After years of thinking about it, and sometimes even talking about it, I have at last begun a blog. The motivation for the blog, the inspiration for the title, and the subject of my first post all stemmed from an incident a few weeks back when, after I delivered an impassioned rant regarding my standards for community theatre, an actor I was working with smiled, shook his head blithely, and murmured, “Well, we all have our windmills.”
This good-natured comment took me aback for only a moment, but burrowed into my subconscious for weeks. It left me wondering, and re-wondering, is my dedication to the creed that community theatre is the front line in the battle to keep live theatre viable really a case of tilting at windmills? I don’t know – but perhaps if I chatter on long enough with random blog posts, I’ll be granted a grand epiphany on the matter. Or not.
The aforementioned rant that became the genesis of this blog was prompted by a rehearsal for a show I was directing. After a week or two of struggling with a difficult script, an actor or two began to display mutinous leanings, and a demand of “Change the lines!” began to emerge. I put my foot down, and the roar became a grumbling, and rehearsal went on. Afterwards, I was treated to an email from one of the actors, simultaneously apologizing and questioning my unwavering devotion to “every word of the script”. I responded via email, reiterating my reasons for not making changes to difficult lines (clearly a subject for another blog post!), but after bedding the line-change issue, I found myself continuing in what quickly became a rant. With some editing to remove unnecessary information (and because there just *might* have been a touch of inappropriate language sprinkled in), here is a sampling of the email:
. . . I am of the opinion that community theatre is as much – [heck], more - "real theatre" as professional, so I hold it to the same standards. Theatre is a passion for me, and I hold all aspects of it in the highest respect and I expect the same of those I work with. I find it an embarrassment when people take the attitude "Hey, it's community theatre, it's just for fun, it doesn't really matter what we do with it." That kind of community theatre makes me cringe . . . Theatre was born in the community, the community is it's only hope for survival right now, and it may very well die in the community - there is no excuse for lazy community theatre.
[snip]
That's the kind of director I have always been and always will be - I see so much more to theatre than actors running around on stage spewing lines. The artistry and meaning of it goes much deeper than that - there is art in the playwriting, art in the directing, art in the set design, art in the lighting design, there is even art in the stage managing of a show, and I won't shrug off those principles because I got stuck with a bad script.
It was this rant, with the line-change issue snipped, that prompted the actor to make the Don Quixote reference when next we met. For those of you unfamiliar with the reference, “tilting at windmills” refers to a scene in the novel Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes where the protagonist of the story (named, shockingly, Don Quixote) spies a group of formidable giants in the distance. Don Quixote valiantly charges into battle with them, sure of victory and fortune, despite the admonishment of his friend that the giants are, in fact, merely windmills. In modern terms, “tilting at windmills” can mean either a battle against an imaginary foe, or a battle that is futile. Hence the question that inspired this blog: Is my fight for quality community theatre a battle that doesn’t need to be fought, or a battle that cannot be won?I admit, my horse is quite high on this issue. :)
I say neither, and if giants disguise themselves as windmills, then it is windmills I will fight. And I know for a fact that I am not the only Don Quixote wielding a lance in the community theatre world.
