Inside Out

I'm teaching my graduate class on theater and theory again, and in it we do some acting theory. I teach it because, as I tell them, all acting theories are really theories about embodiment. In the process of trying to figure out the best and most convincing way for someone to become another person, Diderot and Stanislavski and Strasberg and Adler and Mamet come up with some interesting ideas about how human subjectivity works. After we had our class on Diderot's The Paradox of the Actor (and Joseph Roach's chapter on it from The Player's Passion), during which (inevitably) we discussed its relationship to Stanislavski's System and the Method, one of my students asked me afterward, "Which acting theory do you believe in?"

You would think that someone who spends as much time directing (and thinking about directing) as I do would have an answer to that question. But in fact, I don't. At least, not at the moment. This is the first time I've had a chance to really sit down and think about it; and by the time I get to the end of this post, I'm sure I'll have some kind of an answer. Because that is actually one thing about directing that I'm really good at: making things up.

Tale of a Trigger

It's been a long time since I posted here. Ironically, that's largely because I've been writing too much. However, as the University of Chicago letter has once again revived the debate around trigger warnings, I want to tell here a story I told an undergraduate not too long ago. She had been debating the trigger warning issue in her own mind, in terms of how she might handle it in the future if she went into teaching. I said, well, I don't use trigger warnings, but let me tell you a story about that.

Even as I am about to tell this story, I'm realizing that to say that I don't use trigger warnings is really true only in the sense that I don't use them all the time, I don't want for specific content, and I don't call them trigger warnings--in part because whatever I'm doing now, I have been doing since long before the phrase 'trigger warning' became part of academic discourse. I think that if you sign up for a course you should know what you're getting, so I do my best to use the course description to let people know what they are in for. And before we move on to something I expect will be particularly difficult, either intellectually or emotionally, I will often let people know they should brace themselves. How much difference that makes to them, I don't know. But I do know why I do this, and that's because of the story I'm about to tell.

It takes place probably 30 years ago now, in the lower levels of a research library on a campus far, far away. It is a story about something I read for a graduate course long ago, and which would, nowadays, probably be the sort of thing people would want a trigger warning for. This paragraph constitutes your trigger warning.