, and we exchanged numbers. Hopefully I can make a more solid connection with her in Chicago when I am there. I want to meet more directors. I want to learn about different styles of directing.
I want to direct. I want to spend time with family. I want to travel. I want to work with children. I want to value narratives. I want to do activist theatre. I want to accomplish all of these things in the next five years (or so). I want to be able to read this, my last paper of my college career, one that is decidedly not academic in nature, and say “Hey! I did that! And that! And that!” I want to be able to look back on this time as being the cusp of something more exciting than moving home and never coming back to New York. I want to succeed, thrive, and grow. Not just in theatre, but as a person.
