What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?

from William Franke, Director of Development & Communications

Yesterday I went to see a wonderful production of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure at NYU's Gallatin School. I'm friends with the director and also know one of the performers from working with her in a Gallatin production of 1001 last fall (I was there as a guest artist).

Now, Shakespeare is wonderful and there have been all kinds of articles and musings about how applicable he is to all disciplines & walks of life. But what struck me was my conversation with the young woman I worked with before. She's now a sophomore and when I asked how things were going, she was busy, of course, but she said she was also "figuring out what I want to be when I grow up." While she had a realistic view of this task, she felt a sense of urgency; even though she agreed when I told her she had time yet to figure it out, I could tell she was anxious (as many students are) to get it settled. (She had at least determined that she no longer desired to be a lawyer, so that helped narrow it down.)

I like to think that her experience in the theatre will only serve her well later in life, no matter what course she chooses. The time management skills she's developing when rehearsing a play are invaluable, because she's working both individually and collaboratively with a larger group. There are those times spent exploring the text in rehearsal, but that follows grappling with its mysteries alone, on her own time, so that she has something to bring to the table in those group sessions (not to mention learning her lines on her own time, so her nose isn't always stuck in the script).

The group dynamic should also prove beneficial. Regardless of the laurels bestowed on any one person for any one achievement, the fact is that no one truly accomplishes anything alone, whether it's landing on the moon, winning an election or a championship, creating the next iPhone, or discovering the next great medical breakthrough.

But really the most important way this student's theatre experiences will have an impact on her later life is something we can't pinpoint now. Something intangible now will come as an epiphany years down the road. I recently read a story about the late Steve Jobs and his similar experience while at Reed College, where he took a calligraphy course:

I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them....

[emphasis added]

And it's this subtle, unquantifiable effect that both theatre & the arts has that is perhaps the most profound. This ability to permeate our consciousness, only to bubble up in unexpected ways—whether we're students (lucky enough to be) studying the arts in (the ever-dwindling) arts programs in schools, or a member of the audience at a play. I firmly believe that there will be someone out there, maybe even at our next reading (on November 21st), who at some point will have a chord struck deep within them and realize how that piece of art relates to a challenge they're facing in their own life, and that realization, that connection will help them overcome that challenge, triumph & endure. Or maybe even help them realize what they want to be when they grow up.
 

Hey, Theatre East-ers, we want to know:  

What is the most profound effect—immediate or delayed—that theatre (whether as theatre-maker or audience) has had on your life? Let us know in the comments.

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