By virtue of the fact that, at many colleges, students can earn credit by being in theater productions, academia has cultivated a strange, liminal space that is both a classroom and a rehearsal room. I’ve been hired a number of times to direct students in a production, teaching them as I go what is expected of professional actors in a rehearsal and performance room. I call this “teach-directing” and it is one of my favorite endeavors. Unlike the whiny, undergrad PC warriors that the media would have you all fear, student actors are on the whole pretty interested in taking artistic risks. They want to emulate professional labor standards because they see them as important protections for both actors and their collaborators, but students, I find, are not as interested in limiting discomfort in the class-rehearsal room as they are simply eager to know just what the rules are. All the better to fearlessly jump into creative and intellectual challenges, after all.

Last week I responded to the University of Chicago’s letter to its incoming class warning them not to expect trigger warnings and safe spaces by saying that in the theater classroom, some safe space rules are necessary. This is not to keep students from having to experience psychological discomfort (to make theater they have to be willing to do that), but rather to ensure that while they are in that vulnerable place – that place where they’re willing to really be present and really feel in front of other people – they can know they are protected from abuse and real danger.

If I were teach-directing this semester, I’d be attempting to lay out the rules of our safe class-rehearsal room space more clearly than ever before, not because I fear today’s politically correct student body, but because they do in fact have a right to know whether they are putting themselves in danger, and they need reassurance that they will be supported when they take artistic risks.

Here’s what I would tell my student-actors about our shared educational-creative space.

1. You will be uncomfortable. You will be off balance. You will occasionally fail in front of other people. This will not be nearly as painful as you think it will be.
2. You might not like everyone else in the room. You definitely won’t agree with all of them. Disagreement is totally normal and really healthy, and it actually leads to better art. It is not a sign of a problem; it is a sign that everyone is really, fully engaged.
3. You cannot improvise violence or sex. That does not mean that having the impulse to add violence or sex to a moment is a bad thing. It means you have to stop yourself when you have one of those impulses and instead say, “I have an idea, but we need to work out how to do it safely.” So please, honor your impulses, even the unattractive ones. Trust them. I want to know what they are and I want to support them. I promise I will not shame you. But in this class-rehearsal room, you can’t act on the violent and/or sexual impulses until you have consent.
4. Don’t tell other actors what to do. It’s not your job. If you have that many ideas about what they could be doing, think about studying directing. Here and now, in this class-rehearsal room, your job is to figure out what you can do, not what others can. Have ideas about your part and share them. Then shape your ideas in relationship to other people’s ideas about their part. Do not try to make your ideas other people’s ideas.
5. I am here to enable you to have so many ideas you don’t even know where to start. My vision is intended as a springboard for you to use to get to other ideas that I could never think of myself, and I trust you to come up with those ideas. If you feel like you’re not getting enough direction, or like you have ideas but you don’t trust that you could try them and fail and not be judged for it, or like your ideas are too different from my vision to work, or like you don’t have any ideas, or best of all like you have so many ideas you don’t know where to start, please tell me. I can help with that. The only thing I can’t do is know what you’re thinking and feeling if you don’t express it to me. I will not judge you for being uncomfortable, afraid, excited, sad, passionate, happy, disconnected, turned on, angry, judgmental, amused, incessantly logical, ridiculously illogical, or any other thing you could possibly be feeling while making theater. In fact all those feelings and more are common and expected. We all have them and we have to have them in order to our job well. What I can do, if you tell me what you’re going through, is help.

If I were teaching this semester, I would also emphasize that theater is not made alone; it is made in companies. Even one-woman shows require more than one woman to make them. Our class-rehearsal room is one in which you have the chance to experience the discomfort, the lack of safety, in front of other people, that is essential to making good art. You have to be willing to put yourself out there, fall down, and get back up again, all with other people in the room. And that is neither comfortable nor, depending on your definition, safe. What is has to be to work is communicative.