Dr. Kathleen Gallagher & Andrew Kushnir
Andrew Kushnir is an actor, playwright, director, as well as artistic director of the socially-engaged theatre company Project: Humanity (PH) in Toronto. Since 2021, he has steered PH’s Proximity Lab, an incubator for new approaches to verbatim theatre — a form he has been working in for 15 years. He has collaborated on two books coming out in 2022: Moving the Centre: Two Plays: Small Axe and Freedom Singer (Talon Books, with Khari Wendell McClelland) and Hope in a Collapsing World (U of T Press, with Kathleen Gallagher). Andrew is the creator and host of _This Is Something Else – _an investigative theatre history podcast for the Arts Club. He is a graduate of the University of Alberta, a Loran Scholar and alumnist of the Michael Langham Workshop for Classical Direction at the Stratford Festival. Andrew is the inaugural recipient of the Shevchenko Foundation REACH residency prize. A proudly queer Ukrainian-Canadian, he founded the We Support LGBTQ Ukraine Fund with the Veritas Foundation in April 2022.
Dr. Kathleen Gallagher: A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, Distinguished Professor, and Director of the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto, Dr. Kathleen Gallagher studies theatre as a powerful medium for expression by young people of their experiences and understandings. She has published numerous books and articles at the intersection of youth, theatre, and the social world. Her most recent works include the 2020 edited collection, _Global Youth Citizenry and Radical Hope: Enacting Community-Engaged Research through Performative Methodologies _and the 2022 monograph Hope in a Collapsing World: Youth, Theatre, and Listening as a Political Alternative
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Transcript
[Phil Rickaby]
Welcome to Stageworthy, I’m Phil Rickaby, the host of this podcast. This is episode 334. This week on the podcast, I will be talking to Dr. Kathleen Gallagher and Andrew Kushner about their book, Hope in a Collapsing World, Youth Theatre and Listening as a Political Alternative, about the use of theatre by students to create work that communicates the dream, and how it can be used to create change. Here’s our conversation. I’m really curious about this project and how the book came about. Why don’t we start with what is Hope in a Collapsing World?
[Dr. Kathleen Gallagher]
I’ll jump in, Andrew. Yeah. Yeah, Hope in a Collapsing World is a title that represents a world of entanglements with artists and teachers and young people and researchers, social workers, who put in the foreground theatre as a way to investigate what it is we care about, and the nature of hope in these times.
That would be, I think, for me, its most concise description.
[Andrew Kushnir]
Yeah, I’m holding, you know, and it depends on the day. It depends on the world. But, you know, these days, what I take from it actually is something that Kathleen has given her life to, which is approaching young people as teachers, you know, and what their capacities are to dislodge us from our tightly held narratives, and to show us different ways of thinking about the world.
And Kathleen has invested in drama, the drama classroom, as a site for that hope to play out. And that’s what’s within these pages for me. And it’s been a real touchstone, even in recent weeks and months, as the world gets more and more complicated, as it falls in on itself more and more.
[Phil Rickaby]
I’m curious about the idea of theatre as social investigation, as making social statements and things like that. For students, is this a new idea for them? Is this something that is a new introduction?
Because when I was younger, I thought about theatre and this sort of thing as just a fun thing, or, you know, to be entertaining. Is the introduction of the social aspect something new for them? And do they have trouble grasping it?
[Dr. Kathleen Gallagher]
That’s a great question, Phil. You know, I think the evolution of what goes on in drama classrooms in the name of theatre has evolved so much over many years now. And I think that young people in drama classrooms already know that their symbolic world is a world that’s so deeply in touch with the real one that they live in.
So if we bring those thoughts together in some explicit way, I don’t see them as surprised. Because I think part of the secret investment that young people have in a drama classroom is that it’s all about them, and it doesn’t need to be all about them at the same time. So it’s a way of playing and acting, conceiving, imagining other ways of being that are so embedded in the things that we care about and have experienced in our lives.
So I feel like those things are not always explicitly drawn. But in most spaces that I’ve been in, I feel that young people have, there’s a kind of urgency for them to explore with metaphor and collaboratively with others, things that matter profoundly to them in their lives. So if we happen to come in and say, hey, the research we do thinks these things are really intimately connected, what about you?
I never find young people saying, oh, that’s so strange. That’s not how I think about it at all. So maybe it hasn’t been explicitly drawn for them, but they operate as though they and the world is at stake in what they do.
[Phil Rickaby]
Well, I mean, it is, you know, as somebody who’s, you know, an older, I’m on the older end of the spectrum now, it’s becoming more and more necessary that we understand that they are the ones that are going to inherit this mess that we’re creating. And they have to find ways to tell us about it. If Greta Thunberg standing up and talking about it can’t rattle people and make change, maybe creating an entertainment can.
[Andrew Kushnir]
You’re making me think of, it comes up in the play, but in Kathleen’s culminating reflection in Towards Youth, which is the script embedded in the book, Marjorie Douglas, there’s a stoneman in there, is it Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School, is invoked because it was indeed the drama kids after that shooting that were the extraordinary storytellers. They really captured the imagination of a nation and were the leads, you know, the sort of gun restriction or gun safety movement is not a new movement, but they were able to take the lead. And I think, again, it always comes back to me to that notion of if a young person’s life can be the curriculum, which is the potential of the drama classroom, you’re opening them up to all kinds of capacities and breadth of voice and a sense of being able to change the world, to imagine a different world, but also change that world.
That’s what you rehearse in those drama classrooms when you’ve got a teacher that makes space for it. You know, it’s about elaboration, it’s about collaboration, and it is about revising, you know, the culminating word of the play is adjust. You know, we learn how to adjust in the drama classroom for all of its chaos and, you know, all of its play and all of its differences, the clashing of differences, the meeting of differences.
If we can learn how to adjust, I think it just makes us better citizens. And, you know, we see that in young people emerging from that pedagogy.
[Phil Rickaby]
I think there’s something about, I remember my time in theatre school, in theatre classes when I was in high school. And you mentioned, you know, if the teacher is open to it, I think that is for many students the challenge. I think that when I was in high school, if I had the opportunity to create something that really spoke to what we were doing or what we were experiencing, that would have been exciting rather than, you know, having to do scenes from plays that the teacher selected.
[Andrew Kushnir]
We can be both, you know, I think. I see it as both are legitimate and, you know, attention that we discovered in the research at the site in Athens in particular was attention between a teacher that was more committed to pleasure in play and fantasy and games and escape in the drama space. And that being a point of, you know, that was challenging in terms of some of the research and some of the opportunities we were seeing around, you know, speaking into these young people’s experiences, receiving their experiences.
But that tension is not only is it real, it’s legitimate. And I think the space can be both of those things. I think it’s when we force it to be one or the other in strict terms that we miss out on what the space can do.
And yeah.
[Dr. Kathleen Gallagher]
Sorry, Andrew, I was just going to build upon that and what you said previously, because I agree with you. And actually, there are these divides all over the world in theatre and also in the study of theatre. And I have I have managed to not enter into that kind of binary thinking over many years.
And it and it takes some effort to not do that. But I think what again, it’s the drama classroom that made that abundantly clear for me. Two things that I would say is what people often say, and maybe, Phil, you had this experience, too, as a drama student.
People are always ready to talk about confidence that that drama students gain confidence because of the work that they might do in a drama classroom. And and this study taught me that it’s something slightly different from that. It’s not exactly confidence.
It’s it’s what I end up calling security. And the secure to feel secure in one’s place is very different from feeling confident because security is is by its nature a relational experience. And so.
If you’re doing Mamma Mia or you’re doing a deep investigation of complex, difficult experiences in young people’s lives, whichever of those you’re doing, what young people figure out very quickly is that they are key players in the lives and the journeys of other people, whether that’s standing on stage, singing in a musical or doing some other different kind of investigation. And once they realize the critical role they’re playing in others lives, that whole idea of confidence becomes a more shared reality. And so we can make the space secure no matter what the work is, because we’re we’re we’re leaning into the relationality of all of this.
And that, I think, is to me, it’s unfortunate that the the ways in which drama has often been articulated really leans on those more individual ideas of of confidence and singularity. Instead of what I think we saw play out in so many different places, which was indeed the roles that not not only young people feeling more secure in their own work and in their own lives, but understanding how that stood in relationship, that they were secondary characters in a whole lot of other lives and that that was part of how you collaborate, part of how you create space together. And you can imagine in the different cultural contexts in which we we researched, the expression of that can look vastly different.
But that singular thing remained true, that we we rise and we fall together. And it doesn’t mean that it always ends in victory. It often ends in failure.
But even in that experience, the lessons gleaned about what it means to to be in a supporting role in someone else’s life is profound for many young people.
[Phil Rickaby]
It’s it’s a fascinating idea. The the the difference between confidence, which I think the idea of instilling confidence in students is often how theatre class is justified to parents. Yeah, that’s that’s how we how we convince the the PTA or the powers that be the school board that this is what makes this program necessary.
And which which sort of useful and it sort of falls into the puritanical view that in North America we have about theatre and its its purpose and its use.
[Andrew Kushnir]
Yeah, that it’s about building those soft skills so that you can be a great businessman or you can, you know, go into politics or law or, you know, it’s something that I contended with. You know, I my parents are first generation Ukrainian Canadians. It was inconceivable for me to go into the arts.
I think they were really hopeful that drama was just kind of something to add to my toolkit. And I decided, no, no, no, it’s the thing. The circus is the thing.
And so, you know, I think you’re spot on, Phil, that there is this this and it’s I mean, what we’re talking about is capitalism. We’re talking about, you know, a system that we’re supposed to slot ourselves into, that a life in the arts is not necessarily legitimate, that these are, again, things that are good for us. But ultimately, we need to do more serious work.
And I think I hope we’re learning, you know, as we I know we’re still in this pandemic era, but I do hope we can see that the arts are actually not just a means to an end. That indeed, it is about sustaining, maintaining, healing our humanity. It is essential work in its way.
And, you know, I hope I hope that there is a shifting narrative around that. You know, I certainly feel like this research in particular would point to a deep complexity about what the arts are offering young people at this time.
[Dr. Kathleen Gallagher]
Yeah, and I think as well that especially in these most divided times, I mean, for so many reasons now that the social contract is under serious threat. And I feel like in a drama classroom, people aren’t consuming each other’s stories. They’re receiving each other’s stories and recognizing what the differences are in a long conversation, not in political slogans, not in easily divided ideas.
But that difference, that space between where you stand and where I stand is part of what the contract is for how we’re both in this space. And I don’t know many other spaces in a school curriculum where that most needed skill, if you like, or just not even skill, but way of being in the world, particularly the world at this time, is more rigorously explored.
[Phil Rickaby]
I can’t think of one either, because I think that it’s the it’s the uniqueness of of of that room, of the of what is essentially a theatre workshop space that that gives the people in it the freedom to to explore and to build and to to essentially have difficult conversations in a way that that, like you said, outside of that room. We are terrible at having those conversations.
[Dr. Kathleen Gallagher]
Yeah, you know, sometimes we’re terrible at having them in that room. And as Andrew suggested, like leadership and pedagogy is so critical. And I think that’s that’s a lifelong work as well.
But the possibility is always there. And I think, you know, even when it breaks down, there’s the time and the space and the commitment to understanding what went wrong, how it went wrong, what was at stake, who was invested in what. Not just to pick apart, you know, but but instead to say we know what a real collaboration or a shared purpose looks and feels like because we’ve had this small success or this not so terrible outcome.
And then we had this experience. And what what intervened to make that less than ideal experience surface? And my God, when I think about any kind of workplace, wouldn’t it be incredible if we all could bring that kind of critical consciousness to these difficult, both domestic and professional worlds that we have to navigate to really stay in the trouble, to really stay with what doesn’t go so well?
And I think, you know, the drama classroom is extraordinary for that sense of persistence, even when things are coming off the rails.
[Phil Rickaby]
I think I mean, the interesting thing is that I think when I was in theatre, when I was sorry, when I was in high school, my being in rehearsal for a show or for like a class was the first time that I felt something go off the rail in rehearsal. And then to sort of have it have the teacher come over and say, you realize that’s part of this process is we can have things go off the rails and then we can bring them back. And it’s up to you to figure out how to do that.
I can help. And your director can help. But part of the process, these things sometimes happen.
What an important lesson that we didn’t often get.
[Andrew Kushnir]
Yeah, that we survive mistakes and that that there’s something outside of this competitive world around us and this judgment filled world around us. I think that’s the huge gift of the drama classroom is that for all the mistakes there, it doesn’t equate to failure. And indeed, as Kathleen pointed out, there’s always something.
There’s always some kind of, you know, let’s call it a win or a gleaning that occurs when you realize that you are consequential to others, which is what happens in the drama classroom when you realize that you have more of a voice than a lot of other classrooms in the building. When you’re suddenly in a circle, you know, the power of actually being accountable to one another in a way that isn’t desks all facing one direction, looking at a chalkboard. They’re just huge lessons to learn in that space.
And of course, we learn through error. We learn through things not going well. There’s this Dorothy Heath quote in the play.
And I inherit this from Kathleen. And the original quote is, you know, drama is a man in a mess. And the mess is that’s where we grow from.
We grow from that. And that’s what good drama is to begin with. You know, so I don’t know.
It’s hard for me not to see it as a critical space. And also, as we’ve discovered, an endangered space.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah, I want to talk about that a little bit. As far as, you know, the theatre, the arts in general in the schools are endangered. Theatre is often seen as a frivolous thing, an extra thing, a nice to have.
But, you know, who really needs it anyway? In a lot of those schools, like music programs are the same. What has following through and letting the students develop their own shows and create these things, and even performing this show, is there a change happening in how the administration is seeing these programs?
Or is it still something that the program itself is having to justify?
[Dr. Kathleen Gallagher]
That’s such a variable thing. I can answer yes and no to that question equally. Leadership matters in schools, of course, in terms of how the arts get positioned or get privileged or not.
But just as you were asking that question, I was thinking about one of the current teachers that we work with in a Toronto high school. And this old idea of the show must go on was really always about other people. It was always about saving face or being, you know, the parents arriving on arts night and they’d have something worthwhile to see.
Or checking off particular boxes in a teacher’s assessment or one’s assessment of a teacher’s work. But we work with a teacher now, and there are many, many, many like him, who feel more accountable to the students in the room and who are very ready to say to whoever might be looking on that his commitment is to the safety and the safe exploration and the following of curiosities of the people who sit in front of him, who sit with him in a circle. And I do feel that more and more, those external pressures that you were speaking about weigh less and less upon the real work that is going on.
And in the end, students will have sit-ins outside a principal’s office who wants to cut their drama class. That’s common. It’s going to be the students who actually most vociferously defend the value of an education in the arts.
And really, we’ve probably been wrongheaded when we’ve imagined that we need to appease others who perhaps hold the purse strings or will get behind us in some institutional way. We know this from climate activists. We know this from young people in drama classrooms all over the world finding their own activist voice, possibly for the first time, that they are the most important audience.
And when you act as a teacher in light of that most critical discovery, I don’t think a drama class can be at risk anymore because the most important spokespeople will not let it happen.
[Phil Rickaby]
Do you see the students who are exposed to activism in this way, that their activism is ignited and it moves forward with them? Is that something that’s happening, that the activism itself continues through the theatre and out of the theatre?
[Dr. Kathleen Gallagher]
Yes. I mean, I’m sure Andrew has thoughts on this too, but 100%. And it moves back and forth between the world and the classroom.
And I think one of the great discoveries and why I continue to research inside a drama classroom is because it’s a screen door. It’s not a wall. It’s not the walls of a school.
It’s really air on the outside and the inside of the building. It’s permeable. And the best drama classrooms are wildly aware of that movement from a young person’s life in the world outside of school and their life inside of school.
And I find that more and more young people want to not compartmentalize in that way. They want to not be read as a student in some two dimensional way in one setting and as a more rounded, engaged, active person in some outside setting that has no relevance in the school space. So, you know, the drama, as Andrew said previously, their lives are the curriculum.
And when that’s taken really seriously, then everything that goes on outside the school matters deeply to what’s going on inside the classroom. And then the reverse becomes true. And I think more and more all kinds of study of young people is resisting this idea that and really the world doesn’t let us compartmentalize in that way anymore.
And especially with COVID, because there is fluidity and there is such richness in creating those, drawing those lines. Part of my research quite some time ago revealed that young people’s engagement in school was correlated strongly with the ways in which they take care of others outside of school. So that meant that this idea of students as needing to be taken care of was in direct contrast to the very thing that makes them more engaged in school, which is their lives as caretakers of others.
I think when I stumbled upon that first really significant understanding, I realized, well, the drama classroom in some ways has always been working to facilitate that. And maybe that’s why it makes us better learners in life and in school, because caring is connected to what many just see as academic performance.
[Phil Rickaby]
Andrew, what are your thoughts about activism in the theatre and out of it?
[Andrew Kushnir]
A few things come to mind. I think of it turned out to be a bit of a provocation, but I’m thinking around the run of the play at Crow’s Theatre in 2019, I had said in an interview that I really think theatre has the capacity to be a call to thought. And I remember in a Q&A somebody being troubled by that and they thought, why not a call to action?
And so I’m turning over right now why I said a call to thought and the extent to which we live in a really fast world, there’s an overabundance of information. We don’t often move that information into clear action. And so I’m reflecting on how the theatre space, the drama classroom is an opportunity actually for us to slow down, to in a way not keep running with our own story around things, but to let go of those stories and make space for what people are actually telling us they need or want.
And so I’m connecting that idea, the call to thought, to indeed instances that both Kathleen and I have witnessed where when there is enough thought, when there is enough gestation and rehearsal, young people do cross over into the world and make appreciable change. And I think of that in the form of drama performances we saw in Athens that were speaking in solidarity with the refugees, the refugee crisis in Greece. I’m thinking of in Coventry, we were there during Brexit, we arrived the day before the Brexit result, and how those young people were using drama as a way to, in a way, put their community back together after this cataclysmic historic event.
And then I’m thinking of India, and I’m thinking, you know, the Girls of Prerna, which Kathleen has this long standing relationship with a school in Lucknow, India, and the critical feminist pedagogy there and the drama class being almost every class, they use drama in every subject, a tool in every subject, a means in every subject. The extent to which those girls are emerging from that program and creating extraordinary shifts within their families, within their communities, I think there’s a lot of crossover. I think, you know, I’m very much persuaded by the fact that that space that could be, you know, we could perceive the drama classroom as being fundamentally about play, but it’s consequential play, you know, it’s got an impact on the world.
And in the years of this study, I just, I feel like there’s an abundance of examples where a young person goes, thank you, thank you, I’m going to run with that.
[Dr. Kathleen Gallagher]
Yeah, Andrew, you’re making me think of Taiwan as well. And they were, they were the oldest students in this study, they were in second year theatre school in a university. And at the time that we were working with them, there was really critical LGBTQ plus legislation happening in Taiwan.
And we got to sit in on incredible rehearsals, where the young people there were taking stories of their peers, and figuring out what they felt an audience needed to hear, so they could be better advocates for themselves and for others to think more progressively about LGBTQ policy in the nation. There was such a direct link there, that that playfulness and even, and this was true in India, too, playing your oppressors, playing those people, those very people who would in the case of India, because of the extraordinary patriarchy, hold those young women down, hold them back. And the same in Taiwan, the young people who did not want to choose between their family with beloved traditions, cultural traditions, and their own identity, whether that was LGBTQ identity, or other ways of being in the world that didn’t so easily line up with the traditions with which they were raised.
And so the drama space really became, as Andrew said, a rehearsal for other possibilities that most certainly would be enacted in the world. They were trying on selves, they were taking the sting out of the oppressors in their lives by playing them gleefully, and with gusto, because they wanted to affectively understand literally what they were up against in some cases. So these artificial lines drawn around the activist in one’s life and the activist in a rehearsal space, as Andrew said, countless examples where those divisions just made no sense at all.
[Phil Rickaby]
I’m curious about, just to switch gears a little bit, about the two of you and how you came together on this project.
[Dr. Kathleen Gallagher]
Do you want to tell it, Andrew? Phil, we both love this question, and we played with this answer so often. I’m going to turn it over to Andrew, I think he should say something.
[Andrew Kushnir]
Well, I’m sure the baton will get passed at a certain point. We met around, well, I mean, it was serendipitous, and it was also inevitable, because The Middle Place, which was my first verbatim play, and it was created from interviews done in the youth shelter system here in Toronto, was touring high schools in the TDSB, the Toronto District School Board, and we happened to be performing at a site that Kathleen was working at. So it was a research site for her.
And it was workshop first, right, Kathleen?
[Dr. Kathleen Gallagher]
Yeah.
[Andrew Kushnir]
So Antonio and I, so Antonio is one of the original founders of Project Humanity, the socially engaged theatre company that I run. And Antonio and I came to this classroom, and with these ethnographic researchers in the space, and this really extraordinary teacher and extraordinary group of young people, and we, in essence, initiated them in this notion of, or at least our verbatim theatre practice, as a kind of precursor to them seeing the show. And I think Kathleen and I had a brief exchange, you know, in that space.
Again, totally unfamiliar to me, the notion of researchers being in a classroom, and yet also observing this real ease between the adults and the young people in the room. And then, I believe it would have been a week later, we came and performed the show. And so, you know, Kathleen could speak to her experience of it, but what I remember vividly, and I kind of feel like it was sort of the spark, was afterwards Kathleen and I having a confab.
You know, this after seeing a bunch of students rush the stage, wanting to connect with the actors who had just performed the play, and just sensing this kinship, this kind of shared, you know, we’ve gone about it differently. And in fact, we play with this hyphenate, the idea of, you know, who is the artist researcher and who’s the researcher artist. And in fact, you know, again, troubling the notion that one is just artist or just researcher.
I think in one another, we saw this gorgeous overlap, and this, you know, shared commitment to young people, you know, seeing young people as full persons, not just people in transit to adulthood. And wanting to honour those voices, wanting to create, you know, engaging experiences for them that don’t live in stereotype or misrepresent them in ways that are, you know, avoidable. And so there was just sort of a conversation that sparked in that room, that eventually led to me doing a tour of Kathleen’s data.
And so that research project she was working on, she wondered if there was something there, the makings of a play perhaps. And I guess I could say the rest is history. I mean, Towards Youth, in essence, was born of that question, is there something in this research?
Do you see something in this research? A question that I think Kathleen posed with a lot of humility and understanding that plays are complicated, and not all research can be a play. But together, we found a way and travelled the world doing it.
Kathleen, what’s your take? Did I miss any?
[Dr. Kathleen Gallagher]
Yeah, you hit all the key revelations for us, Andrew. But I would just add that once Andrew and I started to engage in our thoughts about young people, our thoughts about theatre, our thoughts about those two things together, and he looked at my data and said that there’s definitely a play here. Then when I moved forward with a new research project, I wanted Andrew to be embedded as an artist inside the research.
Why wouldn’t we be representing the research ultimately, in the language of theatre, if theatre had been so responsible for our ways of seeing? How could we not make theatre a critical expression of all that we were learning by doing theatre with young people in these unique spaces? Right from the get-go then, when we imagined this new project, we centred Andrew as the embedded artist who would be in conversation over the whole long five-plus years.
In a funny sort of way, that meant that the researchers also became objects of study for Andrew, that in a sense, the research itself became something to look at by a playwright. So, it really started to flip all kinds of traditional notions about theatre, about research, about adults and young people and intergenerational engagement, about inter- and intracultural engagement in complex classrooms in Toronto and in other places around the world. There began a very, very long, still enduring conversation about how to see not just the value but the criticality of these spaces in times where social crisis is now the new normal.
In the last study, it seemed almost, Andrew mentioned Brexit, it seemed almost odd, strange, increasingly unusual that we kept showing up at places when there were serious social crises or breakdowns or polarised ways of being that were surfacing right at that moment. And then at a certain point, I said to myself, there isn’t a time that isn’t in some way a crisis now. And so, what in that broader context, if I’m interested in the idea of especially youth citizenship, citizenship itself, but especially young people as growing, engaged citizens in the world, if that’s of concern to me in these times, then we need a lot of people in that conversation.
We need the artists. We need the social scientists. We need the humanists.
We need the service people, the facilitators. We need the voices of young people. And they need to not only be cared for but need to do the caring as well.
And we need to sometimes keep very quiet as adults who have tended to think that they’ve lived past that time. And so, we know it. We don’t know it in their terms.
We don’t. We have to be listeners. That’s why that’s key to the subtitle of this book, Listening as a Political Alternative, because that’s what you soon realize.
And so, Andrew and I have just not only enjoyed listening to each other in our ways in the world for a long time, but to be a team with others to listen in new ways in spaces that we think are really key to weathering the storms and also to making, oh, how can I say this without being completely trite? Making the idea of new possibilities a reality, not just for young people, but for those of us who are so ready to turn it over, as you said at the beginning of this, for young people to fix the mess we’ve made. Now, we’re not going to do it that way.
We have to do it in relationship. We have to quiet our own voices so that we can hear. And we have to speak up when it’s uncomfortable to do so, when we don’t necessarily know what the right answers are, when we don’t have the answers ourselves.
We have to, as Andrew quoted Dorothy Hethcott, we have to be in that mess together. And I can’t think of anyone I’d rather be in the mess with than Andrew. So I think we I think this is going to be a long term engagement with lots of twists and turns in the road.
[Andrew Kushnir]
Yeah. The feeling is mutual.
[Phil Rickaby]
One of the things that I’m always fascinated by is the road that somebody takes to to focus their life on theatre, whether it is as somebody who’s who’s an actor, playwright, director as Andrew is or in an academic fashion like like like Kathleen. So I’m curious for each of you. I’ll start with Andrew.
What is your theatre origin story? What what first grabbed you and set you on the road to here?
[Andrew Kushnir]
It’s it’s a word. It’s a word I used earlier. It’s the word consequence.
And and it was a performance in high school. I went to an all boy Jesuit high school. We didn’t have a drama class.
We didn’t have a drama teacher. But we had a dramatic society, which sounds very dramatic. But but it was actually it was it was it was, you know, a bit goofy.
I mean, it was it was us gathering and putting on a show and the pleasure of that, of course, but not necessarily structured and not necessarily the stuff of, you know, absorbing tools or ways of working. But I do remember in a high school production, a prop breaking down on stage. It was a candle, actually, that broke in half.
I was playing Ebenezer Scrooge in A Christmas Carol. And it was this moment of, you know, in the blink of an eye, a problem, an unexpected problem on stage. And I made a choice.
And to my best recollection, I started cackling with laughter. It was at a point in the play where Scrooge had stopped caring about money. And I just started to sort of burst with joy at the notion of of losing this candle and it not mattering that life was bigger than a candle.
And I remember the tension in the room as I was calculating my next move. And then I remember the relief in the space when I made a choice. And for some reason, it’s it was just a really I got infected.
I got infected in that moment with the notion that I, as a young person, was a consequence to the world. I could do something that could move people in some direction, an unexpected direction. And I think that that was kind of, you know, it’s like a little bit of a snowball that turned into a big snowball that turned into an avalanche.
And I’ve been more and more invested and curious about how do we embrace the art space as a consequential space? How do we as artists do things in the world that have reverberations that help people feel into things, hard things, things that we want to maybe disengage from or disassociate from? How is the artist actually somebody who is a connector and a messenger between entities, between people?
And so it was such a silly little moment, but I always look back on it as the bug. That’s when the bug really bit me hard and and I couldn’t shake it. Thereafter, you know, for for all the sort of vocations I was considering, it all felt hollow to this thought of, oh, wow, as an artist, I may be able to actually make a big wave with the choice I make in a moment of uncertainty.
So, yeah, I’d say that was the that was the onset.
[Phil Rickaby]
Those moments when something unexpected happens like that, those are the potential for magic. It’s as simple as dropping a pen on the floor and because you’re blocking doesn’t include it, ignoring the pen that you’ve dropped on the floor and the audience being able to do nothing except stare at the pen on the floor and wonder why nobody is picking it up. And they will increasingly like that tension that you mentioned, they will get more and more tense until somebody finally just picks up the pen and they’ll suddenly be able to concentrate on the show again.
But that there’s magic in those moments, their offerings for us to to accept the moment or ignore it.
[Andrew Kushnir]
It’s landing the plane, right? It’s that tension, you know, it’s that bumpy landing. I’ve been on prop planes recently and I just, you know, don’t get me started.
But it’s that moment you do want to break out into applause when the tension is released. And and that’s that is what theatre is about. It’s about that tension and about letting that tension go.
And that’s what catharsis is. It’s about building up that tension and then letting it go. And that practice, I think that elasticity that the theatre engenders in us, it just makes us better human beings.
I mean, it lets us stretch our minds, even if we think about how do I reconcile somebody else’s ideology or somebody who thinks wildly differently than me. The fact that in the theatre we can move towards and away from folks that are so different, that makes us better citizens. It makes us more compassionate.
It makes us more, you know, just just better partners, better parents, better kids. You know, going back to that notion of the drama classroom, just providing these sort of soft skills that, you know, I can’t advocate enough for the fact that it just makes us better human beings. It just puts us in better relationship with one another.
And and again, to be a messenger, to be an agent in that mission, which I think artists are, is addictive. It’s satisfying. Yeah, there was it was a little bit of there was no looking back from that for me.
[Phil Rickaby]
I don’t blame you because there’s that, you know, that moment where something goes wrong on stage. And if the audience can see it, it’s one thing if only the actors know that somebody flubbed the line. But like if something visibly happens for everybody on stage and off, it is a realization that, oh, yeah, this isn’t a movie.
Stuff can go wrong, this can be different every time, which is an exciting thing to to witness and to have that realization of.
[Andrew Kushnir]
Yeah. And it can’t be perfect. It can never be perfect, which is is the you know, it’s torture for the artist, but it’s also it’s it’s such a gorgeous parallel to life.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah.
[Andrew Kushnir]
And and it allows us to fight the perfectionism that, again, our capitalist system is constantly calling out for. And our classrooms often can call out for and drama is the antidote. Yeah.
[Phil Rickaby]
Yeah. I mean, if it’s a drama class, how do you what’s the difference between a actor and a B actor? What’s the.
What are you doing there? Yeah, I don’t know.
[Andrew Kushnir]
I’m glad I don’t have to. I’m glad I don’t have to mark drama.
[Phil Rickaby]
Kathleen, what was what’s what is your origin story of your interest to theatre?
[Dr. Kathleen Gallagher]
I love this question. I’m still dwelling in Andrew’s beautiful response. Oh, well, mine, of course, begins with Tennessee Williams in a way.
I want to draw a line between being six, being a teenager, being a drama teacher and being a theatre researcher. Really a trajectory that has been riding a wave that I think you both might recognize. I’m the youngest of five children.
And when I was six, I had one sister who was 16 and who was drama mad. She was in high school theatre arts and was passionate about it. And so I was her audience.
She practiced monologues in her bedroom with me as her audience of one. And she would light a candle and don a costume. And I would be mesmerized with my big sister who would be.
Tennessee Williams, Streetcar Named Desire, there she was right in front of me. Words I didn’t even understand. And that’s that was my experience of theatre.
I didn’t actually go to professional theatre, but I had that really intimate experience with my sister. And then, of course, when I went on to high school, I followed in her footsteps. And I also was a drama nerd and I love deeply loved my drama class.
And I had a drama high school teacher who was really demanding. It was a really, really demanding course. It was the opposite of people’s expectation of drama in high school, even though it was way back in the 80s.
And and I worked hard and I felt a great, great achievement when I accomplished things. And I felt like I was let in on a secret that drama was fun, but it was also really consequential to use to use Andrew’s term that it mattered. She made it matter.
And I and that was really aligned with how I already felt. So then, of course, naturally, I become a drama teacher and I spent 10 years being a drama teacher in a high school classroom. And they were hands down the best professional years of my life.
I loved it so deeply and became a different person doing it. And while I was doing it, I started to have those big questions occur to me like, what is going on here? Why is this?
What are these relationships about? Why is this mattering so much? And in my case, I was teaching in a girl’s school, a Catholic girl’s school.
You know, what is going on for these young women that seems so important? And so that at that point, I said, I don’t think I’m going to sort this out myself. So I want to go back to school.
I want to make this drama classroom my laboratory. And I want to do a Ph.D. and I want to figure out I want to ask these questions that I care about, about the social world. And I was deeply caring about gender questions of gender at that time and its relationship to theatre.
Why this has why this space continues to be a space of proliferation of ideas and in intense emotions and all of the things that I loved and cared about. And so I went back to school and I did I made a study of my own drama classroom and I spent time learning the skills of a social scientist and applying them to my practice as a teacher and to the young people I was engaging with. And at the end of all of that, the obvious outcome for me was to continue to work as a researcher.
And I felt really mournful about leaving the classroom. So, of course, I had to create an entire life that would get me back in those drama classrooms for the rest of my life. And to my amazement, I have managed to do that.
And I have not regretted one moment because I I relive my own sense of possibility and I see it unfolding with other people. And I like being in the mess and I like being with the challenge. And I think brave conversations happen.
And I think I I’m a better researcher because of of where I apply that work. And I guess I’m doing what Andrew’s doing. I’m continuing to both be amazed and be determined that the world understand what is going on in these negligible spaces that is so consequential to lives and how we live them with other people and how we see the world.
So lucky me is all I can say. Lucky me that I could draw that line and keep keep the drama classroom as a as the heartbeat of whatever I was doing and to keep being a student of it because there is much to learn. There is more to learn.
And and so it goes.
[Phil Rickaby]
Kathleen, Andrew, thank you so much for having this conversation and the work that you’re doing and the book itself. Thank you so much. Thank you, Phil.
[Dr. Kathleen Gallagher]
Thanks for the conversation.
[Phil Rickaby]
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