Or: Coping with Judgment in the Arts

By Adina Kruskal ’18

Kruskal’s campers onstage

Against the better advice of my Skidmore professors, I did not pursue any theater-related experiences this summer. I spent two months of the summer at a Jewish day camp in Westwood, MA, as I have for nearly all of my life. A big part of our camp life is our color war, or Maccabiah, as we call it. (The name is borrowed from the Maccabiah Games, a sort of mini-Olympics held periodically in Israel). Maccabiah is a summer-long competition in which we split the kids up into four teams to compete in sports, races, board games, and other events to earn points for their team’s total. Once I competed in Maccabiah as a camper, but now I have realized one of my childhood dreams and am a captain of one of our Maccabiah teams.

But what does this have to do with theater?

Well, some of the “other activities” that we compete in are performances. One of the most anticipated moments of our summer is our Maccabiah Lip Sync contest. We create dances for the kids to do while lip-syncing to a certain song, and the kids go absolutely bananas for it. There’s often drama over who gets to be the “lead” and lip-sync the words; but, in the end, everyone who wants to perform gets to perform, and we have a real good time.

Then we find out the results.

Obviously, we have to judge the lip syncs so we can award points to the winners. As captain of a team, it’s my job to make sure the team does as well as possible, and that means appealing to the sensibilities of the judges. That means that sometimes I will have to throw out a certain song idea or dance move that the kids and I really like because it constitutes a risk to our chances in the competition. That means there’s very little room for experimenting, or trying new things outside of a very narrow range of what makes A Good Lip Sync based on our camp history.

It’s pretty much the exact opposite of the type of risk-taking, experimental theater that I learn at Skidmore.

At the very end of the summer, to finish off Maccabiah, we have one last performance, aptly titled “Final Presentation.” It consists of two songs (pop songs, the words of which we change the words to be about camp) and one short play that we must write about camp, making fun of the counselors.

So, I wrote and directed a ten minute play this summer! I Did Theater™! Huzzah!

There are lots of rules we must follow when creating our Final Presentation. Some of them are: the entire presentation must be less than 16 minutes in length. Seriously, there’s a giant timer looming next to each performance and if it goes off before a team is done, the team receives a penalty. The play must adhere to a certain theme (this year’s was popular sitcoms). Also, you must be able to teach all of this content to a group of fifty-plus children in just a few days.

Good theater can be made in spite of rules, or even because of rules. That’s the philosophy behind a lot of theater techniques: rigid rules allow you to see what freedom you have within those rules, and make choices in ways you hadn’t even considered before.

I had lots of crazy ideas for Final Presentation, but I couldn’t follow through on any of them because it would have been irresponsible to the campers on my team who wanted nothing more than to win imaginary points in an imaginary summer competition. I must do my best to win in order to be a good captain for them; so, I must do my best to appease those damn judges – which means playing it safe. Which, at a non-theatrical summer camp fueled by pure tradition, is not such a bad thing.

But it gets me thinking about the theater world, and how all of these summer camp problems are also problems that exist in the real world on the career path I’ve chosen. Luckily, in the real world there are outlets for experimental theater, for everything new and different and “non-traditional,” just as there are outlets for the traditional. However, it’s a sad truth that the traditional is usually more profitable.

Someday, in my career, I may be in a situation just like the one I was in this summer– one where I feel a deep desire to screw the rules and do something new, but I have responsibilities to my campers (producers) to appease the judges (audience) so that we can get points (money).

That kind of sucks, but it’s a reality about commercial theater. I think the next step for me, at least, is learning how to take that kind of situation– where I’m restricted, at least nominally, by these outside forces­– and reframe it in my mind so I can create art that is meaningful for myself, instead of being blinded by so-called objective judgment.

I just finished reading Colored Lights: Forty Years of Words and Music, Showbiz, Collaboration and All That Jazz, a series of interviews with Kander and Ebb. My biggest takeaway from all of their reminiscences was that oftentimes the shows that had the least commercial success were the shows that meant the most, artistically, to John and Fred as writers. I think that’s important to remember: while a bit of commercial success is necessary to be able to make a living in the theater, we can’t let ourselves be blinded by that. We must be unafraid to treasure the shows and experiences that are most meaningful to us personally, whether or not they are the same as the shows that are lauded by audiences or critics.

If you’re wondering, my Maccabiah team ended up getting last place. Perhaps my cautious, traditional approach was what sunk us after all. Next summer, I’ll get all Brechtian up in this b*tch.

Adina Kruskal ’18  is a blogger for the Skidmore Theater Living Newsletter.