Directing in Educational Theatre

Abstract

When I began to think about “directing across boundaries”, and making decisions from “particular political or social vantage points or within particular performance theory”,1 I became distinctly grumpy. I was immersed in the final (hellish) week of rehearsals for a large-cast musical revue / extravaganza at the Scarborough campus of the University of Toronto, where I teach acting and theatre history and direct a variety of shows. Our only “theatre facility” at the College was built as a television studio in the mid-1960s when videotaping lectures and feeding them out to several classrooms at once was thought to make sound pedagogical sense. The folly of this notion was soon discovered, and, in the early 1970s, the studio became the sole teaching-and-performance space for the new Division of Drama, without, however, any particular conversion to the somewhat different requirements of a theatre having been made. For twenty years, consequently, dozens of productions have been presented in, and the drama program has been run out of, a cramped, ugly, woefully inadequate space. And yet interesting and valuable theatre has sometimes been made in what is still referred to as the TV Studio. Fortunately, plans to renovate are (finally) going through, but when I began to think about directorial decisions, I was rehearsing my show in the only space on campus large enough to hold it, the cavernous concrete nightmare known as the Meeting Place; the thought of writing about any director who has the luxury (as I saw it in my sullen state) to be truly creative, to make artistic decisions that are not based on any limitations whatsoever of facilities, funds, or talent, made my eyes cross with antipathy. Directing across boundaries indeed, I thought, what about those of us who direct, if one can even call it that, almost exclusively within boundaries, limits, confines?