Love the Audience and Do What You Please

For a fledgling school that wants to add a few extracurricular activities, theater isn’t a bad place to start. You don’t need many people; it can be cheap; it brings the entire school community together; and, of course, it’s fun. Classical Christian schools, in particular, can tap into the deep history of drama as both a classical and Christian art form. It’s one of the few places where curriculum and extra-curriculum complement each other perfectly.

Yet, from what I can see, classical Christian schools have not developed theater programs in a rigorous way. Students read plays in the classroom, of course, and the drama teacher does his or her best to put on productions that parents can watch without wincing. But there is no overarching philosophy connecting the theater program to the mission of the school. Theater may be a part of many classical Christian schools, but few of these schools approach theater in any way that is distinctively classical or Christian. In not doing so, they’re missing an opportunity to teach students to pursue truth, goodness, and beauty through the subject of art.

As far as “classical” goes, I think this is simply an oversight. Theater is one of the most classical subjects out there, in both form and content. People may debate what exactly “classical” means, but at the very least, we can describe classical education as an extended exercise in thinking others’ thoughts after them. Whether you define it as approaching every subject in three distinct stages (Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric) or pursuing virtue or learning to love old things, classical education impresses upon the student the fact that the most important things exist outside of him. He must conform to them. This kind of friendly objectivity is crucial to all forms of classical Christian education.

This is crucial in theater, too. Theater is all about thinking others’ thoughts after them. Directors and actors pore over a text like jewelers scrutinizing a diamond. They look for the best possible interpretation of the play, and they alwaysgive the playwright the benefit of the doubt. “I don’t get that line. Can we cut it?” is not an OK position in theater. A director or actor may spend hours—or days—puzzling over some detail before settling on an interpretation. The actors are highly motivated to get it right because they have to say those lines out loud in front of hundreds of people and need them to be believable. Think of it as an extended oral exam.

When it comes to theater, the real difficulty comes not in the “classical” side of CCE, but in the “Christian” side. This is where work needs to be done. I’m not referring to the godless culture of modern theater or the vulgar content of modern plays. The challenge facing the Christian high school drama teacher comes at a more fundamental level. It comes in the nature of the actor’s craft. If classical schools pursue excellence in theatrical performance, sooner or later they’ll have to deal with some rather sticky problems.

To convincingly pretend to be another person requires extraordinary concentration, sensitivity, and control. Most students are beginners and need the director to tell them exactly what to do. As they grow more confident, they go beyond the black-and-white words on the page to explore the feelings and motivations of the characters. This is where things get dicey. A high school student can feel with the best of them, but as far as controlling those feelings, he may as well be eating tomato soup with a fork. In playing a villain like Iago, for example, a young actor may tap into his own experience of envy and duplicity. When the curtain falls, he needs to be able to put that wickedness aside. But how? For the sake of the actors, classical Christian schools must have an answer to that question.

I am not a trained actor, and trained actors will probably wince at the advice I’m about to give. The mantra I repeat over and over when directing a play is this: “Keep the audience in mind.” It is your duty, I tell my actors, to love the audience. You must sacrifice yourself for the good of those who came to see you perform. You must put your ego aside and use all the gifts you have—mental, physical, emotional—to tell a story you believe is important. Your goal is to introduce the audience to the characters and the story. To do this well, you will sometimes have to make yourself vulnerable as you draw on your own experience—joys, longings, frustrations—to communicate what your character thinks and feels. But, at the end of the day, none of you is the star of the show. The show is the star.

    The idea is to create some separation between Iago and the sixteen-year-old playing him. If the play is good, the story will show that Iago is a villain. The student loves the audience by portraying Iago as realistically and humanly as possible, confident that Iago will be foiled in the end. The director’s job is to remind the actor of his role in the story and help him act accordingly. The director simultaneously inhabits the world of the actor, who is plumbing Iago’s dark imaginings, and the world of the audience, who must never lose sight of the fact that Iago’s behavior is, in fact, wrong.

  In one play I directed recently, a character had an “Elsa moment,” in which she sang about throwing aside restraint and forging her own path, ignoring whatever criticisms the world tried to throw at her. Just like “Let It Go” in Frozen, this song occurred in the middle of the play, at the end of the first act, when the character was still in the middle of her story arc. She had a long way to go. I knew it, and the actress knew it, but the character didn’t know it. We had to build the scene so that the audience could feel what the character was feeling without getting lost in her logic. Ideally, when the song ended and lights came on for the intermission, the audience would applaud, stand, stretch, and think to themselves, “I wonder what will happen when that character’s dream meets reality.”

 The actress playing this role did not necessarily have to understand everything her character was going through, but she did have to portray it convincingly. I, as the director, didn’t have to portray it, but I had to understand it. It was my duty to stand by everything in the play, down to the tiniest bit of dialogue, defending it if necessary. I needed to build a solid foundation so that the actors could engage in flights of fancy, knowing that they had a sure place to land.

As classical Christian education matures, the question of the arts will gain more and more attention. What are they for? How do we do them well? Theater is a small part of that discussion, but it is as good a place as any to start developing answers.