Mark Lewis

Faculty Reflection   

Mark Lewis, Professor of Communication

“The college classroom mirrors our current cultural climate in being an environment marked by low trust.”

    This idea has lingered with me uncomfortably since our CACE Faculty Seminar earlier this month. Sadly, it resonates deeply with some of my own classroom experiences in recent times; there is a relational guardedness, a wariness now present in the rooms I share with students that strikes me as both new and on the rise. In the Seminar, three elements to consider in attempting to build trust in the classroom were offered by John Rose, our Seminar’s facilitator. They were- the factor of time, the creation of viewpoint diversity, and the development of an atmosphere where students can become ‘present and real’ with one another. 

    As I have considered these three elements, I have been encouraged to note that each of them is critical in the creation of meaningful theater work; they are a staple in our discipline and, as part of our regular practice, are intentionally pursued in Wheaton’s small theater program. Here, though, I must hasten to add that while they are practiced with regularity, the resistance to them in student and professor alike (each dogpaddling through our present cultural moment) seems particularly fierce. On our bad days in Arena Theater, we are as isolated by division as any environment on campus. But the simple idea that the creation of trust is inherent in the challenge of theater-making is encouraging. 

   Regarding theater creation and time… “Many people don’t realize that their main objection to theater on our campus is not that it is morally questionable. It is that it is slow.”  Wheaton Professor Jim Young suggested this to me in a conversation more than 30 years ago. Since that time, the deeply held value of productive efficiency has moved us even further from a shared valuing of time that allows for the slow fostering of environments marked by trust. So it is perhaps good news that effective theater is rarely created with efficiency as the highest value; in Arena Theater, it feels necessarily countercultural to insist that we spend time paying attention. In a relatedly necessary way, viewpoint diversity is always a feature of a healthy theater room. Oskar Eustis, the Artistic Director of New York’s hallowed Public Theater has wryly pointed out that when Thespis gave us the second actor (sometime around the 6th Century BC), the person who speaks from the stage turned suddenly from a sole authority figure to “a guy with an opinion.” In the theater, that opinion is never un-opposed. Conflict, and its resolution, are a basic feature of any theatrical event. While this does not mean that characters in plays resolve conflict in ways we should emulate, it does mean that our students are required to practice conflict out loud. Additionally, they are required to be ‘present and real’ as they do so.

        What keeps our environment from simply lapsing into one marked by the kind of debate
   where, as Rabbi John Sax has pointed out, “one side wins, one side loses, but neither side  
   is changed” and instead into “a conversation… (where) no one wins, no one loses, and
   both sides are changed”? Perhaps there is an encouraging clue in solid acting craft itself,  
   where the practice of becoming a permeable, affectable target is key. Good acting 
   requires attuned and vulnerable listening. Key moments in plays and films are the
   moments where a character is transformed because of information they receive. The
   actor who achieves this moment has regularly practiced becoming moveable… 
   changeable, in the Rabbi Sax sense. 
        I wish I could say any of these practices are fool-proof or quantifiable in their
   effect. They are not. But their presence is encouraging to contemplate, and I am grateful 
   to have been included in a circle of colleagues where slow thinking and honest 
   conversation on the subject felt so hospitably extended to us by CACE.