The semester is over and, even though I'm generally disappointed with the way things have gone, I felt really good about things today. Wrestling With Angels is over, I no longer have that blasted New Testament paper eating my soul, made it to my first class on time and feel fairly confident I'll be able to get through my test and final, I'm exempt from two finals and will be ready for the rest of them, I had a great audition last night about which I feel quite confident, and tonight is the first free weeknight I've had outside of Thanksgiving. Compared to how I felt, say, Friday morning, everything was coming up roses for me this afternoon. Then I went to the department meeting.
Typically, the majors and minors meet with the faculty on the first Tuesday of every month, supposedly to keep us up to date on happenings in the theatre department and guide us in any ways we need it. However, every meeting I go to somehow results in a tongue-lashing from some or all of the faculty on what a bang-up job we students are not doing. The exception in this meeting was that there was no discussion or guidance leading into the tongue-lashing. On the contrary, they (the faculty) called this meeting particularly to piss on us (the students).
We didn't get agendas, like we usually do. We didn't have our supervisors take attendance as we settled into our seats or pass around a sign-in sheet. Instead, our warden stood before us and proceeded to draw out how pleased our patrons and audience members were with the last performance (Wrestling With Angels). She related how people from other departments extol the unity among us theatre majors and the wonderful results that we get when we put on a show. Dr. Matthews has a great talent for making people feel like shit. Even as she recounted all these observations she'd gotten that would be taken as compliments from anyone else, I could hear the edge of disapproval in her voice, see the cut of reproach in her eyes. I knew better than to dwell on the positivity because of what was coming next. I was not surprised, then, when she switched the subject from the results to the process. When speaking of this process, she brought up our most recent production.
Having come off of the most excruciating theatrical process I can remember, at the end of the most disheartening semester I can remember, I wasn't feeling particularly eager to revisit it. On the contrary, I looked forward to pushing this show as far behind me as humanly possible. Instead, I had my disapproving dean inviting my disheartening director to further speak on what a collective disappointment we are as a department. I sat and listened as, after two months of pushing to get this part right, to follow his instruction, to give him what he wanted, he proceeded to bitch and moan about how irresponsible we are, how uncommitted we are, and how much that hurts him. Never mind how much it hurts me to have him telling me how much I sucked all the time that I was putting my all into this show. Never mind how much it hurt for him to tell me I was wrong about everything that I brought to the table. Ironically (or hypocritically), he opened his bitchfest with the insistence that this wasn't about him.
He whined about his disappointment and his sadness and his loss, then his theatre wife threw in her two cents about what horrible students we are, how little we take this work seriously, and how we've killed her spirit. Then the tag-team flogging continued to my least favorite professor, whom I can't remember feeling anything but contempt for, decided to throw his two Confederate cents into the bucket. This designer, who teaches two classes to majors, neither of which have anything to do with performance, felt it incumbent upon himself to ask us collectively what our aversion to the process is. To the person for whom the process is so important, this comment is insulting and off-base. And frankly, it pisses me off that he thinks he's so psychic that he can speak for the thoughts of an entire body of students. I have nothing respectful to say in response to that, sense I'm not one of the people whose minds he's able to read, so I say nothing. The trouble with this is, the rest of the room also says nothing in response to his assholish question.
After the faculty demanded some kind of response, I figured that I was at least entitled to throw in my two cents concerning the fact that he didn't know what the fuck he was talking about. I spoke up for myself, about how my homework gets thrown out the window, about how it feels to be told that there's no value in any of the effort I've made, that I didn't get anything right, that the work needs to begin when the work has been happening for weeks, and the crux of the response was "Deal with it." Then the asshole who initially asked the bullshit question that wasn't worthy of an answer came back with a counter-question of, "How do students deal with having that response? Because if students pout..." This self-important son of a bitch nearly had a shoe thrown at him. He had no right to speak on me or anyone else whose mind he can't read because he's no more psychic than I am. In the end, the resolution became that "We're not talking about that right now." So people who don't have their hit together, who don't try, who don't do their work, who don't care enough to fully invest, get a meeting dedicated to them, but the people who have their shit together, who have genuine concerns about having their work shit all over and thrown out, don't get two seconds out of that meeting. I never understand what these people want from me.
After the initial fuck you storm, we got the threats of not being cast in The Color Purple, the "don't be concerned about who likes you" speech that pretends to have our best interest at heart, and a nice little referendum on our not liking favoritism that rubbed our noses in the fact that they shoved their heads up the same girl's ass for four years. When it over, I felt nothing of contempt. I don't trust these people to look out for me because all they do is put me down. I'd much rather do a community show than make these pissers my priority.
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