Can we chill?

"You don't want a career."

This was said to me this year, with love, by one of my teachers. I'd said something about not knowing if I wanted to do something as a "career" and he interrupted me with this observation, and I immediately said, "You're right. I don't."

Every time a conference comes in, there's a new group of people that I'm working with on a day-to-day basis, and as such, there are the few introductory questions that inevitably occur sometime during the first week. "Where are you from?" "What school do you go to?" "What's your major?", etc. A question that was rather innocuous last year but has gotten significantly more potent nowadays is, "What year are you?" Last year, I could say I was going into my junior year and people would be like, "Oh, you've still got some time." Now, however, I'm going to be a senior, so the follow up is, "What're you going to do when you graduate?"

I do have an answer to this question. I have some plans. I'd look/be stupid if I didn't. Mostly they include things like staying in New York, making money with various theatrical and non-theatrical prospects, doing some unpaid design work for friends who have graduated and are now self-producing, and developing new works/directing public domain plays until I get enough money to do things that require me to pay rights.

I try very hard to steer these conversations away from anything about "career" or "life" plans.

This past week, three very exciting things arrived on the same day. One was my state tax refund. Another was my visa, meaning I can now officially get into Ghana when I arrive. And last but not least were... my studio evaluations.

Grades in theater school are a very funny and rather useless thing. Even if you skip all of that debate on whether you can evaluate art or not, grades in an artistic context tell you very little. On a math test, a grade represents a percentage of questions answered correctly. How do you grade when things are far more subjective than "right" or "wrong"? I'm not sure how the teachers do it, how they "assign a grade", but what they do in addition to the grade they are required to assign is they write us evaluations. A paragraph (or a page if you're a directing teacher, who always write the longest evaluations) about your work in class or on shows this semester, noting strengths and places for improvement. The amount of time and effort that these teachers take to write evaluations for all of their students is astounding, and every time I receive them, it's like getting a packet full of love--because even if they're saying harsh things, they written out of love.

Something that has come up fairly often recently, and came up again in some of my evaluations, is my decision not to do a 4th year directing project.

To put this in perspective, I'm going to take you back about five years.

A little over five years ago, I was a sophomore in high school (an arts school where I was a musical theater major). I had come into that high school on an unexplained impulse towards musical theater fueled by an obsession with Sweeney Todd. A couple weeks into my freshman year and I was already convinced that I wanted to perform musical theater for the rest of my life. However, early my sophomore year I saw my friend Sam dancing on stage, the epitome of "future musical theater performer" (he'd just gotten back from doing the CAP21 summer program at NYU) and thought, "That's not the life I want to lead." I immediately panicked because now what would I do with all of the musicals I'd memorized in the past year? What would I do with the rest of my life? I had had an impulse to direct Sweeney Todd, simply because I was so obsessed with it, which made me think, "Well, what about directing?" Which made me panic even more. However, I started to look at things as I thought a director might, and eventually said, "Yes. Directing. That is what I want to do."

So five years ago, that friend Sam had graduated and was going off to NYU to wear tap shoes at CAP21. I was starting to look at colleges, which was a rather difficult process, actually, because finding a four-year directing program is harder than you'd think. Many of the "top theater schools" I'd been interested in before do this, "go for acting or arts management for two years, then maybe we'll let you into the two year directing program" thing that I was not interested in. Inspired by Sam's stories of his summer in New York (he came back talking about "using verbs", it was mindblowing), I checked out NYU's website to see if they had a four-year directing program. And lo and behold, they DID! At the Playwrights Horizons Theater School studio! (I was of course already familiar with Playwrights Horizons Theater Company because they produced the original production of Sunday in the Park with George and I was a Sondheim Snob.) So, five years ago, I was scouring over the PHTS website, several times a week. I found a paper from fall of 2005 expressing my desire to be in New York, studying directing, at NYU's Playwrights Horizons Theater School studio.

(About four years ago I started having very heated debates with my parents because I was so set on going to PHTS. They were concerned I was cutting off my options by appyling early decision, whereas I was SET on applying early decision because, statistically speaking, it would help my chances of getting in. I remember saying, "I HAVE been researching other programs, and this is the best one out there. If you can find a better one, I would LOVE to hear about it.")

The way projects generally work at PHTS is: you do two smaller projects (30 minutes and 45 minutes is the idea), full-fledged shows that go up in theaters at NYU/PHTS. Mine were Tongues and The Maker of Dreams. Then, you do a full-length project. The two smaller ones are usually referred to as "3rd year" projects and the big one was your "4th year project", though each one is only a semester so it's possible to say... do a project and then go abroad your third year, then do your "second third year" and "4th year" project in your 4th year. There are also people who've done two 3rd year projects, a 4th year project, and a smaller project their last semester. It's rather flexible.

Five years ago, I didn't know enough short plays to start obsessing over my 3rd year projects... but man oh man, was I looking forward to my 4th year! I'd do Sweeney, maybe, if they didn't let me do it in high school, or perhaps John and Jen, or Parade. I'd heard someone at NYU had done Parade in a black box! Crazy!

When I came into PHTS, I'd made my preference for directing known. And though many people started off saying one thing and ended up doing another, I really stuck to it. Considered other things, surely, but always came back to directing. And so, when I revealed to my classmates and teachers that I had decided to use my last semester to focus on design instead of directing, people were shocked. My classmates, in particular. I've had a lot of people say they would have loved to have seen what I would have done, curious as to what I would have proposed. (I'd've proposed the musical My Life with Albertine. Followed by the musical The Baker's Wife, though that might not have flown right after Maker of Dreams. Other options included Amadeus, Kaspar, and Coram Boy, if I felt insane enough. But truly, my heart was set on My Life with Albertine.)

My reasons for choosing Design track for that semester are many. The jist of it is that, I've spent a year focusing on directing, and while I have the opportunities and resources of PHTS, I would like to use them to focus specifically on design, since I do design often and sound design is a HUGE part of my work as a director. If I had another year of college after this one, sure, I'd do a 4th year and then spend a year on design, but I don't, so this will be how I use my time. (I would also rather be employed by others as a designer and then self-produce, rather than be employed by others as a director.)

Some people seem to think this decision means I'm not planning on directing again.

That's silly.

It's kind of like the people who think that, because I'm a theater major, I'm not going to work (whether paid or volunteer) in the church.

That is also silly.

We have gotten so used to limiting what people can do. Who's to say that I can't be a director, sound designer, and vocal coach at the same time? (I did. That was Tongues.) Who's to say that the church and the theater must stay separate outside of youth productions of Godspell? (Check out ancient religious and theatrical traditions--they're often the same.) Who's to say that I can't write a novel about voice? Who's to say that taking a year to join the PeaceCorps in Ethiopia would be detrimental to my "career path"? Who's to say that I have to have a career? I have to make money, sure, but a career is not required for that, especially as I'm not looking to have a family, a marriage, a house, or a retirement plan.

The wind blows where it wants to. You hear its sound, but you don't know where it comes from or where it is going. That's the way it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.

To tell you the truth, I cannot see where I'll be in five years. Probably in New York, but who knows? My life is blown seemingly-random-but-yet-always-connected places. The one thing I'm pretty sure of is that whatever I'm doing, it will probably be working to connect things that seem distant, because there is NOTHING that is isolated. In fact, I will say that there is nothing that is not already connected to everything else in the world. When I am studying voice, I'm studying directing. When I am studying theology, I'm studying design. When I am staging a scene, it is ministry. My career is loving and praising God, which means I will do whatever (usually strange) things that are asked in that service.

I haven't "stopped" doing anything. When I'm in Ghana, I'm planning on doing some intense body/voice exploration, and I have given myself the goal of having something to present as a workshop when I return to New York in January. I've chatted about my Song of Songs/Job piece that's in development with theater artists in New York and North Carolina, and clergy in New York and North Carolina, and am planning on really starting to dive into development with collaborators of that once I graduate. I have already been approached and said yes to a show for Spring 2010 (for which I shall probably be a sound designer-vocal-coach-slight actor combination), which has already got me thinking about how sound can change the physical experience of a room. I'm going to be truly pouncing on a playwright friend of mine about doing some staged readings Spring semester, as I found out this year that I'm the kind of director who works well with staged readings, particularly for "developing the play" purposes (as opposed to "getting a producer" purposes).

Who knows? I don't. But nothing is over, and nothing is disconnected.