If there was one thing Earnest tried to instill in his students, it was toughness. He would warn them that acting is a brutal profession full of rejection and requires a sturdy exoskeleton to survive. He himself is a rare species in the world of theater: a Donald Trump-voting conservative from a small town in Alabama with a deep passion for avant-garde European theater.
Among the videos his freshmen watch in class is a postmodern remake of Henrik Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck” that includes a scene in which a father places his penis on a table while his blind daughter swings at it with a hammer....
As more speech is construed as hurtful or even dangerous, can a professor be dismissed for creating an “uncomfortable” learning environment or “endangering” students?...
Much more at the link. I got past the paywall by clicking "Reader View." My post leaves out everything about the incident that set everything in motion. I've selected the material about teaching toughness on the theory that students are going to need it to succeed in the world.
ADDED: I kept thinking about that blind daughter swinging a hammer at her father's penis, so I googled and found this in a philosophy dissertation, "Theatres of Reality, Fiction, and Temporality: Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller’s Ibsen-Saga (2006-2015)" by Andrew Friedman:
Sometime in the sixth hour of Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller’s 2009 production of Henrik Ibsen’s Vildanden (The Wild Duck), the English rock band Muse’s “Undisclosed Desires” plays in the theatre.... Those who stay for the entire seventeen-and-a-half-hour performance will hear the song at least a dozen more times before the sun comes up. On one occasion the track follows a scene in which Hjalmar, the play’s surrogate father of Hedvig, places his penis on a table while his blind daughter wildly swings at it with a real hammer.
The performers—hidden beneath full-cover rubber masks—betray neither fear nor malice, except when Hjalmar reflexively jerks away from the table, his naked legs visibly shaking. Sometimes the cast enters the auditorium to dance to the song. Taking to a platform alongside the spectators, Vegard Vinge, one of the production’s creators, plays his Director character.
He wears a baby-faced mask of pale skin with blue and red raccoon-ringed eyes, a wig of jet black hair, and a Nazi Waffen-SS jacket emblazoned with the last name of the production’s hero: WERLE. His white track pants are smeared with fake blood and real shit. The scent of urine hangs in the air. He dances passionately to the song, swinging his arms skyward with the clear instruction to get up and dance. And people do....
The Director’s abandoned dancing between scenes celebrates endurance in the face of fatigue and reminds us that we are doing something together in this one hundred-seat theatre on the edge of Oslo. The music stops. The curtain opens on another scene: Gregers—the show’s ideologue played by Ida Müller—is birthed from a massive Ibsen hell-mouth wearing a t-shirt on which Richard Wagner’s profile is emblazoned like a super-hero’s logo.
Gregers wanders through the audience, blessing each spectator with a tiny miner’s hammer, the performer’s body dripping gore and green ooze. The other characters have mercilessly abused Gregers over the past dozen hours, punching, kicking, humiliating, and electrocuting the boy.
As Gregers approaches, I look into the mask and see Müller’s eyes dart at me: a flash of grey life beneath a dead face streaked with blood. The curtain clangs closed and “Undisclosed Desires” pulses forth again. The audience laughs. Heads nod along. It is in our bodies.
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49 comments:
I've selected the material about teaching toughness on the theory that students are going to need it to succeed in the world
I used to believe this but more and more the world bends to accommodate the feelings and demands of young people.
…and the young seem to reject the meritocratic aspects of society in favor of ‘universal income’. It’s an unsustainable idea but there’s more than enough leaders with the authority willing to give it to them…
I reject his contention…
The importance of being Earnest.
Among the videos his freshmen watch in class is a postmodern remake of Henrik Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck” that includes a scene in which a father places his penis on a table while his blind daughter swings at it with a hammer....
That scene is not in the Ibsen play. Therefore it must be in the postmodern remake.
I assume that the freshman students first watched the Ibsen play itself before watching the postmodern remake.
It seems to me that the teacher is spending too much class time on this Norwegian play, written in 1884.
It seems to me that the teacher wants to treat his class of freshmen students as if it were a class of graduate students.
I can't figure out how to get to the article. reader view doesn't work for me.
So what is "endangering" about what he is doing? Is he going to swing a hammer at the students?
More general I don't get this whole "S/he/it makes me feel unsafe" thing that so many participate in these days. In this class and others. What do these snowflakes think is going to happen? What danger do they think they are in?
John Henry
I've selected the material about teaching toughness on the theory that students are going to need it to succeed in the world.
I think Althouse liked the part about the penis and the hammer.
I don't know how you 'teach' toughness in acting class. But the important thing would be to not avoid discomfort, tough situations, tough talk. Acting IS tough. But do you know what's tougher? Life. Teaching these young people to be so incapable of dealing with other points of view or uncomfortable situations is not helping them. It is handicapping them for life.
They're not called 'snowflakes' for nothing. Theater as we know it (as well as movies) is already suffering from reworking existing scripts to fit the soft narrative. Leaving out the meat of a story to insert the fluffy goodness. Or, what is currently accepted as fluffy goodness.
Good for this professor for standing up to this. I hope he has another means of employment because even if he's right, that job is probably not going to be there for him.
Now, about that scene in "The Wild Duck"...
"the theory that students are going to need it to succeed in the world"
A nice theory, but one that is being refuted more and more: students are learning the skills they need in the real corporate, political and social-media world to exploit hurt feelings for personal gain and the destruction of deplorable opponents.
The problem is not that the black students are too sensitive, it is that they are too stupid:
At first, he struck her as laid-back and lenient. But as she got to know him more, she came to see him as out of touch and awkwardly inappropriate. Two incidents stood out.
The first one was when he returned to campus after a fellowship in China. “Oh, wow, looks like you’ve shaped up well!” she said he told her. “You look so good now!”
Herriott understood that he was complimenting her on having lost weight — she had weighed more than 200 pounds when she joined the department — but it still felt wrong.
Then, just this fall, he advised her to audition for outdoor Shakespeare theater companies that were seeking diversity and “definitely casting people like you.”
She wondered if he told her that only because she is Black.
From the article:
I need to know that this is a department where everybody, from whatever walk of life they come from, is just going to be able to be themselves here,” Levermore said. “That sounds so kumbaya, but I really do want a safe space for everyone.”
Including Earnest?
“Um, no,” he said...
These kids aren't making this sh!t up on their own. The university is the one teaching intolerance in the name of tolerance.
Sebastian pretty much said it all. I read the story, and it's clear the administrators have shown they're moral cowards in siding with the students.
What's funny is that the dick-pounding didn't trigger anyone, but telling a black student (truthfully) that you'll get preferential treatment because of your race if you audition is.
Clowns leading clowns.
Coastal Carolina is an undistinguished school. Why would anyone go there to get a drama degree?
Well, kids...it's going to get worse before it gets better. The acting profession IS brutal. Ask any conservative actor. Life is brutal also. How will you handle life when it plain sucks and you can't sue or boycott someone because you didn't get the part or the job?
I felt that one of the last lines in the story I read, said by one of the students, is rather ironic. "And it's just interesting how quickly people are able to judge.”
I was able to read the story by searching other sources using the phrase, "theatre-professor-told-students-their-hurt-feelings-were-no-big-deal."
I have no interest in watching "The Wild Duck," but I will admit to wondering how any plot could lead to that scene.
I've lived and worked in Los Angeles for almost 50 years. Over that period of time I've had numerous temporary secretaries who were actually pretty good actresses (okay PC "actors" but they were of the binary female persuasion). Occasionally they'd get parts in non-equity theatre plays (50 seats or less). I've attended some of those performances. They, along with a lot of the waiters in this town, were skilled actors. But they weren't making it in their preferred profession.
If the college professor's attempt to teach toughness doesn't work--send the students to L.A. Life is a hard teacher. There will be a lot of crying and anxiety--and "temporary" work as waiters and secretaries.
I've lived and worked in Los Angeles for almost 50 years. Over that period of time I've had numerous temporary secretaries who were actually pretty good actresses (okay PC "actors" but they were of the binary female persuasion). Occasionally they'd get parts in non-equity theatre plays (50 seats or less). I've attended some of those performances. They, along with a lot of the waiters in this town, were skilled actors. But they weren't making it in their preferred profession.
If the college professor's attempt to teach toughness doesn't work--send the students to L.A. Life is a hard teacher. There will be a lot of crying and anxiety--and "temporary" work as waiters and secretaries.
I greatly enjoyed theater classes back in my university days, but the professors made it a point to warn their students not to go into acting unless nothing else in life could make them happy. Calling theater “the bitch goddess” reinforced this. Until you’re an established star, life in the theater is mostly one disappointment after another. You “pay your dues” in a place where there will often be no payoff at the end.
Back when I was an undergraduate math major I sometimes acted in University Theater. There was a guy who, I swear, had more talent in his fingertips than all the rest of the theater majors in his graduating class put together. After graduation he headed off to Hollywood to make his fortune, and I saw him later in a made-for-TV movie. He had a non-speaking role as a member of a fraternity. I never saw him onscreen again. Bitch goddess.
In college I performed as the father in that version of The Wild Duck, but we had a limited budget and needed a bigger table.
The best university class that I took was a seminar on German-Scandinavian theater. I was a graduate student in Germanic-Slavic Department at the University of Oregon.
In order to get a Masters Degree from that department, I had to take at least one class in German literature, although I majored in Slavic languages. I took that class only because I had to satisfy that requirement and because the class schedule fit into the rest of my schedule.
I was not interested in literature. Rather, I was interested in linguistics, politics and history.
This was the only seminar that I ever took during my university studies.
Each student had to study a play, write an essay about it, and present the essay to the seminar. Another student was assigned to criticize the essay. Then the entire seminar discussed the play, the essay and the criticism.
For me, this was a wonderful educational experience. All the other seminar students were graduate student majoring in literature, and their presentations and discussions were very intelligent, insightful and interesting. Until then, I never had respected literature majors.
This seminar has stayed in my mind more than any other university class that I took, more than four decades ago. This is why I have a blog about one movie.
=======
It seems to me that this Wild Duck professor is trying to turn his freshman class into such a graduate seminar.
Some of his freshman students are rebelling, because they are not intellectually able to participate in and appreciate such a class. They cannot understand why they should spend much time and effort studying a nineteenth-century Norwegian play and then comparing it with a postmodern remake.
They are just freshman, and it's likely that many of them should not be in the university at all. They cannot read at the university level.
They do not have the intellectual and social culture to fit into a university. They do not appreciate or respect their professors. They want to pull the universities down into their own stupid level, where everyone must focus on their own personal gripes about being ignored, marginalized, disrespected. They want to consume the entire university in stupid controversies about racist rocks and other such nonsense.
Bill Peschel said...
Coastal Carolina is an undistinguished school. Why would anyone go there to get a drama degree?
They didn't have the chops to get into a middle-of-the-road Drama program like UNC-Greensboro's?
I'd think the movie scene filmed by Dali where a straight razor is taken to an eyeball would be more universally disturbing that the hammering of a penis. But maybe he was playing to the feminists in the class, who knows?
I wish I'd titled this post "The Importance of Being the Wild Duck."
I know, right? We live in an age of snowflakes where the simple task of wearing a mask and getting a vaccine is perceived as just like being Jewish living in Nazi Germany.
Oh, the humanity.
I went to a university that was associated with a music conservatory. I was a clarinetist at the time. I took lessons from an exceptional clarinet professor. He knew I had no expectations of going into music as a career. I just played in the university ensembles.
This professor was very talented, experienced, and skilled. But he was also a pragmatist. He never stopped talking about the foolishness and naivete of his conservatory students. They had a romanticized view of the industry, as if their talent and passion would automatically open doors for themm. His view was that you had to become a serious, hard-core businessperson to make it as a musician, whether classical, jazz, or any other genre. He knew too many former students who became embittered due to their experience in the real world. He would say, if you're not prepared to sell yourself as a commodity, you aren't going to have professional success. He even encouraged his students to take an introductory business class, so they could get their feet on the ground. But musicians, and other creative types, tend to be impractical, pie-in-the-sky dreamers.
Point being, I think that's what this theatre professor had in mind. Perhaps his students are too young to understand it, and maybe he's giving them more than they can handle. But his heart is in the right place. These young people do need to toughen up, and get thicker skin. So does their entire generation.
Meanwhile, I genuinely fear for my country that these next generations will some day be in control. We're already seeing it. As if offending someone or demanding a high standard is a crime. How can you run a society if that's the operative mentality?
Funny, I have a coffee mug that is inscribed "Liberal Tears" as well. Given to me by my college senior grandson. I use it a lot. Coffee seems a little salty though.
What, no 'Dickhammer' tag? Lazy...
: )
Blindly swinging a hammer at someplace you think a penis might be seems like a satire on current “Feminist” thought.
OTOH, if a professor has a reputation for being tough, but you didn’t sign up for his class, then you didn’t ask for his toughness.
OTOOH, if you’re wigging out because you saw a list of names and made wild, paranoid, assumptions bout it, I pity you, and think anyone who encourages you is engaged in undergraduate abuse.
Directed by Alec Baldwin.
I never wanted to be in an actor. I would need to answer all these questions:
Who can take all the rejection?
Why him and not me?
You can't really see me, can you?
But what about me? I can play Hamlet better than that guy.
I really wanted that part. Would you like fries with that?
If I took acting classes for six years, would they ever tell me I had no talent?
If I were good at persuading other people, would I make a good lawyer?
I kept thinking about that blind daughter swinging a hammer at her father's penis
That's funny because I really, really, really do not want to think about this.
Howard is certainly no snowflake. Like most State-fellators, he can look at the Democide statistics, shrug nonchalantly, and say, "So?"
If feminism has taught us anything, it is that if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a penis.
Henrik Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck” that includes a scene in which a father places his penis on a table while his blind daughter swings at it with a hammer....
There has to be a German word for that
There is no blind-girl hammer penis attack in Ibsen's Wild Duck. But there should be. It would make Ibsen more interesting.
Maybe they should retitle the post modern play: "Who gives a Wild Fuck?"
In my one class involving arts - a combo Music, Art, Theater class for STEM kids - the Theater prof spent an entire class demonstrating close up magic to us, standing directly in front of one student at a time, manipulating objects a foot or two from their eyes, such that the prof could disappear or reappear an object without the student right there, or anyone else, figuring out how. He taught this lesson annualy, he said, to help us all know why as adults we should never play cards for money.
I think I'd recall the hammer attack described here just as well, but hopefully with less real-life applications.
"Coastal Carolina is an undistinguished school. Why would anyone go there to get a drama degree?"
Someone has to clean the toilets in the theaters.
"Sorry but I don’t think it’s [it has? it is? it was?] a big deal... Im just sad people get their feelings hurt so easily. And they are going into Theatre?"
Im just curious if "Im" is one of those new pronouns, or if peopleve begun omitting the apostrophe when theyre writing contractions.
(BTW: kudos to the LA Times, or writer whose identity is obscured behind paywall, for actually spelling out "they are". It only takes a bit of extra effort and eliminates need of conjecture on part of reader.)
It seems to me that people whose feelings are easily offended would have trouble in any creative field because so much is subjective. If an instructor or editor or whatever likes you personally, they are more likely to like your work above that of others. Theater seems much more prone to this because people are chosen based on their looks more than their talent.
That scene is not in the Ibsen play. Therefore it must be in the postmodern remake.
------------
did post modern add in after Lorena Bobbitt or earleir?
For your edification, here is four minutes and twenty seconds of garde from the production at issue which is so fucking avant that it will rock your world.
Burn it all down and start over.
Ibsen, of course, created a new and more realistic kind of drama. Nothing in the quotation Althouse provides about the Vegard Vinge and Ida Müller production of the Wild Duck seems to me remotely like realism. Perhaps, if I had seen the entire seventeen and a half hour performance, I would have gained some deep insight from this seemingly inappropriate handling of the source material. But I doubt it. For some reason, I’m reminded of the Gilligan’s Island episode where the castaway put on a rollicking, musical production of Hamlet.
Paul Johnson devoted a harsh, but perhaps not very unfair, chapter to Ibsen in his book Intellectuals. It seems Ibsen was very vain about the many literary awards he had won, and would wear all these things on every possible occasion, such as public banquets and the like. This is off topic, but I couldn’t resist mentioning it. For some reason, it amuses me to think of Ibsen going around festooned with medals, like a Soviet general on May Day.
Theatre students all over are grousing about the problematic plays assigned to them. They are cut from the same cloth as law students who are shocked! shocked! to learn the forbidden words actually appear in real world legal proceedings.
At Western Washington U., students protested a future production of No Exit. Too much patriarchy, gender stereotyping, sexual harassment, blah blah blah. One student distilled the idiocy into this: “We understand that this is a piece that is meant to challenge us as a department, but this play is not challenging if it doesn’t allow us to feel safe.”
The students' petition (of course) included this demand: "A female and LGBTQ+ led panel before or after the play that is REQUIRED for all audience members to attend." That's a great way to sell tickets (not) -- assume the audience is even stupider than whiny woke undergrads.
Levermore said. “That sounds so kumbaya, but I really do want a safe space for everyone.”
Including Earnest?
“Um, no,” he said...
Yeah, that's the correct response. Just make sure you film it.
Oh, and you ask follow up questions like "why am I not worthy of a safe space?" your goal is to get them to say something about your skin color or your sex,
If you can get them to say "because you're a white male", on video, you have a winning lawsuit
Blogger Sebastian said...
"the theory that students are going to need it to succeed in the world"
A nice theory, but one that is being refuted more and more: students are learning the skills they need in the real corporate, political and social-media world to exploit hurt feelings for personal gain and the destruction of deplorable opponents.
For every one of them who gets one of those positions, there's a dozen working at Starbucks et. al.
“ Paul Johnson devoted a harsh, but perhaps not very unfair, chapter to Ibsen in his book Intellectuals. It seems Ibsen was very vain about the many literary awards he had won, and would wear all these things on every possible occasion, such as public banquets and the like. This is off topic, but I couldn’t resist mentioning it.”
I’ve blogged about that passage a couple times. Click my Ibsen tag and you’ll see that it caused me to change my position on the legalization of marijuana.
From a comedy titled "Real Genius":
Chris Knight : So, if there's anything I can do for you - or, more to the point, *to* you - just let me know.
Susan : Can you hammer a six-inch spike through a board with your penis?
Chris Knight : Not right now.
Susan : A girl's gotta have her standards.
Arthur Miller caused me to change my position on drinking. All of his plays should be performed with a complimentary bottle of scotch, just so everyone can get through them.
"Among the videos his freshmen watch in class is a postmodern remake of Henrik Ibsen’s “The Wild Duck” that includes a scene in which a father places his penis on a table while his blind daughter swings at it with a hammer..."
Alan Sherman would say, "It's a most unusual play."
What if you TOLD a blind girl your dick was on the table and just put a knock wurst out there instead?
At 9:03 this morning I posted a comment mentioning a classmate who was one of the most talented actors to come through University Theater at Illinois. I said that I had never seen him on the screen after the made for TV movie where he was a member of the crowd.
That was a true statement, but I should have checked further. The actor's name is Steve Vinovich and he seems to have had a lengthy career doing small roles as a character actor in episodes of TV shows such as "Cheers," "Three's Company," "Sister," "Star Trek Deep Space 9," "The Young and the Restless," "Everybody Loves Raymond," and "Home Improvement." He's also been on Broadway and done Voice acting for animated movies. So he did have a career after all, though he never seems to have become a star. That doesn't make theater any less of a bitch goddess.
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