During my first semester at Towson I wrote and produced my second full length play in my own time, out with the structure of any class and for no academic credit. Researching that play, The Holding Pattern, allowed me to explore some of the powerful philosophical and religious ideologies that had been alluring me since undergrad. Exploring the writings of Ionesco, Beckett and Sartre lead me to Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, Camus and Schopenhauer. Adding into my reading a little Freud and Marx, whole chunks of the Old Testament, some Foucault and a lot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I developed my own understanding of the inequities of humanity, expressions of misanthropy, justifications for despair, nihilism and the absurdity of existence. Through The Holding Pattern I was able to personalize these philosophies, better acquainting myself with the thoughts and feelings I was experiencing. Like that great thinker and philosopher of our time, Dr. Evil, I allowed myself to introduce… myself. I started to feel that I owned my self for the first time.
Following directly on from my existential enlightenment I rewrote my personal artistic mission statement under the title “Fundamentally ineffectual.” It states:
Art is a functionless pursuit. The continued proliferation of art serves merely to highlight the futility of humanity’s continued existence.
The best that any artist can hope for is to spend their time in such distraction that they do not become fully conscious of their own passing.
Theatre is the most wretched of all arts.
After reading these statements in my thesis proposal documents Dr. Stephen Nunns gave me some advice. It went something like, “Chill the fuck out, have a beer!” So I did. I chilled out (and had some beer), I committed to life.. I was able to do this because I was able to reason thus:
I am content with new understanding of absurdity and futility.
This is my truth. I do not ask anyone else to share it.
This is my truth.
Ironically, though perhaps unsurprisingly, my artistic discovery, my journey, my truth is the plot of my third full length play, Neither Thinking; Nor Feeling written in my final year at Towson.
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The lineage of my thesis paper on contemporary theatre criticism is considerably less personal.The Holding Pattern opens with a speech by Theodore Roosevelt, a speech given to a special ops unit in Sorbonne in Paris in 1910.
"It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy course; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat."
Around the same time that I was producing The Holding Pattern I submitted a few reviews of theatre shows to the student newspaper, The Towson Towerlight. Someone suggested that I should look into the National Critics’ Institute workshop at the regional KCACTF. I did, and met Andy Propst who was that year’s Guest Critic. From there I was invited to participate in the American College Theatre Festival NCI workshop and from there was invited to the O’Neill theatre centre in the summer of 2007. Those experiences provided much of the original research for this thesis, research which was then elevated through academic research and, of course, the gracious hands of my committee.