Teaching Theatre From A Distance

Kate Farrington

Artistic Associate

I just closed the (grade) book on my personal “Phase One” of the current pandemic. For two months I’ve been wheedling my too-old laptop into serving as a hub for my various teaching endeavors (I’m an adjunct professor). No lie, it’s been a slog. Fighting with online platforms to display things the way I want, struggling to find alternative sources for tried-and-true performance clips I can share over Zoom, and generally feeling put upon by circumstance. 

 Believe me, I know how lucky I am. I’ve watched friends and colleagues across the theatre community lose both theatre work and survival jobs for the foreseeable future. “We were the first to close, we’ll be the last to re-open” has been a common statement in the arts community—stated without rancor but with the grim understanding that the theatre is in for a rough recovery. I’m incredibly grateful I blundered into teaching a decade ago and that it’s proven not only to be work I can do under a variety of circumstances, but that it’s work I intensely enjoy. 

 But like many people I’ve talked to, whether kindergarten teachers or graduate school lecturers, I ended every week feeling like I was averaging a C-. At best. The classroom tactics I’ve relied on are suddenly useless. The politely hands-off acquaintance I’d had with online teaching tools is now a ‘round the clock relationship I did not ask for and did not enjoy. It’s been hard to see anything but my failures—the times when a lecture fell flat or an assignment didn’t get the result I wanted or my online instructions weren’t clear enough. 

 And teaching theatre at a distance is just . . . bizarre. Our entire field is built on face-to-face interaction, on inhabiting and experiencing the same space. On breathing the same air. Many of my students struggled to adjust to acting, movement, and voice classes that were suddenly the exact opposite of what they signed up for. They grieved for the irreplaceable student productions, dance concerts, and play workshops that vanished overnight. Not to mention the coveted summer internships or summer stock positions so vital as the early career steps into an industry built on personal connections. I had students asking—fairly—if they were pursuing a theatre degree at the worst possible time.

 Well—yes. And no.

 As I finally take a breath and try to take stock of the past two months, I realize how much I’ve learned (or maybe re-learned) about how versatile and elastic the teacher-student relationship can be, and by extension how quickly the theatre can adapt to extraordinary circumstances. 

 So, I thought it might be fun to share with you a few lessons I’ve picked up since mid-March. I promise I won’t complain TOO much about Zoom.

 Lesson The First: Connection Finds A Way

 I did not go into this learning experiment with high hopes. The first time I convened an online class and stared dubiously at the gallery of faces staring dubiously back at me, I honestly couldn’t see how this was going to work. 

 I tend to tightly plan only about 70% of my lecture points—the rest I leave to student interest. If we’re discussing Moliere and student want to go down a side street about popular music in the 1660s, I’m there for that. If I get over-excited about the portrayal of servants in Shakespeare’s comedies and feel the room go dead with disinterest, we move on. But how could I do that online? How could I facilitate the give-and-take so central to my teaching style?

 Well, I may never get to the point where online teaching gives me the same thrill I feel standing in a classroom on day one, but it wasn’t the joyless experience I feared.  We learned how to connect. They learned to use the chat feature to ask provocative questions or hold side conversations I could dip into and out of. I learned how to break up a lecture to keep them tuned in. It didn’t always work, I didn’t always get it right (there are a couple lectures I’d give anything to erase from our communal memory), but there were impassioned conversations, vigorous debates carried on from bedrooms and kitchen tables on different coasts and even in different countries. I’d put up a script and ask for readers—and suddenly Lorraine Hansberry’s Raisin in the Sunis echoing across the internet, bouncing from Queens and Brooklyn to Mexico City, read with as much passion and clarity as if we were standing in the Younger family kitchen. Utterly awe-inspiring.

 It speaks to the broader artistic moment. The sheer volume of artistic output—powerful, engaging work—released by playwrights, actors, dancers, musicians in the past months has been astounding. And what they are creating isn’t some modified version of film or TV—it’s theatre. The delivery system may be different, but the connection is still there Not exactly the same, no, but alive and vibrant and working. 

 Lesson The Second: We Need Plays Like Whoa

 It’s almost a cliché to say that Shakespeare has a quote for every occasion—though he definitely does. But he isn’t the playwright my students turned to.

 No matter the class, I always try to create a syllabus that offers both “Must Read” plays and “Must Read Now” plays. Must Read plays are the scripts I think every theatre artist ought to have glanced at at least once in their lives. Must Read Now plays are scripts I think will resonate with students at a particular moment—plays that speak to a specific cultural or political reality. And every once in a while something happens in the world that moves a Must Read play into the Must Read Now column. This semester? Waiting for Godot. 

 Now, usually I have to coax students to really engage with Beckett. Which I totally get. Godot’sbleak and nuanced themes—the repetitive nature of life, feelings of futility or emptiness, impotent rage or grief at an uncaring universe—mean that for many students, their first encounter with the work is usually more of an intellectual puzzle than an emotional touchpoint.

 Not this time. We sat there on a chilly April afternoon, each in our respective “lockdown,” each of us experiencing conversations that seemed to repeat endlessly, experiencing the passage of time as a series of days drifting one into the next with no sense of progress and no end in sight. They feltthe play in a way I’ve never seen before. Beckett stopped being an obscure, enigmatic writer and instead offered a crie de coeurfor 2020.

 [As I write this, I am thinking of the final play we read for the semester as well—The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire Worldby Suzan-Lori Parks. I have written elsewhereabout my longstanding love of this play, and, as I watch waves of protest in response to the brutal killing of George Floyd, I can hear lines from that play specifically echoing around me. I’m . . .  “glad” is the wrong word, but knowing what the immediate future has brought, it was a timely play to end with.] 

 The theatre always provides. There is always a word of support, a whisper of comfort, whether coming from 2,000 years in the past or from the next borough over. My students (heck, all of us) have needed those voices so much in the last two months—I’ve never been more grateful for the work of my fellow artists, or more certain of its necessity.

 Which leads me to . . .

 Lesson The Third: We’ll Be Back

 Not right away. Though no official verdict has been given or statement made, I suspect most colleges (maybe even most schools) will approach the fall semester with caution. I’m not sure I’ll be back in the classroom in August. I might not even be back in January.

 The same is true of theatre in general. I think live performance is pretty much a bust for 2020, and ’21 will depend on whether the fall brings us a second wave of coronavirus or winter brings us a vaccine. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that the next couple of years may be the roughest the theatre has seen in a very long time. 

 But when we do come back? It’s just possible we’re in for a Renaissance.

 I think the most fundamental function of theatre is to provide communal experience. We are starving for that right now. In a way that neither film nor television can, theatre may play a vital role in reestablishing the frayed ties this year has created. 

 I think playwrights and performers, already producing powerful of-the-moment work to help us through this impossible time, are going to face the challenge of portraying a world in a state of radical change. And that’s always been where they’ve shined the brightest.

 I think theatre students will have had a crash course in how to reshape their art. I think they will need to be resilient, daring, and innovative. And from what I’ve seen this semester, that’s in the bag.

 I’m VERY ready for a long nap and a few weeks of down time before I start figuring out how to build my fall semester. But I also leave this semester with profound gratitude. Watching the resilience of my students, watching the fortitude of the artists around me—it’s kept me going.

 I can’t wait to see what they will build.