A couple of weeks ago, I went to see a production by the Baylor theater department. It was a retelling of the Alice in Wonderland story set in London during the Blitz. The set was designed to call to mind one of the tube stations far underground in which so many people in 1940 took refuge from nightly German bomber attacks. The students who acted the parts, the students who put on the technical aspects all did wonderful jobs.
The main takeaway for me as I sat and watched it, ended up being, “Isn’t it wonderful that a university has this capacity within it to do something like this?” And I thought about how much smaller a university would be without a drama department.
A university experience is supposed to broaden a student’s appreciation of what the world is, and what life can be. One purpose of a university is to show you how broad the world is and how many different kinds of existence there are. Even though students pick a major, a university education is not supposed to narrow your horizons.
Literature and history, theater and music, poetry, philosophy and other languages, these are the things that point to how broad life is. Theater is especially like that. More than any other art form, theater shows us what life really looks like. Altogether, the arts exist to show you how broad life can be. Anything else is a misuse of a great and meaningful gift.
I’m very fond of a quotation from G. K. Chesterton from his book Orthodoxy that marvels “How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it.... You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always being played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers.”
And your time at a university is supposed to be just that. It’s supposed to show you how broad the world is and how much there is to know and to experience and it’s supposed to get the focus off of you.
Art has the capacity to do this. is liberating in a way that few things are. It is broadening in a way that fewer things are these days. If some people don’t want their minds and perspectives broadened, that’s another thing.
A couple of weeks ago Harrison Ford received a lifetime achievement award from the Screen Actors Guild. He said that in college he felt entirely lost until he got into the drama department. I’m certain a lot of creative kids feel that way, and the lucky ones find their way into university theater programs.
