Thoughts on the KC/ACTF Divorce

 

Curmie has never been a particular fan of the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival.  They’re too political, in two senses of the term: your show will stand a much better chance of advancing to the next round if it espouses a sort of squishy Kumbaya leftie ideology, and your actors will be more likely to succeed in the Irene Ryan competition (a sort of best collegiate actor in the country award) if they’re BIPOC and/or LGBTQ+.  Oh, and above all, make sure your director is a muckety-muck in the KCACTF hierarchy.  Students from the same school as a regional official tend to do very well, indeed.  Go figure. 

By way of contrast, when Curmie became an officer in a different national theatre organization, he stopped nominating his own students for a fairly substantial scholarship awarded by that society.  “Appearance of impropriety,” and all that…  FWIW, two of his students had won that award in the previous three years. 

Even apart from Curmie’s discomfort at the whole art-as-competition business, KCACTF judges are sometimes quite helpful, but a goodly number of them are either eminently unqualified or condescending jerks who think “you should have said the line this way” (sez you) or “that light was white” (duh) is somehow a useful contribution to the discussion.  It’s also a problem that someone outside the production team is telling student actors (in particular), generally before the show has closed, that they should do something other than listen to their director for guidance.  At the other end of the spectrum, the proliferation of extra “merit” awards, generally little more than an opportunity to stroke a director’s pet students, had reached the level of farce long ago.

And, of course, going to the regional or national conferences prevented students from participating in the productions at the home college.  You might be able to miss a weekend early in a rehearsal process, but whenever Curmie happened to be directing in the first slot of the spring semester, he often did so without the availability of some of the best actors at the school because they’d be gone during tech or performance dates.  A couple of times, actors came to him before auditions, saying “I want to do your show if I get this or this part, but otherwise I’m going to KCACTF.”  It may or may not have been in keeping with departmental policy to go along, but Curmie did.  In one instance, the actor got one of the desired roles; in another, an actor who would have had a featured role went uncast.

Finally, it’s expensive.  If you want your show critiqued, you have to pay the judge, and generally that also means taking them to dinner and putting them up in a local hotel for a night.  Sending students to a regional or national festival means one of two things: either the department picks up the bill for transportation, housing, food, and registration, thereby reducing the budget for the production season, or the opportunities are limited to those students who can finance their own attendance.  Both alternatives kinda suck, although a reasonable alternative fails to present itself.

All that said, there was a definite upside, and Curmie has a number of friends whose experience of the organization has been considerably better than his own.  It should also be clear from the foregoing that whereas some of Curmie’s concerns were caused by KCACTF per se, most were simply the nature of the beast: if you’re going to have this kind of event, it’s going to take time and money away from someone.

More to the point, KCACTF has indeed provided opportunities for theatre students to meet and interact, and they’ve been useful advocates for arts education in general.  They have encouraged tens of thousands of young thespians over the years.  And they have no doubt saved a department or two simply by giving prizes.  In Curmie’s adopted state of Texas, if you can win a trophy at something, it’s a good thing.  Not as important as football, of course, but still worthy.  

This is even more true at the high school level, but there are a lot of collegiate programs out there that choose to advertise that they had actors nominated to compete in the Irene Ryan competition.  The fact that two actors from every show critiqued by a KCACTF judge are automatically advanced goes unmentioned.  And if, as was the case for a student-directed show Curmie advised a few years ago, there are only two people in the cast, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll both be nominated.  (Luckily, both actors happened to be very good, but they wouldn’t have been treated differently if they weren’t.)

You will have surmised by now, Gentle Reader, that when Curmie reached the point in his career when he could decline an opportunity to participate in KCACTF, he did so.  Again, this is in no way intended to denigrate anyone who has had a different experience than Curmie’s.  But, as noted above, he’s never been a fan.

And now, finally, we get to the catalyst for this post: the decision  by the National Committee of the American College Theater Festival to sever their 58-year-old alliance with the Kennedy Center.  The announcement doesn’t specifically mention the bone-headed decision to append the name of Dear Leader to the front (!) of the Kennedy Center’s official title, but it doesn’t have to.  “Circumstances and decisions that do not align with our organization’s values” gets the job done a little more politicly.  Everyone knew what they meant. 

The affiliation between the Kennedy center and ACTF goes back to when Curmie was in junior high, with literally zero thoughts of ever going into theatre as a career.  His major accomplishment in the field to that point was playing Scrooge in a 5^th-grade version of A Christmas Carol, a role he got because Mrs. Hamilton thought he could learn all the lines.  But the linkage wasn’t made explicit in the title until Curmie was already teaching college.  That is, the festival was the ACTF, not the KCACTF.  The change happened quite a while ago, though, and one can understand why: both organizations benefitted from being associated with the other, so it made sense to play up the partnership.

Since the Kennedy Center has devolved under the “leadership” of Dear Leader himself into a celebration of popular mediocrity  (Sylvester Stallone?  Really?) , there is no upside for ACTF.  There’s no prestige, certainly, and indeed the linkage suggests a capitulation to the censorial and ultra-partisan idiocy that now seems to pervade literally everything associated with the Kennedy Center.  So the split makes sense from ACTF’s perspective.  They’ll run their own festival for the foreseeable future (i.e., probably another three years).

Of course, ACTF is not without its own partisanship, and their decision was in part a predictable exercise in virtue signaling.  But was it necessary?  Yes.  Yes, it was.