Friday, March 30, 2012

Unscripted

I feel like I've been living in a thick cloud; a cloud of stress, schedules, and failed plans. I've been trudging through this cloud sending emails, mailing resumes, and doing homework that I had procrastinating like crazy on. A couple of weekends ago, Megan and I traveled to Castleton to catch up with Jake and Kate and see their Spring show Chicago. We had a great time, and the weather was so beautiful it was almost like nothing could go wrong.

Also, I was wearing my piano key suspenders for the win.
That was when everything started to go crazy. It started when the job I had been lining up this summer, the one I held last summer that allowed me to stay in Burlington for free, completely fell through because the 18 days I'm going to be in Europe this summer on Eurotheatre are too much to take off. Suddenly, I felt lost, and entirely without a plan. I can't live without a plan. What was I going to do without a job for the summer? Where was I going to get money to apply to grad school? So many questions were racing through my head about what this summer is going to look like, and what next year is going to be like especially since Megan got accepted to the University of New Hampshire for graduate school. It's entirely too much change for me to handle. I'M NOT THAT GOOD AT IMPROVISATION! WHAT DO I DO WITHOUT A SCRIPT???

Then Megan took me out on a drive and a walk around downtown Montpelier, just to talk, and to bitch about how crazy life is and what I'm doing with it. That was when I realized...I have so many more skills than I give myself credit for, and there is no reason why I can't use them. Why can't I get a job doing what I love? It's so not impossible, despite what people may say about theatre majors. Theatre, movement, creating, performing, writing, teaching...that's what I'm good at, it's probably all I'm good at, so why am I not using it to my advantage? Why don't I write my own script? So that night, I emailed a bunch of different theatres, and I received a few replies back, and I sent out my resumes, and you know what? I'm going for an interview next week.

I'm not saying that everything's all good now, because it's really not. Rehearsals for the senior directed one-act I'm starring in are going so well, but I'm still super nervous. This will be the biggest role I've had in a show at UVM, and it's thrilling but at the same time terrifying. I'm also worried about setting everything up for next year going into my senior year of college (yikes!) like being a new Program Director in the Living/Learning residences, some opportunities in the works, and my honors thesis project I'm going to be working on that I seem to be churning out ideas about everyday...and what's going to happen after next year when I have to look for another new school. I'm still so stressed about the logistics of this summer, but there are a few things I do know: I'm going to Europe in June (YES!!!), I'm going to be taking a summer English class to take some of the load off myself next year, and I'm going to have some kind of job somewhere that some sort of amount of money (I don't care how much...it's something) doing what I LOVE and what I'm good at. Because I'm better than being stuck in a rut, and I'm better than the same old scripts that have been written for me before.

I'm adding in a PLOT TWIST.


Peace out!

Monday, March 19, 2012

Ryan Performs in Places: Little Voice


If I wanted to, I could stand and breathe in the sunny air, letting it fill my lungs with the cool ripple of the sheer water's surface. I could open my body to the space and sing so loud it would fill the whole bay with notes and words and soul so it would fill the whole bay all the way to the mountains in the distance and reverberate to the heavens. But for now I'm a tiny voice sitting on the rocks, waiting for an opportunity.




Peace out!

Monday, March 12, 2012

What the Hull?



It was dinnertime yet the streets of this off-season beach resort town were near to deserted. Megan and I could hear the sound of heavy waves crashing on the beach as the moon pulled in the high tide. We marched down the sidewalk hand in hand with a mission for a wonderful dinner. It was Megan's birthday and being the horribly broke boyfriend I am, I hadn't bought her a present. The only things I had to give was myself and my love, so I decided the least I could do was take her out to a birthday dinner. So there we were, walking in the dark streets to a very nice-looking pizzeria on the corner which appeared to be open for sit-down, eatin' business. After ordering a meatball pizza, we sit down to see two employees behind the counter making our pizza right then and there. It was amazing, but at the same time we couldn't help notice how quiet this place was...how absolutely devoid of ample human life...

A DAY AND A HALF EARLIER...

Early Tuesday morning Megan, her mom, her grandmother, and I left Lyndonville on a Spring Break birthday road trip to Boston. Our first stop was the University of New Hampshire where we hopped onto the back of the metaphorical undergraduate admissions tour truck even though Megan is applying for the graduate program there. It was a great tour of the campus, and while the crazy biddies and the redneck bro who kept shoving his father during the tour were very entertaining, Megan really enjoyed the campus and the programs offered there. AND they have a Dunkin Donuts on their campus! Sold.

The next stop on our trip was Portsmouth, NH where we checked in to our hotel and explored.






The next morning, it was time to get classy because we were heading to the city. Boston, to be exact, and while I never thought Boston is my city (I <3 NY), I actually found it to be quite beautiful.







We parked the car in the parking garage of a massively swanky hotel at Boston Harbor then went directly to the New England Aquarium where Megan touched a stingray, we made friends with a giant sea turtle, and we watched a group of seals being trained.











After a visit to a Boston Panera Bread (it's delicious everywhere), a walk around the city looking at beautiful buildings and people in business suits, and a semi-stressful drive to get out of the city, we made our way to the beach town of Hull, MA.


The first thing that struck me in Hull were the abandoned carnival fronts that were like ghostly images of childhood wonderlands of summers long past. There were signs for ice cream and fried dough, games and rides. In the back there was a run-down carousel that still held on to its magic even in the desolate emptiness that hung in the salty sea air. Some things we observed about Hull:
  • Almost everything was abandoned - beach houses, storefronts, and restaurants. The only thing that didn't seem to be abandoned was our beach resort which was odd because this town was in such an off-season. It was obvious that this place made all its money in the summer.
  • A supermarket that had full-floor red carpeting. Weird.
  • They had a musical theatre group that was going to perform Curtains in an auditorium that was named after the director...?
  • Roads went nowhere, especially not a lighthouse Megan and I were trying to find.
  • The internet in the hotel was super slow, almost as though the town didn't want us to have any connection to the outside world
  • A pizzeria that was empty at dinnertime.

Which brings us back to Megan's awesome, totally romantic, totally classy birthday dinner. We were sitting there waiting for our pizza and observing the sketchy shit out of this town when the cashier brings a closed pizza box to our table where we have taken our jackets off and asks us if we want plates and napkins...sure... We sat there for a good five minutes trying to figure out whether we should awkwardly eat the pizza there or take it back to the hotel. We decided to take it back to the hotel where we had a pool, a fireplace in our room, and an awesome balcony. So there.











It really was a beautiful place and we had a super fun trip, and the pizza was really good too. Happy birthday, Megan! <3

Peace out!

Thursday, March 8, 2012

Hell to the No - Fighting for the Arts Scene

This is an essay I recently wrote for my Expository Writing class. Hope you enjoy and I hope it calls you to action in some capacity whether it's activism, drawing a picture, singing a song, dancing a sparkly dance, writing a play, or performing on the street.

Hell to the No - Fighting for the Art Scene

            The Laramie Project is a play based on a compilation of interviews performed by playwright Moises Kaufman and the Tectonic Theatre Project. It centers around the city of Laramie, Wyoming and the vicious murder of the openly gay, local college student Matthew Shepard. The play was groundbreaking when it premiered in the early 2000s, is a major part of the American dramatic lexicon, and in the Spring of my senior year of high school would be coming to our humble theatre department.
            Needless to say, I was excited. To my blissfully youthful, theatrically growing mind, performing in The Laramie Project was like winning the Tony for Best Actor. I poured over the entire script, devouring it like it was fresh meat, like it would go bad if I didn't absorb it all in that instant. Once we finally received approval from the administration, a feat all in its own, we set to work adapting the script to fit into one act so we could take it to the Vermont state drama festival.
            After three months of rehearsal, and a sweeping win at the festival, we were ready to perform our creation to our own community, and it became my belief that EVERYONE needed to see this play. It was a necessity. To achieve my lofty goal, I came up with a brilliant plan to bring a camcorder into our final brush-up rehearsals, film segments of the play, and edit them into a kick-ass advertisement I would then play on a loop on this gigantic big-screen T.V. in the cafeteria during lunch.
            The first day of Plan Kick-Ass T.V. Advertisement was fairly smooth right up until the very end. From the designated "theatre kids" table which also included a few "band kids" we could spy a table full of testosterone-filled, redneck, back-of-the-woods, jockstrap-smelling football guys sitting right next to the T.V. Up until that moment, everything had been okay, but right at the end of the period the comments started flying.
            "What the fuck is this?"
            "Why do we have to watch this crap?"
            "Is this about some kind of fag?"
            And it all would have been okay, we would have been completely cool about the whole matter if they hadn't decided to get up and turn the T.V. off.
            Oh hell to the no.
            As I surveyed the cafeteria I noticed just how many members of the school administration and faculty were wandering around: quite a lot. And none of them; absolutely none of them were doing anything to stop the crude and vicious comments flying from the rednecks' food-filled mouths, or preventing them from physically silencing us.
            Right then, one of my best friends, and one of the lead women in our department, stood up. She stands about four foot, ten inches and has the voice of a cartoon Disney princess on helium, but she is scrappy and she was pissed. She marched past the beefy guys and flipped the T.V. back on, turning around to face the entire football team with an index finger pointed right at their noses.
            "Don't you DARE turn that T.V. off again!" she commanded. "I know all your moms, and I am NOT afraid to call them. You know, you could learn a lot from The Laramie Project."
            This confrontation is only one example of how my old high school executed several injustices against our arts programs. In my three years as a member of the prestigious Select Choral Ensemble group headed by our brilliantly talented and caring director, I witnessed several instances where the administration limited our budget so we couldn't purchase sheet music, professional outfits, or publicity for our concerts. They were completely unsupportive when we traveled to compete in various singing contests, and refused to announce our spectacular victories when the sports teams received top billing in assemblies. In some moments it felt like they weren't even treating our director like she was a real teacher. At the end of my senior year, the administration had pressured our director so hard and squeezed her and our Ensemble out so much that she finally gave up and quit. It's prejudice like that that makes me see how underappreciated and unsupported the arts are in our society, and that attitude starts in school.
            In the same year we performed The Laramie Project, a little show called Glee came into my life. Created by Ryan Murphy, Glee tells the story of a small-town high school glee club that perseveres despite the lack of support from the school system and their own personal struggles. Glee is basically a complete representation of my high school and every other establishment that puts the arts down. Every stereotype is depicted: the principal who doesn't want to fork anymore money over to the arts groups because it will detract from the sports programs slightly, the ultra-conservative teachers who refuse to see the benefits of the arts in people's lives and in our culture as a society, the peers who have adopted this negative view of the arts and artists themselves; automatically labeling them as "losers," and the little arts program run by a devoted teacher who persists in spite of everything.
            In an episode from season one, guest star Neil Patrick Harris plays a member of the school district looking to cut arts programs until he finds statistics which show the benefits of an artistic education and how the arts improve the lives and even the learning abilities of students. But it's not just Hollywood that's preaching the values of an artistic education. In an article from the December 1991 issue of Dramatics magazine, theatre professor, director, and author Louis Catron talks about how CEOs are attracted to theatre majors in their hiring process because they possess incredibly desirable qualities that trump even more qualified applicants. Some of these include communication skills, time-management and punctuality, confidence, independence, ability to work collaboratively, adaptability, and overall motivation. And yet it would seem these benefits aren't highly valued in our society despite the rigorous work and discipline that goes into an artistic education.
            At the University of Vermont I have to put in a total of 48 credit hours just for my theatre major. That's more hours than a pre-med student puts in at the undergrad level, and my classes are the furthest thing from easy. Along with my acting classes which are full of performances and serious training, I also have had to take several technical classes which have taught me how to use tools for construction, how present my work professionally, and how to operate complicated computer technology. I have also taken classes in dramatic analysis and theatre history which have taught me literature critique, how to do in-depth research, and more useful history than I'd ever learned in previous history classes. Last year I had to do a twenty page research paper on Spanish Renaissance playwright Lope de Vega along with theatrical conventions of the Spanish Renaissance. I became so interested and involved in that topic that I did the best research and wrote the best paper I think I'd ever turned out in my life.
            Despite all the proven benefits, testimonials, and shocking statistics, there is still so much discouragement in this country regarding the arts, especially the performing arts, from the harsh hierarchies in the halls of high school to the upper reaches of government. This is the government that established the National Endowment for the Arts but then in the early nineties denied funding to many influential and ground-breaking performances artists such as Karen Finley. Her shows brought about social consciousness of gender inequality and rape culture in the performance art atmosphere of the nineties. The Laramie Project shows audiences that problems such as discrimination, hate, and ignorance are issues that are still embedded in our society as our fantastic football friends showed us. Without artists such as Karen Finley and the Tectonic Theatre Project we would lose invaluable social tools that inspire thought and change for good, and we would lose our ability to point these issues out to audiences.
            We hear it all: we'll never get a real job, our lives are always going to be difficult, we'll be waiting tables for the rest of our lives, and so on and so on. The arts are completely undervalued because we are taught that they don't matter. Arts classes are "extra" and generally a waste of time, and anyone who enjoys and appreciates the performing arts are considered stuffy or "gay," and that's usually meant in the most derogatory way as possible. This is the time to stand up just like my friend did in the cafeteria, like the Glee kids do when they support each other in times of crisis, and like I do whenever I step out onto that stage and perform. We need to pat our weaves, take our earrings out, and pull our tap shoes off so we're ready to fight. Theatre kids are incredibly resilient even in the face of all the crap we have to hear about how pointless our dreams are because we know we're not going anywhere. There is this amazing drive artists have towards their work, a passion that thrives deep under our skin, and most of the time that art is the food that keeps us alive. As a basic survival instinct we have a fiery need to fight for our art.
            More than that, though, the arts make our lives better. They enrich our culture, entertain us, make us think, and stir up issues in society to create social change such as The Laramie Project which is so controversial it has sparked protests and rallies. If we don't fight for the arts, we would have no culture, and we would have no vehicle to continue the progress of humanity. Plus, theatre's what I love. It's what I'm good at. It's what makes me feel special, and I would be so sad without my showtunes to put me to bed at night.

Peace out!

WORKS CITED

The Laramie Project. By Moises Kaufman and The Tectonic Theatre Project. Perf. Denver Center Theatre    Company. The Ricketson Theatre, Denver. Feb. 2000.

"Dream On." Written by Brad Falchuk. Directed by Joss Whedon. Glee. Fox Broadcasting           Company. 18 May 2010.

What Theatre Majors Learn. 10 Oct. 2011. Milkin Quarterly: Milkin University. 22 Feb. 2012