Nine summers I’ve worked as a hiking guide in the mountains of Wyoming. Teaching, to me, is the same work, the same joy. The best teachers leave you panting to rush off on your own and continue exploring. When I teach theater, I position each artist, each thinker, each method we study as a star attraction, a center of that course’s geography. Part of my effort in workshops, lectures, and in assigning readings is to show the paths that lead to those landmarks. An equally important part is showing the new paths those landmarks lead to.
While I have taught various subjects to different age groups around the country, as well as internationally, my career as a college theater teacher began five years ago at Hunter College. I was hired by Gregory Mosher to teach Play Analysis based on the strength of my work for him as a graduate student (I earned my MFA in Playwriting at Columbia in 2017, studying under David Henry Hwang and Lynn Nottage, among others) and as an assistant on his touring production of Antigone in 2015. Soon he asked me to guide extracurricular student projects. Since then I have added Introduction to Theater courses and overseeing numerous additional student activities to my portfolio, including directing students in original productions, serving as a faculty advisor to theater-oriented club groups, and mentoring students through the development of their own plays as well as their graduate school applications.
I start my guide work from a place of humility: I don’t know where students are going once they leave my classroom, and I don’t know what will excite their attention when we begin. So I develop my syllabi by asking: what do I wish I had known? What were my impressions when I walked into this landscape for the first time? Which landmarks leapt out to me? What made me want to race breathlessly ahead? What made me want to stay and contemplate for hours? Which turnings unlocked my understanding of the terrain? Most importantly: what parts of it seem most relevant right now, at this very moment? But that’s just how I begin.
Ultimately every hike is a collaboration between guide and guest. Teaching is a collaboration between teacher and student. Within two weeks, I have a sense of what lights up my students’ eyes. I find out where they can’t wait to go next. Every semester I’ve adjusted on the fly to suit the needs and interests of the people in front of me. While it takes care to ensure that these adaptations do not burden the students (my groups at Hunter, at least, have enough to contend with before a careless, disorganized teacher starts shredding their syllabus), I find it natural to meet the students where they are. I am a firm believer in give-and-take. For all written assignments, I offer students detailed feedback and the opportunity to revise and resubmit work for an improved grade. Even the students who don’t take advantage of the opportunity have expressed gratitude that assignments are not seen as one-and-done. Someone is working with them. In workshop, we treat all sharings as process, as conversation, as a place to pause and look at the compass and map. Often developing the habits and skills to make use of feedback is as important as any immediate progress made.
At Hunter, I have been privileged to work with as diverse a group of students as one could ever imagine. I look around my classrooms, and I see people of all ages, races, backgrounds, physical abilities, experience-levels, beliefs, and goals. It’s a wonderful thing, and it teaches me new lessons about building a community where everyone can thrive. Inclusion is core to my mission as a teacher. I lead hikes in national forest and wilderness areas: public lands that belong to everyone. Theater belongs to everyone. We all deserve access to our own creativity, one of the richest parts of our human inheritance. Working on shows together actually trains us to be better members of our communities, better friends, co-workers, collaborators, and citizens. It’s practice for living, whether or not you ever do another play. I really believe that.
There is not one way through this landscape. I see myself ultimately as an opener of paths, not a dictator of directions. I want to help all those interested in theater to connect to the power of the stage and the responsibilities it demands. Anyone who asks to speak to an audience had better have moral courage. Anyone who wishes an audience to feel that terrifying, joyous rush of the heart expanding to encompass more life must be brave enough to risk their own heart first. Here, my job is to stoke the fire students already have in them, feeding it oxygen and fuel so that it burns long and bright.
