I didn’t choose Stanford Drama. It was already in my veins before I had a choice in the matter.
My father started the program. Not “helped establish” or “contributed to”… he started it. Which meant I grew up backstage, in the wings, in the green room. Which was actually painted puke green. Where the boundaries between faculty, students, art, and life dissolved into something that would be absolutely unrecognizable, and probably illegal, today.
This was a different era. High school for me meant post-show parties where I watched professors and administrators do lines off prop tables, where faculty dated undergrads without anyone blinking, where one of the professors was the de facto drug dealer for the entire Stanford arts scene. Before you clutch your pearls, understand: this was the late ’80s, early ’90s. This was the culture. And out of this absolute chaos, this willingness to burn it all down, came work that was genuinely dangerous, genuinely alive.
The concept my father championed, the Director/Scholar, the Artist/Scholar, wasn’t just an intellectual exercise. It was a way of life that demanded everything.
I was in an acting class once where a student had a scene assignment: you’re a cat burglar looking for jewels, then suddenly you’re discovered. The student, in Memorial Auditorium, during class, jumped out the second-story window. Landed on the bricks below with two broken legs. Yeah, he was institutionalized for a bit, but he played Woyzeck the following year.
That’s not a cautionary tale. That’s not something to emulate. That’s just what it was. The level of commitment, of absolute dissolution between performer and performance, was pathological. It was also extraordinary.
I acted in shows from the time I could remember lines. Those post-production parties were my education, not just in theater, but in what happens when brilliant, damaged people pursue something with zero regard for normal boundaries.
This was also a department that had Martin Esslin, Carl Weber, Anna Deavere Smith, Lee Breuer, Adrienne Kennedy on faculty. Not as visiting celebrities doing a master class and collecting a check. As actual faculty. People who were making groundbreaking work while teaching, whose scholarship emerged from practice, whose practice was informed by deep intellectual engagement. The Scholar/Director wasn’t a concept, it was the people in the room.
Of course, being the contrarian I was, I did my undergraduate work in Modern Thought and Literature. But theater had its hooks in me. It always did.
So I went out. Worked with Anna Deavere Smith, who showed me documentary theater could be both rigorous and radical. Spaulding Gray, who understood that confession and performance were the same thing. Mabou Mines and Lee Breuer, those magnificent lunatics who treated theater like a laboratory for the impossible.
When I came back as a grad student, that legacy was still alive. Carl Weber was still there, Brecht‘s translator, his dramaturg, someone who’d actually worked with the man. Rush Rehm, who could direct Greek tragedy and write definitive scholarship on it with equal authority. Jean-Marie Apostolidès, bringing that French intellectual rigor to performance analysis while remaining deeply engaged with the making of theater. Later came artist/scholars like Ann Carlson, Helen Paris and Leslie Hill, practitioners at the highest level who brought their work into the academic space. These were not people who talked about theater from a safe distance. They were in it.
And the grad students? They weren’t coming straight out of undergrad with their theater degrees and good intentions. They’d been actors at the Public. Assistant directors at the Guthrie. Designers who’d already cut their teeth in the real world. They came with Edinburgh or Avignon on their résumés. People who’d already made work, failed at work, learned from work. The seminars in Men Aud room 125 weren’t abstract, it was a room full of practitioners wrestling with ideas because those ideas had direct implications for what they were making. Theory wasn’t separate from practice. It was the thing that made practice better, sharper, more dangerous.
You’d find a mix of grad students and undergraduates on the back steps of Memorial Auditorium at two in the morning, smoking, drinking, arguing about Bakhtin’s carnivalesque or whether Piscator or Artaud had it right. The mix was inevitable, desire, whether for the work or for each other, made no distinctions. These weren’t academic exercises. These were fights about how to make the work, what the work should do, whether theater could still be dangerous in a world that had already seen everything. Theory and practice, completely inseparable, fueled by cigarettes and cheap wine and the kind of passionate certainty you only have before the world beats it out of you.
And the goal? The goal was never to produce more academics who’d get tenure and write papers for other academics. The goal was to impact the field in the broadest sense. Graduates went on to leadership roles at Playwrights Horizons, the Mark Taper Forum, the Guthrie, the Public in New York. Yes, some went on to head academic departments, but they were artist/scholars who continued to make work, not scholars who’d retreated into theory. They were out there, in the world, making theater that mattered to audiences, shaping institutions, taking risks.
The department now? It’s no longer about making art. It’s become parasitic, feeding off the work of artists who are no longer welcome in the buildings they once inhabited. It’s about creating academic scholars who pump up their own egos by sharing their thoughts with twenty-five peers at conferences and publish papers that six people will read. Meanwhile, the artists, the makers, the ones that know both theory and practice, the ones actually trying to engage with the rest of humanity, trying to make something that lives and breathes in real time with real audiences… those people have been shown the door.
The Director/Scholar my father envisioned could think and make. The current model can only think about making. There’s a difference. A catastrophic one.
What you see documented here, this body of work, represents what was possible when artists were still welcome. When the program believed in the primacy of the made thing, not just the discourse about the thing. When theater was a living practice, not a dead language being analyzed by academics who wouldn’t know how to light a stage or direct a scene if their tenure depended on it.
This is the work. The actual work. Made by people who believed that art matters more than the conversation about art. That engaging an audience of hundreds, or thousands, is more valuable than impressing a tenure committee.
That theater is a verb, not a noun.
