These last two decades have afforded me the consistent opportunity do what I love: to be adventuresome and demanding, precise and expressive, experimental and playful, in collaboration with young people, creating performing ensembles out of groups of students. In the process of making theatre, I have seen students discover depths in themselves, and the ability to articulate those depths, that they never imagined they had. It’s that spark of discovery that makes teaching and doing theatre dynamic for me.

“Fill the space,” I say to students entering the room. It is a direction usually followed by more specific instructions about responding and relating to the other bodies in the space, making relationships, finding moments, listening and being aware of a thousand different things. But this idea of “filling the space” goes beyond the simple warm up exercises with which we begin the day’s work. There is a growing space in our students’ lives now that is being filled in ways that are closing them off to each other rather than bringing them together, face to face. It becomes increasingly essential that we create spaces for them where they can truly be in the same room, responding to what is happening in the present, in open and truthful ways.

 

Since 1995, I have been filling all kinds of spaces in collaboration with high school students. How have my students and I filled the spaces at our schools together? At the International School of Prague in the Czech Republic and at Lawrence Academy in Massachusetts, we filled it with storms at sea in our adaptation of The Odyssey, with Shakespeare’s romancing verse in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It, with provocative questions about the world in An Iliad and The Good Woman of Szechwan, with beautifully articulate silences in a devised full-face character mask show called Awkward Moment, with haunting images of dreams and nightmares in the company-created Rapid Eye Movements, with tension and heartbreak in Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, with the slapstick comedy of The 39 Steps and Peter and the Starcatcher, with devised work inspired by students’ ancestral journey stories in The Trip. In 2013 at Lawrence Academy, we created text and songs for our original piece called Oklahoma! City. by reaching out to interview people who were teenagers at the time of the bombing there in 1995. We have had a uniquely fun, immensely challenging and close experience together creating each of these ways to fill the space, as well as many more.

 

Every class I have taught at those two schools has also been an adventure in discovering where the class would go based on who was in the room and what ideas took off. These have been classes in improvisation, ensemble creation, acting and scene study, directing, and physical theatre. I am a high school theatre teacher, and I also happen to be a theatre artist. Or is it the other way around? It doesn’t matter. The fact is that I have taught theatre at international and independent schools to students who are not often intending to be professional makers of theatre. They have, rather, been young people who will go on to a variety of fields in which they will use the skills they acquire here to be more human and more alive in whatever they end up doing.

 

After I left Cleveland, Ohio, where I grew up and began performing, and then finished my theatre studies at Northwestern University outside of Chicago, I began my teaching life at a preschool in Evanston, Illinois. It was my “day job” for four years as I worked and didn’t work as an actor in Chicago, but teaching those little ones was inspiring in itself. I left Chicago to study at the Dell’Arte School of Physical Theatre in California because I longed for something beyond auditioning and being in other people’s plays. I learned to make my own work and see how ideas could be conveyed theatrically in whole new ways. I took those new skills to Minneapolis where I co-founded a theatre company called mc2 Mask & Clown Company. I began to teach theatre in workshops and residencies in elementary schools. I began a string of many summers spent teaching in a high school pre-college program at Amherst College where I got my first taste of really being with teenagers in a room that contained all kinds of possibilities for creating and devising theatre. I left Minneapolis for the Czech Republic and stayed there for a surprising seven years. While I was in Prague, I fell into several communities of theatre making and also substituted my way into a part time job at the International School there. I grew that job over the next few years into a full-time position, part of which was teaching theatre for the IB diploma program. Working professionally as an actor while being a teacher has enriched my teaching and given my students a chance to see me practice what I preach. Looking out from the Globe Theatre stage in Prague as I played Hamlet and delivering a soliloquy directly to some of my students in the audience was one of the highlights of my teaching as well as my performing career. My theatre company in Prague performed our ensemble-devised piece Encyclopedia of the Dead for my students at the school after we toured it to Bosnia and to Ireland. This facilitated for my students and me a discussion of the nature of theatre and how it can communicate in unique ways, how the question “what was it about?” can be answered with something other than a description of plot, and how a piece of theatre can resonate with an audience long after they leave. As a performer in Prague, I worked in English language theatre, multi-lingual physical theatre, silent mask performance, puppet theatre and lots of film, television and commercial work.

 

Eventually, it was time for me to return to the US, to be nearer to family. But I fully identified by that point as teacher of high school theatre, and I found the job that I’ve been in for 12 years at Lawrence Academy. I’m proud of the work I’ve done there. During my tenure at LA, I’ve been lucky enough to be an associate artist with Sojourn Theatre, led by my college friend Michael Rohd, and the work I’ve done with them in Oregon and across the country has not only been incredibly fulfilling work as a performer/creator, but has also been perfect professional development for me. It consistently informs the teaching and directing I have done with my students. Sojourn makes work that asks questions about the world, and is an ensemble that is very okay with the idea of not knowing as the journey starts out. That is the model I want to bring back to my teaching when I return from the work with Sojourn.

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For my students, there are no right answers to the questions and problems that come up in rehearsal and class as we make something together. There are only more and less clear, or more or less articulate ways of conveying ideas about the world and ourselves. Emily Dickinson wrote, “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant.” If we listen and we try everything, we are bound to find the truth and the way to tell it in ways no one has seen before.
               Something emerges.