My roommate is far too modest as an actress. She dismissed the time she spent on the Centennial project as if it were nothing. I understand where she was coming from, their task was very nerdy, so to speak: research the school and present a educational but nonetheless entertaining musical theatre piece, all in high centennial spirits a’course!
It’s one thing to make that enjoyable for the people who run this school or are funding buildings and programs and find self-congratulations just lovely, but it’s irrefutably difficult to make the show entertaining to current Camels. The actors’ (who doubled as playwrights and/or composers) first priority as viewers are their classmates and friends. From socially awkward freshmen who cannot find it in their hearts to stop playing beer pong, to stubborn seniors who really, really like chillin’ at the bar and off-campus housing, the intended audience of the show was going to be pretty difficult to reach in any case.
All jokes aside, the cast was semi-successful. The audience was somewhat weak in number, although I went on a Thursday night, but as an audience we had some good ole’ fashioned fun together. We all laughed at the funny parts (there were quite a few) and didn’t let the slight emptiness of the theatre get the best of us. It was a good, fun time. What was more interesting about the play, however, was just how much perspective it gives us (that is, students and community members of Conn) about this whole Centennial thing, and whether all these celebrations are a genuine celebration and congratulations for our past and present achievements, or just an opportunity to deny those things we could do a lot better, specifically as students here. And let me remind you that as students here right now, we are the most active ingredients at this place we like to call a community.
The history of Conn, and how we matter as a community, inspired the “Big Event” that took place this past weekend. Administration, students and faculty agreed in prospect that this weekend was a way of determining how we as a community choose to project ourselves to alumni, trustees, or parents, the region, the world, etc. Whether that projection was intended to be honest or not, I’m not sure.
The show was actually extremely funny and had pretty respectable tunage. I laughed a lot, and was impressed with the sincerity of a few of the auto-biographical monologues. But even the show, which was meant to romanticize just how awesome it is to be a Conn student in both parody and sincerity, was incredibly hypocritical.
The unifying theme of the show was the passion and progressiveness of Conn students in past and present times. The show brags that Conn spawned from dissent as an all woman’s school after Wesleyan kicked out the ladies, and continues to be inspired by student-driven social disobedience decade after decade (the move towards co-education, the civil rights movement and affirmative action being the main examples). The whole point or message of the show, though, was to connect the social disobedience of the past to the so-called activism on campus now. In an attempt to do so, one of the actors performed a “break-the-fourth-wall” monologue in which she described her experience with the Westboro Baptist church’s protest of the the Laramie Project plays on campus in 2009. She theatrically explained that she and everyone she knew were so darn upset that these people would come into their little bubble and actually force the community to respond.
This personal experience, I presume, was supposed to somehow defend the college against claims that we are, as a student body, apathetic. If anything, this experience of hers is the exact definition of college campus “apathy.” It got to the point that those a**holes had to physically put themselves in front of our nice clean faces and ironed clothes before anyone bothered to notice or react en masse. In their defense, they did stand up against Westboro Baptist, but only because they absolutely had to. I’m sure that there were individuals and small groups that had true passion for the fight against the ignorance that Westboro Baptist personifies, but on this campus of only 1,900, sometimes a small group just isn’t enough to gain momentum and energy and excitement for a good cause.
She claimed in that same monologue that she just doesn’t see apathy at Conn, that she refuses to believe it exists here. I was briefly inspired by her ernestness. I agree with in her in a sense; there are communities here, like Spectrum and other LGBTQ ally-groups, that I do believe are very active participants in trying to make the world they live in a better and more humane place by raising “awareness” and money and opportunities for education in an effective and consistent manner. But these communities are small and isolated. I would call them pioneers, but I don’t know if the rest of Conn wants to jump on the bandwagon that is social and political activism. Groups like Spectrum and Active Minds and CC Dissent are pioneers, but the rest of the fleets might not join the fight for a while.
What made the show especially confusing was its coincidence with the Occupy Wall Street movement. After the actors conjure up all the fervor they can muster to “ra-ra-ra” behind the mask of theatre and stage, I wonder if the majority of them or the majority of the audience are informed about the movement of our time. Perhaps I sound harsh, but it’s really not the time to give out get-out-of-jail-free cards for neglecting to stay informed at this point in history: we at Conn have the intellectual and creative ability to do something other than (or at least in addition to) mindlessly scrolling up and down Facebook for hours.
So, in a way, you could say that the whole play, and even the whole weekend that we made such a big deal over, is nothing but a big ole’ mess of hypocrisy. But maybe this claim is exactly what is making us so unwilling to give into the prospect of change. Maybe the expectation that we won’t react is truly making us unwilling to act. Look around at your peers and family members: we are unexcited about the world and communities of which we are a part and it shows through our ignorance of current events, both tragedies and victories on local, national and international levels.
I saw so much potential at the Centennial play, so much potential for the audience to grow larger and become more lively. Those laughs we had as an audience, the appreciation we felt when David Jaffe, head of the theatre department, introduced Ms. Tansill (sitting front row) who single-handedly funded the theatre, those moments of parody when we let loose and made fun of how campy it is to “celebrate” the school’s history through song… why can’t that energy be translated towards the activism so necessary – for our generation and generations to come – to thrive? This energy can bring us together as a community, on the internet and face-to-face, to discuss dynamics of the communities we live in, and how those communities have possibly become very dysfunctional.
So, the “Big Event” is over now. The trustees have gone home, and we don’t have to worry about hiding our Smirnoff handles from the wandering eyes of Mom and Dad. Those actors can forget all the memorized lines about how progressive we once were and how ever-passionate Conn students continue to be. All the academics we spend hours in the library for can turn to grades and nothing else. We can continue with our post-centennial lives. But if we choose to do that, and it really is a decision of ours, I’d be pretty damn disappointed, and you should be too. •
