Eight Important Things I Learned From Drama

The first thing you learn when you’re a drama major is that people consider your field the lowest branch of academia. “Even” a drama student would know this; or seriously? Where do you plan to work with that degree – McDonald’s?

But as any drama student who cares can tell you, there are lots of skills you learn on and around the stage that you can’t pick up anywhere else. I found myself thinking about this during the conference my graduate department hosted last Saturday, and later, I wound up discussing it with some of my also-ex-theatre colleagues/classmates after dinner.

And in the end, I figured this: although I love HPS and math and languages and various sciences and all sorts of things; although it’s true that it’s way easier not to fail drama than most other subjects; and although you wind up wading through a lot of what one professor of mine termed “la-la woo-woo”, if I had my undergrad to do over, I’d never change my major. Because it taught me these things:

1. How to project.

Admittedly, you wouldn’t know it anymore, as years of daily vocal exercises have given way to laziness and the mumbling habit I inherited from my father’s side of the family. But drama taught me how to speak up without yelling, how to enunciate every consonant, and how to make sure everyone in the room can hear my presentation.

I still remember standing at one end of the cafetorium in a line-up with the rest of the cast of The Taming of the Shrew , each of us in turn having to say a line over and over until our teacher, standing by the windows at the other end, said he could hear us.

2. How to go first.

You’re sitting with the rest of your class on the carpet; it’s time to present your scenes or start an improv game. The teacher asks for volunteers. Everyone stares at their hands.

Drama taught me how to jump to my feet and say, “I will!” Even when I’m not sure that my work’s any good at all. Even when I’m scared I’ll mess up or worried that other people might have done better. Even when I have no idea what’s going to happen next. Because what’s the worst that could happen? Not that I’ll embarrass myself or clam up under the spotlight.

The worst that can happen is we all spend the next hour still staring at our hands.

3. How to applaud my friends.

When all your friends are fellow drama geeks, there are a lot of shows to go to. Some are great, and some are not so great. However, there is a time for critique, and a time for encouragement. When your friend rushes beaming out the stage door to greet you, still in her make-up or techie blacks, it’s not the time for critique.

But it’s also not the time to lie. Because, paradoxically, if you always tell everyone how great they are, they’ll stop believing what you say. So you learn how to find something good about even the most boring or incomprehensible productions. It’s always there. You just have to learn how to see it.

Also useful is the complementary skill of being able to applaud loudly for long periods of time with minimal effort: cup your hands slightly.

4. How to applaud my enemies.

Drama departments are (in)famous for, well, drama. There are always backstage whispers going on during any show – who should have got the part, why the actors and the crew hate each other, who’s sleeping with whom… The list goes on. But at the same time, every drama student knows that none of these things matters as much as the show.

No matter how much you hate someone, you need to work with them. And that means being able to reflect honestly on their talent. It means understanding that the show is more important than how you feel about its leading actor or its technical director. It means figuring out how much of your anger or annoyance is personal and how much of it is about something important to people who aren’t you as well, and how to deal with issues of the latter type effectively and professionally when they arise. And, finally, it means being able to cheer like mad for someone you hate when they did a job really, really well.

5. How to be rejected.

There’s an extent to which you have to learn to take rejection in every field, whether it’s failing a test or not getting a job, but few areas require the development of such a thick skin as the creative and performing arts. When you get up there to do an audition, it’s hard not to make it personal. You feel like you’re putting yourself – your worldview, your emotions, your intellect, your face and body – out there. And more often then not (in departmental productions, at least), the people judging are people with whom you do have a personal relationship. So their “no” feels even more like a rejection of you as a person than of you as an artist.

But if you’re going to have anything resembling a satisfactory career or personal life in the theatre community, you can’t take it that way. Being rejected from an audition or a directorial position or a spot on the crew isn’t telling you you’re not good enough; it’s telling you you weren’t right for that role in this show right here right now. If you allow yourself to believe that the fact that your friend didn’t cast you as Puck in her production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream means she considers you a talentless, annoying hack, you’re going to be minus a role and minus a friend. It’s really hard to separate business from personal with anything into which you’ve poured your heart and soul, but since that’s routinely the name of the game in drama, it’s a skill every student has to acquire.

6. How to reject.

And sometime it’ll be you on the other side of the director’s table. Sometimes, you’ll see a good friend audition and think, “Man, that was awful… but she’s expecting me to give her a part…” And you’ll need to be able to, first of all, bite the bullet and cast someone else instead; second, to do it in a way that doesn’t destroy your friendship.

If you don’t do the first part, you’ll probably end up destroying your friendship anyway. After all, what exactly do you intend to do when your buddy’s Hamlet doesn’t fit the concept you have in mind for the production? Yell at him? Swallow your own ideas and silently resent him for the rest of the show? Giving someone get a part you know they’re not right for doesn’t help them at all as an artist and is frustrating for everyone involved.

Being able to let people down gently but firmly is an important skill to have, onstage or off. Sometimes criticism or “no” is the most friendly thing you can say. There’s no one best way to do it, but going through a drama program at least forces you to practice often and makes you comfortable with the process.

7. How to stand up in front of a crowd.

One of the classes I took in my final year of undergrad was called “Math and Poetry”, and it was comprised of mixed science and humanities students, with a much heavier proportion of science. Yes, we did learn math and poetry, and no, the professors never explicitly integrated them, but the point is what used to happen in the poetry section of the class. The English prof who led that section often started by asking someone to read the poem aloud. Very often, the only two people who volunteered were me and my friend Rosemary – a fellow Math and Drama student. Everybody else was too shy.

There are lots of skills you can learn (like projecting , making eye contact, or good posture) that help you give a presentation in front of a crowd, but actually being able to stand up in front of a group of people in the first place is a skill in itself, and one that comes only through practice.

Attaining a certain level of comfort (you’re never going to entirely lose that nervousness, and as Nevil Maskelyne wrote, any performer who does is as dangerously oblivious as a soldier who loses his fear of getting killed) while being the centre of many people’s attention requires experience, and Drama is the only field I know where you get it in spades.

8. How to compromise.

You may have noticed that my natural  attitude is less “we can work this out” and more “my way or the highway”. When I direct, it’s my knee-jerk impulse to do it in the dictatorial fashion, and when I was in elementary school and high school, I was the kid who pretty much took over group projects because I knew the way I wanted them to turn out.

You can’t do that in Drama.

Take improv for example. When you’re onstage in front of your class or at the Improv Games and your teammate makes a suggestion you think is worse than yours, you can’t say, “Nope, actually, we’re doing it this way”. Not only is there no time, but it torpedoes your sketch. It’s like stealing the ball from your own teammate during a soccer match – even if you really can get a goal that he or she couldn’t, it still makes your entire team look bad. Even if you think your teammate’s suggestion is the worst thing ever, you’ve got to go along with it if you possibly can. And you’ve got to learn to listen so you don’t steamroll those suggestions by accident.

Even in more traditional forms of theatre, be they group presentations or Broadway productions, you have to learn to give everybody’s ideas a chance. An actress or lighting designer who feels like you’re bossing them around won’t want to work with you again; a director who notices that you’re ignoring all of her suggestions won’t re-cast or re-hire you. Theatre is a collaborative art, and collaboration means cooperation.

Drama taught me how to consider other people’s input without setting it up as holy writ and how to accept ideas I’m not at all keen on without letting others drown out my voice.