A Letter to Dr. W. Stump

Dr. Stump,

It may be best to call Playwriting off tomorrow as I don’t think I’ll be done with anything worth reading. All around me I am beset with ideas but none of them have enough weight. I’m not invested in them, frankly it’s very hard for me to invest in anything for 60 pages without feeling presumptuous. I’ve tried writing about that as well, but again, the question “Why?” rears it’s ugly head. I’m having a hard time drawing upon personal experience, and when I do, I have a hard time justifying placing it upon stage as it seems to cheapen it. It’s incredibly frustrating looking at a work and feeling that it has been contrived, not created, and everything I have done so far feels that way to me. I understand that these are works in progress, however I see no progress between what I have created now and what I created four years ago.

Perhaps I need experience. To spend time searching for value in things around me and try to find a way to transform that into something that would work on stage. Perhaps it will come to me, eventually, in a year or ten. Know I am not discouraged, but rather now have an imperative need to search for value in the world and in my life. I think that now is the time to listen and not to talk.

I apologize, as this must be disappointing to you and I can assure you I am disappointed as well: Shelagh Delaney wrote “A Taste of Honey” at age eighteen and you cannot know how aggravating that fact is to me.

Hope all remains well. I’ll see you in class, and look forward to studying in London with you.

Sincerely,

Ian Carlsen

PS: I am fine if this affects my grade negatively. I understand that if I really wanted to I could turn in a very quick, trite, hackneyed work and receive a mediocre grade, but I just can’t bring myself to do it.

I am frustrated with academia right now, perhaps I don’t fit in. I can’t seem to separate the body of my work in school from work that I want to remain relevant in the rest of my life. My school mind from my artistic mind. I know however that I must. I am required to create and receive deadlines to do so by. With my other classes this works well: In Prof. Zhao’s Modern East Asia I am doing well, I take notes and write papers, which are critically thought-out answers to questions she poses. This is an example of when academia works.

In theater on a university level, the format is different. We are expected to rigorously churn out examples. There are no questions posed. The object is simply to demonstrate an understanding without asking critical artistic questions or allowing the process to evolve from a natural or real place. Perhaps the only aspect this works well in is tech/design. When applied to performance, the result is cleverly-disguised indicative acting, a series of hat tricks designed to create an example in the quickest most efficient manner thought of. The professor of a scene study class says a character must cry, the class disbands and a week later the actor comes in and pretends to cry, leaving himself at the mercy of the professor to see if his ruse has passed. Acting becomes an inorganic formula, a mechanical response. With writing for the theater the same happens: a formula is given and followed out, but with no place or imperative to write other than the sake of a deadline what results are hollow representations of art with little lasting power. As if someone was going to build a house by ear.

I often wonder if acting, or most art for that point would be best taught in a conservatory or an apprenticeship, after one has had a few years of general education.

If so, then, what am I doing?