Judge not, lest ye be judged.
There’s often something that seems to be increasingly unfair. Whenever someone goes to a choir concert, band performance, or a theatre production, it’s understood that these are the work of students. You don’t compare those performances with those of professionals, who have spent their lives working on their craft. You realize that these are students who are constantly learning about their art, and as such, may not display the quality of high ended performances. We don’t compare the student cafeteria with a five star restaurant, we don’t compare the basketball and baseball teams with professionals, and we don’t expect students in the medical field to perform surgery.
So why then is the student run newspaper critiqued so fiercely? The Independent is a student learning project and collaboration that gives students an introduction into the field of journalism. You can’t expect every story you read or they write to be Pulitzer worthy. These are students learning how to write, student who are using the college paper to find out what works and what doesn’t work in their writing. Trial and Error.
Despite this, the student newspaper is constantly berated with people pointing out our faults and laughing at our mistakes. They hold the work of students to unfair standards with high-minded superiority, with so rarely offering constructive criticism.
Think for a minute, if you would like your English 102 paper critiqued publicly on a weekly basis. How many students would join the theatre productions if they knew their audience would judge them so harshly? How many people would sing, or play their instrument, or compete if they thought that their every mistake would be highlighted, and their success would be buried.
The point of student participating in programs at Clark, a community college, is so that we can try out different things before devoting the rest of our college life on it. We constantly learn new things about how our field works and what we can do to make it better. Given the response I’ve heard from friends, peers, and even teachers, I’ve come to expect that if I want to continue in this field, I should get comfortable with being ridiculed and critiqued on a daily basis. I should come to love the sneer and disdain that even my friends have for my field. I should, in all probability, find something else that’s not so universally reviled. The faculty and student body actively alienates a group of students who are still learning. So much for the ‘next step’.
A Streetcar Named Predictable
The theatre department is putting on A Streetcar Named Desire sometime next month. The show itself is great, even though Tennessee Williams gets caught up in his own cleverness, both Streetcar and A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof are really well written plays that have helped a lot of actors start their career, such as Marlon Brando.
Even though the show is prolific and a classic, I really don’t think that it can be performed well at the college level. Since this is a community college, the amount of student taking theatre classes is smaller than Universities with larger budgets. The talent you find at a community college is sparse compared to a theatre school you’d have to audition for. With that in mind, shows that have such a wealth of interpretation like Streetcar isn’t the best choice for student actors. It’s like Shakespeare. No matter how good a student is, how deep they play Hamlet or how flippant they play Puck, there are still thousands of actors that are doing the same thing, and better.
The community college theatre is more a place to explore new ideas on stage, newer plays and less known scripts to expand the horizons of both the actors and the audience. The problem with putting on shows like Streetcar, or Fiddler on the Roof, or anything Shakespeare, is that the audience is going to be much more critical, as they’ve seen the show many times before. They will have been exposed to many interpretations of those shows and will stack all those performances against the show put on by the students.
Lisa Abbott, the director of A Streetcar Named Desire, is leaving Clark after this show. I was hoping that she’d do something a bit more challenging or controversial to signal her departure. The Clark audience would have really benefited from seeing No Escape or Tartuffe, or something as grand and magnanimous as Les Miserables. Instead, we’re going to get a well-meaning, but disadvantaged version of a show almost everyone’s seen.
