Tirades from the Theatre

In the small but self important realm of Christian colleges there is a definite hierarchy to the majors. Those who chose to study the sacred, Biblical studies and theology majors, consider themselves at the top of the heap with business and science slightly beneath them. After them come the humanities. Philosophy gets the most respect because no one wants to argue with a baby philosopher. Next comes history and English because they will have no trouble getting accepted into graduate school. And finally at the very bottom of the heap are the students of the arts. 

I am a theatre major, and I am tired of all the condescension. I spend just as much time in the black box theatre as any chemistry major spends bent over a Bunsen burner. Yet, I am labeled academically soft and emotionally volatile. Therefore I will try to the best of my abilities to refute both these claims through a calm and logical argument.

A good deal of the condescension stems from the fact that in acting class we lie on the floor and find our inner pool of vibration. However, acting class is only one component of the theatre arts major. I challenge any history major to take theatre history as an elective and discover that we too know how to deal with cold hard facts. We have to remember dates, names, and places like the rest of you. And just as a history major tries to understand change over time, so does a theatre major. We strive to understand how the devastating loss of ideals after World War I contributed to the rise of Absurdism, and why the Nazis embraced Wagner and his passion for the masterwork with such a devastating misunderstanding. We struggle to make sense of the myriad of plays produced since the time of the Greeks in order to understand how they affected culture, and how in turn we may change our own. This is the same lofty goal towards which all students should struggle. The only difference is that instead of trying to advance science or gain a practical understanding of macro economics we are trying to understand how the average citizen responds to them.

One of the great purposes of theatre is to record civilization. Not things like the great building projects of Ramses and Herod for they will always be remembered. Instead we struggle to remember what is all too easily forgotten: the feelings and lives of the average citizen. As Thornton Wilder said in Our Town:

Babylon once had two million people in it, and all we know about them is the names of kings, some wheat contracts-and the sales of slaves. Yet every night the family sat down to supper, and the father came home from his work, and the smoke went up the chimney same as here. And all we know about them is the bits we can piece together from the jokes and plays they wrote for theatre back then”   

In a play we see what does not make it into a text book. No textbook will ever break our hearts with the story of a farmer in New Hampshire who lost his wife in childbirth. Instead it can tell us that the infant mortality rate was high at the turn of the century. History can give us facts, which the scientists can study and use to change the future. But theatre can tell us the stories that make up those facts. Without those stories we will lose what it means to be human. 

G.K Chesterton said that: “tradition is democracy extended through time”, as Americans we believe in democracy, just as we believe in progress. But in order to maintain both we must not forget those whose lives contributed to the statistics in our textbooks. This therefore is the purpose of theatre: to repeat what was said so that we can remember the dead, and to say what needs to be said so that we in turn will not be forgotten. It is with this aim that I pursue my degree.

With this exalted view of the theatre’s role comes the responsibility to understand what is actually going on around us. So I ask you to talk with me. Tell me about history, about chemistry, about the different ways of interpreting Genesis 6:1-4. I will listen. I love to listen. All I ask in return is that you grant a theatre major the same respect you would a Bible major. After all they will have just as hard a time finding a job after graduation. Possibly harder, because we have at least been taught how to listen. 

 Hannah Baker