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The Theatre and the University: Two “Last” (and Lasting) Human Venues

2015; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 25; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tt.2015.0005

1086-3346

Catherine M. Cole,

Postmodernism in Literature and Education

The Theatre and the University:Two “Last” (and Lasting) Human Venues Catherine M. Cole (bio) “Idealism . . . may in itself be put down as the first idea of the art theatre,” said Sheldon Cheney in 1917 (qtd. in London vii). Our ephemeral art form is quintessentially defined by a near religious faith in the imperative of having visions. In Todd London’s 2013 edited collection An Ideal Theater: Founding Visions for a New American Art, one finds a magnificent gathering of over fifty credos and manifestos of the American theatre: 500 pages testifying to idealism as theatre’s inciting substance, its primary catalyst. “Every theater begins as an ideal,” he says. “Every theater begins in dream form” (xvi). If every theatre begins in dream form, can we say the same of universities? Does every university begin as an ideal? Of what stuff are its dreams made? As a parent of a senior high school student, I recently received a solicitation from a high-end tutoring firm offering to coach my son in taking the SAT exam. This personalized letter advised, earnestly: “If you want to start preparing Aaron for these exams and eliminate the stress of this dreaded process, I encourage you to consider carefully the prep program you choose.” This letter, surely the first of what will be a cascade of direct-marketing solicitations we will receive during the coming year, inaugurates my son’s journey to college as a “dreaded process.” Of course not all dreams are ideals—some of them are nightmares, others are banal, strange, or simply forgotten. Not all dreams lead to actions, and indeed if they did, we would not get much sleep. But perhaps in theatre more than in other spheres of life (save the psychoanalyst’s couch), dreams are expected to become manifest. In our field, we expect dreams to become actions. As we think about our conference theme “DREAM Acts,” we might recall the words of the Gravedigger in Hamlet, who says that every act “hath three branches: it is to act, to do, to perform” (5.1.11–12). What are the branches of the “dream acts” referenced in the ATHE 2014 conference theme? They may be acts of a play; or acts done by a character; or acts of law; or performative acts that create through words—for example, “I arrest you!” or “I apologize.” If words do things, as J. L. Austin and Judith Butler have shown, can we also say that dreams do act? We act out our dreams in theatre’s suspended space of “let’s pretend,” even if we know that our dreams may not come true. Our dreaming comes in cycles. Dreaming in the theatre is a practice that repeats: there is always another rehearsal, another play, another opening, another “take,” another chance to restore behaviors or to renovate them. This is theatre’s redeeming paradox, what Alan Read calls the “banal miracle that is performance”; it is our Lazarus affect, which he defines as “the hopeful feeling that follows a theatrical effect that you know to be true” (2008, 279). The Lazarus affect reminds us, Read says, that theatre, “the last human venue, unlike the irreparable world, has always been a place where you are given the chance to begin again, to recall how intimate an engagement could be and how truly political such reticent acts could become” (ibid.). The theatre is always in danger of dying, and yet it always resurrects. Idealists make this happen. What if the university, like the theatre, is also a last human venue? Does it have a Lazarus affect? And if so, who activates this? [End Page 7] Just as the American theatre had its Hallie Flanagans and Luis Valdezes, the university has had its idealists, its Cardinal Newmans and John Deweys. Like theatre, universities are also based on cyclical reenactments: each academic year a new crop of students arrives, looking (to those of us who stay here for the long haul) somehow both younger and perpetually frozen in time. While the theatre is accustomed to dying and being reborn, for universities, dying is an unfamiliar and alarming experience. Of the public university in America, Michael Meranze said...