Re: RAT: The Next Generation

[BeSpecific@aol.com]

In a message dated 6/4/01 8:19:25 PM Pacific Daylight Time, 
Cathryn616@aol.com writes:


> Cat and I have been having an off list discussion for the past few weeks 
> about the "Next Generation of Theatre" Panel that some other students and I 
> will be running. 


I am 41, and I teach middle school, high school, and young adults (20) to 
older adults (30 and up) at several studios in and around Seattle. 

I do not see/sense any gap. Aside from seemingly obscure references, say, 
from television programming - so for instance, I might talk about the Brady 
Bunch when in fact Friends would be more in their background than my own, 
growing up.

Maybe humor. 
Ponty Python and Saturday Night Live pushed the envelope when I was in 
college. Now we have South Park - what's funny anymore? How to track that...?

There are many changes, from when I was in college to when you were in 
college.
 No computers - really - I mean, I wrote my term papers on an electric 
typewriter (brother). When you make a typo, you would have to use whiteout, 
not just a backspace button. Hardly any cordless phones, No cell phones (very 
big difference). No CD, No DVD. Hardly even video-machines in your home. 
Record players rather than Walkmen. When I used a handheld calculator, I 
could really 'see' the calculator working; sometimes it would take up to a 
half a minute to get to a total - somehow 'real time' of things has sped up. 
For me, anyway. Then again, on stage - time speeds up and slows down...one 
production of Lear breezes by. Another just goes at a snail's pass - it's an 
unusual thing...

Plays are shorter. More episodic due to TV influences. 10-minute plays at the 
Humana Festival - compared to the long-ass plays we read in college like 
O'Neil and Chekhov. When Peter Brook was in town last month, he spoke about 
getting rid of intermissions, of challenging the attention-span of the 
audience.

Nevertheless, what IS the foreseen GAP about, really?

The only thing I notice is that due to a lot of hours in front of the 
television, many younger students have difficulty imagining their own 
imaginings much larger than a breadbox - really! Often they cannot imagine in 
a 3-D way, a way of putting themselves inside the film of their imaginings - 
rather, they watch a small version of their film from outside of themselves - 
in front, like a television box. This inability to abstract, I think, is a 
newer phenomena. And may make it difficult to empathize with life performance 
(?) - 
when you are in front of a TV, you can go into an alpha state. It's a very 
passive state. That may become a rather habitual response - when 'in front 
of' a story...
Jessica Marlowe Goldstein
www.freeholdtheatre.org