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Richard S. Beam

159     A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Theatre

9/27/2019

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Having written about my life/career in theatre at what was probably greater length than anyone cared about last time, I thought I’d do a post of some theatre-related humor.
 
I ran across this story a good while ago.  While it probably deals with a movie theatre, having spent a lot of time doing “front-of-the-house” both as a student, and, later, as a faculty member, I found this to be a pretty successful attempt to make a joke out of every House Manager’s nightmare.  
 
     An old man lay awkwardly sprawled across three entire seats in the theater.  When the usher came by and noticed this, he whispered to the old man, "Sorry sir, but you're only allowed one seat."

     The old man didn't budge.

     The usher became more impatient.  "Sir, if you don't get up from there, I'm going to have to call the manager."

     Once again, the old man just muttered and did nothing.

     The usher marched briskly back up the aisle, and in a moment returned with the manager.  

​     Together the two of them tried repeatedly to move the old disheveled man, but with no success.

     Finally, they summoned the police.

     The officer surveyed the situation briefly, then asked, "All right, buddy, what's your name?"

     "Fred," the old man moaned.

     "Where you from, Fred?" asked the police officer.

     With a terrible strain in his voice, and without moving, Fred replied; "The balcony"....
 
I think that the creators of “Thatababy” MAY have solved the problem of casting the part of Caesar in Shakespeare’s play for all time.
Picture
In the Broadway theatres, it used to be (perhaps still is) the practice to post specific, announcements related to the currently running production.  I ran across these “suggestions” for such notices in a copy of the New Yorkerprobably close to twenty years ago, but I thought them amusing enough to save.
 
               Some Theatre-Lobby Notices by Andy Borowitz from the New Yorker:
 
WARNING:     In Act II there is gunfire, an explosion, and a lengthy monologue by a character named Mr. God.
 
WARNING:     Owing to a typographical error, the Times review of this play omitted the word “horrible.”
 
WARNING:     In Act III, there is full-frontal nudity, but not involving the actor you would like to see naked.
 
WARNING:     Any audience members you may hear laughing this evening have been paid handsomely to do so.
 
WARNING:     Tonight’s play is being produced in spite of explicit instructions in the dead playwright’s will to “burn all remaining copies to a crisp.”
 
WARNING:     The role usually played by Sir Ian McKellen will be performed tonight by the actor who played Isaac on “The Love Boat.”
 
WARNING:     This play has a title very similar to that of another play currently running on Broadway, which is the one you meant to purchase tickets for.
 
WARNING:     Tom Stoppard found the play you are about to see “confusing.”
 
WARNING:     Tonight’s play is performed without an intermission and you will be stuck here forever.
 
So much for Lobby Notices!  Moving right along to critics and reviews….
 
Understandably, nobody is particularly “fond” of negative reviews of their work.  I believe that it helps to be your own worst critic and always suggested to my students that they should follow that practice.  Certainly, they should be pleased when their work comes up to their (hopefully high) standards, and they should always try to figure out how to do better when it doesn’t.  But that they shouldn’t, necessarily, be too overly upset when someone makes negative comments, or too over-joyed when somebody praises their work.  
 
I don’t think it’s particularly arrogant to suggest that only the creators truly have a grasp of what was being attempted.  I remember being criticized when I directed Beckett’s Waiting for Godot because the student critic for The Carolinian didn’t feel the characters were feeling what he thought was the “appropriate existential anguish.”  I didn’t have the heart to tell him that we (the cast and I) thought that Beckett’s point was that he (therefore, we) didn’t want to show the characters experiencing that “anguish.”  
 
We thought that Beckett (and, therefore, we) wanted the audience to be anguished by the character’s lack of it!  We weren’t after a “look how they are suffering!” response, which, apparently, was what this student desired.  What we wanted was the “It’s very upsetting to me that these characters just can’t get it together enough to actually DO anything meaningful about their problems!”  After all, one doesn’t get anywhere by simply waiting for a solution to show up, which is, basically, what they do for the whole play.  This is why Beckett wrote the play, at least as we understood it.  
 
Consequently, I was only frustrated that the student reviewer was unwilling to accept what he suggested was an apparently successful production because he was unwilling to look at what we were attempting, rather than what he thought we SHOULD be attempting.  Thus, he was not following Goethe’s “Rules” for critics.
 
Still, unpleasant reviews do make one wish to do something like what is shown in this “Shoe” cartoon.
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I think I may have commented before about my distain for the “These are REAL people, NOT Actors” TV ads on some previous post.  I confess that I still don’t care for the implication that actors are not real, just paid liars, but I found this Garfield comic strip much too funny to ignore. That MIGHT be because I am a “cat person,” having had cat(s) for most of the past fifty-some years, but I did find it quite funny.
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My last “contribution” to this post is something which I have no recollection of having discovered, but I know that I didn’t create it.  I suspect that I ran across it in some satire of Shakespearean scholarship, or some such, but I have no idea where.  It says that it is from The Saturday Review of April 18, 1964.  That would have made it timely (just before Shakespeare’s 400th birthday), but I am fairly sure that isn’t where I saw it.  I’m pretty sure I found it reprinted somewhere else.  Still, as someone who is relatively familiar with both academia and the works of Shakespeare, I found this to be hysterical.  I hope any readers will enjoy it, as well.
 
                                                   CITIZENS' STATE UNIVERSITY
                                                                April 13, 1964
 
From:  Dr. Earl Prince King
            Dean of the Faculty 
 
To:       Mr. William Shakespeare 
            English Department 
 
Re: Termination of Employment 
 
Dear Professor Shakespeare: 
 
            You are hereby relieved of your duties at Citizens' State University and are placed on sick leave for the remainder of the semester, at which time your contract will be terminated.  Due to an unexpected vacancy last summer, my predecessor had to hire you more hastily than usual, without a detailed examination of your qualifications.  (You will recall that you did not furnish references.)  However, alert Christian students have called my attention to your writings (the few that have been published); and from an alumnus in London I have secured a report about your unpublished plays, the ones in the repertory of the Globe Theater there.  In addition, various facts about your career have finally reached us here in the United States.  Some of them have even become known around the campus.  I am afraid that 1 will have to dispense with politeness and speak bluntly. 
 
            To begin with, you are on record as having spelled your family name in at least thirteen different ways, which suggests that you are an imposter; and it has even been charged that you are not William Shakespeare at all but one Francis Bacon, a convicted bribe-taker.  When you were only nineteen, living in Stratford, England, you produced pregnancy in a girl and had to marry her so hastily that you needed special permission from the Bishop.  About two years later, after two more children, you left your family behind in Stratford and commenced residence in London, not rejoining them for about twenty-five years.  According to your-own sonnets, you have committed adultery or have tried to commit it with a certain "dark lady."  Other love affairs of yours have become common gossip.  For instance, a friend of yours, Richard Burbage, says that you cheated him (as well as your wife) by visiting a woman with whom he had made an appointment.  When he knocked at the door, you opened it and said, "Remember: William the Conqueror comes before Richard the Lion-Hearted."  (For your information, I see nothing humorous about the incident.) 
 
            As for your writings, they reek (and I use the word advisedly) of sex and violence.  In the opinion of the University's lawyers, your very first work, Venus and Adonis, is obscene and ought to have been banned. 
 
            Your sonnets have aroused the suspicion, not only in me, but in the University's psychiatrist, Dr. Summerfield, that you may be a pervert or that you have been one.  About half of them are declarations of love to a young man. 
 
            The characters in your plays kill, duel, make war, steal, go to prostitutes, deprive girls of their virginity, swear, drink, talk about sex, miscegenate, and commit suicide.  They even doubt the existence of God and God's Plan. 
 
            In Henry IV, you think it is very funny to depict a Crown Prince stealing purses.  In Romeo and Juliet, you think it is extremely funny to portray young men who brawl in the streets and rob girls of their virtue without marrying them.  In Hamlet, you ask us to feel sorry for a young man because he does not behave like a delinquent; you consider him a coward because he refuses to kill his stepfather.  Your Antony and Cleopatra are simply juvenile delinquents upon a global scale, obsessed with sex and not even married.
 
            At least four of your plays (if they are published) would prove offensive to minority groups at any American university.  In Othello, you try to romanticize marriage between Negroes and whites.  Not only would many whites object; many Negroes would, too.  In Romeo and Juliet and Antony and Cleopatra, you could offend Catholic students by your glorification of suicide.  In Romeo and Juliet, everybody is a Catholic and yet everybody thinks the suicide is beautiful.  Not even the Catholic priest says the lovers have gone to hell.  (I might as well say flatly, Professor Shakespeare, that I find all of your plays unbelievable.)  In The Merchant of Venice, you portray a Jew who demands a pound of Gentile flesh. 
 
            As for religion; not one of your plays glorifies it -- at least not clearly and unambiguously.  One moment you are saying, "There's a divinity that shapes our ends"; and the next moment you are wondering whether life signifies nothing.  Are you an agnostic?  Are you an atheist?  If you are a Christian, why don't you come right out and tell us so? 
 
            In regard to your teaching, I will only say that to the best of my knowledge, I find it very hard to believe that your four sections of freshmen are learning to write plain, simple English from you.  Frankly, in both your poetry and prose you sound as though you were intoxicated.  Your style totters on the edge of absurdity or even insanity.  You are wordy, crude, obscure, and addicted to far-fetched figures of speech.  As the former Director of the University's Testing Service, I can state with some authority that on nearly every page you exhibit emotional instability and immaturity. 
 
            Although Citizens' State believes in academic freedom, it does not believe in academic license.  Consequently, I cannot provide you with a letter of recommendation, and no member of the English Department will be permitted to give you one.
 
                                                                                                Sincerely yours, 
 
 
                                                                                                Earl Prince King, Ph. D.                                                                                                                                  
                                                                                                            Distinguished Service Professor 
                                                                                                                        and Dean of the Faculty. 
 
P. S. I regret having to send this dismissal notice just before your birthday, but a deep concern for the welfare of your students compels me to act without further delay. 
 
From: Saturday Review (April 18, 1964), p. 59 
 
LLAP
            Dr. B
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158     A Life in the Theatre

9/13/2019

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​Well, Labor Day has passed, schools have started, or are starting, and I am, once again, reminded that I am retired from a life in academic/educational theatre.  Until I retired in 2014, I had been involved with academic theatre at some level pretty continuously since about 1959, and I started doing things in educational theatre (as opposed to just attending) as early as 1956.  That’s a long time!  
 
I started out by performing in a Sixth-Grade play adaptation of the book of Johnny Tremain, as the culmination of the three years of “Creative Dramatics” classes every student took in the Evanston schools at that time. I went on to have some involvement (mostly in the front-of-the-house) at Evanston Twp. High School, although I did have a little backstage involvement, as well.  The production I most remember being involved in was a summer one of The Importance of Being Earnest, although there were a number of others, enough that I had decided I was pretty serious about this theatre stuff.  
 
When I went to Indiana, I got seriously involved quickly, as in my first week as a student.  From then on, as a Theatre Major, I worked on most shows in some capacity.  I acted small roles in some shows, was on shift and/or construction crews a lot, ran sound (for the production of The Tempest in 1964, we used 2 reel-to-reel tape machines, with three reels of tape for each one, and about two dozen tape cartridges for short, quick cues.  Combine that with selectable speakers all over the house and stage, and it took three of us to keep track of it all.  As I remember it, I also ran lights and stage managed some.  If I didn’t work a show, I generally ushered for it.  The summer after my Freshman year, I spent doing summer stock with a buddy of mine at Beloit College in Wisconsin.  We did ten shows in eleven weeks!  That kept us hopping. During my final summer at IU, I was a member of the Brown County Playhouse company, which was the University’s summer stock theatre in a theatre that IU ran in Nashville, IN during the summers at that time.  There, we did three different shows over the course of the summer while taking classes, as well.
 
When I started on my master’s degree, I stayed at IU because I was offered a Fellowship as a “Graduate Artist-in-Residence” to serve as Co-Technical Director of the Indiana Theatre Company. That meant that I helped with set construction, designed and supervised lights on the road, and was co-driver of the company truck, as well as acting in smaller roles and sharing stage management duties.  We generally left Bloomington on Thursday afternoon to drive to our first gig; setup and ran the show on Friday; then (a good deal of the time) we struck and loaded out after the performance.  On Saturday, we tech folk got up early to drive to a second gig; got setup for the rest of the company to arrive by mid-afternoon; did that night’s show; loaded out and (after sleeping a bit) drove back to Bloomington on Sunday.  For the first semester, at least, we had rehearsals most evenings Monday through Thursday to get the second and third shows ready to add to the rep, for we did three shows each year.  And we did them in rep, so we might do two different shows in the same weekend!  Over the two seasons I was involved we did: Tartuffe, The Taming of the Shrew, Amphitryon 38, The Rivals, The Glass Menagerie, and The Death of a Salesman.  Of course, we also had classes (a minimal load), with folks like Oscar Brockett, who my Theatre History students will remember wrote the history text I used. It was a busy couple of years.
 
After two years “on the road,” I had finished my classwork, so I spent the next year working for a local department store in Bloomington, IN, while I was writing my Master’s thesis (an analysis of the promptbook for a production of The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Theatre Royal in Birmingham, England during the latter half of the 19th Century) based on the actual promptbook, which was kept in the Lilly Library [the rare books collection] on the IU campus.  So, I’m not sure if I really should count that as a year of theatrical activity, but I’m going to do so, anyway. After all, the thesis was theatre related.
 
After finishing my Master’s, I took a position as a Designer/TD with the Children’s Theatre Company which I had attended as a child and which had been taken over by the local school district from Northwestern U., which had founded it.  This meant that I was, technically, a public-school teacher, but I really built sets, did lighting and props, directed a summer show, supervised crews, etc.  Much of the work was done with and by Junior High students.  We did six shows a year, three aimed at the primary grades (K-3) and three at the upper grades (4-6).  We kept busy.  After two years with them, the school district lost a bond referendum (it's first such loss in history), so they had to cut a lot of stuff, including the Children’s Theatre program.  I was sorry about that as, at the time, that was the longest continually operating children’s theatre in the country.  In any case, that put me back on the job market in the summer of 1971.
 
I, rather quickly, was offered a position as Designer/TD by a guy named Don Loeffler at a little college in the mountains of western North Carolina; a school called Western Carolina University.  Little did I know that I’d spend the rest of my career there.  For more than forty years, I was designing and TDing sets, lights, and some props; doing some directing; promoting the theatre program (which the Dean referred to as my being “Director of Theatre”) for several years, dealing with House management; and teaching Stagecraft, Theatre Appreciation (in many variations and under several names), Intro. To Theatre, Dramatic Literature I & II, Theatre History I & II, Concept Creation, Intro to the Professions, Intro to Theatre, Intro to Professional Development, BFA Thesis, Basic Public Speaking (several variations), and probably others which don’t come to mind right away.  I was also co-founder of Western’s summer theatre program at Fontana Village in 1974 and spent two summers “in residence” out there doing rep with a faculty colleague and about a dozen students.  In the mid-1970’s, I took a year’s “leave” to do my doctoral course work in fifteen months at the University of Georgia in Athens, where I also managed the Fine Arts Auditorium.  I returned to Western, however, and spent the next several summers completing my dissertation.  In the later days of my career at Western, I also served in the Faculty Senate several times and as Chair of the Faculty for two two-year terms.
 
AND, I can’t forget that I got married during my first year of Graduate School at IU, and Bonnie and I had two daughters and multiple cats over the years.  And we’re still married, although I’m not sure why she has put up with me and my life for all this time.  
 
All things considered, it’s been quite a long and, generally, happy life.  Now, this is NOT a suggestion that I am planning to die anytime soon.  I’ve still got stuff I want to do.  But, the beginning of a school year always makes me just a little nostalgic.  While I’m glad that I retired when I did (it was time!), I confess that I do miss my colleagues and, especially, my students (at least most of them).
 
So, while considering what to write about a lifetime of educational theatre, I looked through my collection of jokes and cartoons to see if I had anything appropriate.  I hope you enjoy what I found.
 
As I always tried to be a complete educator, I had to deal with my students in the classroom, as well as in the shop and rehearsal hall, so I got a bit of a grasp on what was going on in some of their heads.  Here’s some person’s pictorial view of that:


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Some of my former students will remember this sign from the scene shop from “back in the day” when I was TD.
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Not having had to deal with some of the challenges which are all too common in high school theatre programs, I never had to deal with the sort of thing shown below, but I certainly understand it, especially since my grandchildren have engaged in such activities.
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Still college-level teaching (especially advising) did have challenges.  Of course, it probably could have been worse…
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I confess that I feel that I spent much too much time trying to convince students that they needed realistic expectations as to what a life in professional theatre (especially in acting) could well be like.  Perhaps I should have just found this earlier.
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At least I didn’t have to deal with “Theatre Parents” very often.  
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On the other hand, being a Lighting Designer had challenges.  I wish I had thought of having a “Mothy” Award while I was still at Western.  It might have simplified lighting some shows considerably.
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Still, being a theatre educator wasn’t always easy.  Just trying to get students to understand theatre jargon could be quite difficult. 
 
A Theatre Dictionary
IN is down, DOWN is front,
OUT is up, UP is back,
OFF is out, ON is in,
RIGHT is left, LEFT is right.
A DROP shouldn’t and a
BLOCK AND FALL does neither.
A PROP doesn’t,
And a COVE has no water.
TRIPPING is okay.
A RUNNING CREW rarely gets anywhere.
A PURCHASE LINE will buy you nothing.
A TRAP will not catch anything.
STRIKE is work (in fact, lots of work),
And a GREEN ROOM, thankfully, usually isn’t.
Now, BREAK A LEG!
 
I confess, thinking back on all those years, I have to ask: “How did we all survive?”
 
LLAP

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