More Than a Bookworm

With the beginning of a new semester comes the shaking off of the summer slack. New classes, potential internships, and a completed major declaration form will set me on my way (pause to do a little happy dance, as I can now say I am officially a theatre major!). I am ready to start. I’m ready to get rolling. I’m ready to see how far I can go. So many questions are swimming through my head: Where can I improve? How will I push my limits? What can I accomplish? Will I succeed? But these are good questions. They get me motivated, they make me want to learn, and they encourage me to challenge myself.

The best way to improve and excel in a skill is experience. You can study all you want, but you won’t be able to come anywhere near expertise unless you actually practice what you set out to learn. That goes for any field of study. And my field of study is theatre. To make it in the theatre business –as in any other business – you can’t just know theatre; you have to know how to do theatre. You can rattle off every major playwright in the world, you can devour all the method books that Constantin Stanislavski and Uta Hagen and Sanford Meisner wrote, you can trace theatre history from Oedipus Rex to Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind; but unless you know how to execute a play – take it from page to stage – you won’t make it very far in your career. If facts and history was all you knew, you’d seem more like a bookworm than an artist – and after all, theatre is an art. As thespians, we are our tools and the stage is our canvas.

As artists, we need to be more than bookworms to succeed. The production process is where theatre majors learn the tricks of the trade: it is where we learn how to use our tools and how to apply them to our canvas. It is our “hands-on”, our “on site”, our “field work” – whatever you like to call it. A theatre student designing, building, rehearsing, and performing a play is like an education student going to a field placement in a local school or a medical student going to residency to get first-hand practice at work life in a hospital. During a production, actors get their best training, and technicians master their craft. After all, how are you supposed to die a heart-wrenching death on stage if you don’t get a director’s criticism and practice it? How are you supposed to know how to hang a stage light safely if you don’t go up to the catwalk with your Master Electrician and a wrench and hang it? How are you supposed to know how to call a cue yourself if you don’t sit down with an experienced stage manager, put on a headset, and call it?

That is the mindset I am adopting this year. Experience. This semester, I landed the position of assistant stage manager for Hope’s musical, Sweeney Todd (how cool is that?!?!), and the rehearsal process is underway as we speak! On top of that amazing opportunity, I will be talking to my theatre department adviser about possible internships for the next two summers (one in Holland and one in Chicago), a potential semester workshop in New York City, future stage managing opportunities, and even a chance to participate in the American College Theatre Festival. Possibilities, possibilities, possibilities! They seem endless. And I’m up for the challenge. I’m going to do all I can to learn my trade: use my resources, enlist the help and wisdom of my professors and advisers, look for new opportunities and challenges, and say “Yes!” to each one I can. I want to go through every open door that life puts in front of me. I’m going to dream, but that’s not all I’m going to do – I’m going to work to make my dreams a reality. You may call it ambition, but I call it learning. Success doesn’t come instantly. I have to learn from someone who has already succeeded in order to succeed on my own. I can’t realize my dreams until I’ve worked for them.

I can’t just sit and study. No matter how often I crack open my textbooks, I can’t just absorb everything on the pages and expect them to get me to where I want to go. I need to work. I need to put down my books and be more than a bookworm.