Saturday, February 07, 2009

Scrappy Jack's World-Wide Theatricals and Dime Museum: more for the pod people:

The old MFA question came up, of course. Those who've been reading this blog know my take on this: don't waste your time and tens of thousands of dollars, get out there and fail in public. It's harsh, but those experiences are lessons you will never forget, not classes you will sleep through.

And on a deeper level, studying directing or acting or playwriting in an academic environment seems to reinforce some dangerous assumptions.

In a class, you are working for the approval of one person, your teacher, right? You want to get that A. So then you go out into the world and you start working for someone else's approval, a lead critic, say.

In a classroom environment, there's always the unspoken understanding that there is a right answer, a right way and a wrong way. So you get loaded up with all of this received wisdom and unthinking tradition and are subtly or not so subtly discouraged from working from an initial, original impulse.

Where else is anything interesting, innovative or worthwhile going to come from except an initial, original impulse?