Something I struggled with while growing up was the feeling like anywhere else was cooler than where I was. This is not a unique feeling. I was a kid doing theatre in the lower Midwest. We spent our time going to rehearsals at school, hitting up the same Steak ‘n Shake after every opening night, and dreaming of the day we could get out. And the first moment I could, I left my hometown and then my state. But now, I can’t help but feel drawn back.

When I started my graduate studies, I was unsure where exactly I would go after I graduated with my MFA. For sure I knew I was going to teach in a theatre, have a few letters to put after my name when I want to feel fancy, and depths of dramatic knowledge I could take with me to the elusive “wherever” I was headed to after grad school. Now that I am charting the end coordinates of my work at EMU, the map is leading me to places I haughtily thought I left in the dust.

In theatre, we often place our focus on the cultural centers—your New York, your Los Angeles,and so on. When people heard I was studying theatre the number one follow up question was usually in the ballpark of “Oh when do we get to see you on Broadway?!” After all, that is what we are all striving for. Right? The glamour and romance of our name lit up on a marquee and the years of practicing our Tony speech in the shower finally paying off. It’s all so alluring! Though I always knew that Broadway was not where I was going, the deeper I got into the art of theatre the more I realized that my work was not meant for a New York or a Chicago.

It was meant for a tiny city no one has ever heard of.

That’s the neat thing about art—it can be anywhere you want it to be. Sometimes that means the Kennedy Center and sometimes that means a park in a town the size of a postage stamp. 

But here’s the trap we fall into: in having our collective industry sights set on these big cities with people (and money) and beautiful facilities (and solid financial backing), we end up overlooking the quiet, unassuming communities in the middle bits of the country. For me, it’s in these middle bits where my art is allowed to breathe.

In the constant push to achieve and feeling the need to “out-art” everyone else, we are becoming distanced from a core tenant of drama work: the valuation of the process over the product. This realization pushed me to come to a further conclusion: 

Broadway cannot be the only guidepost for us as an industry and even more so as an art form.

I am certainly not against having a highly visible, mostly mainstream, and generally profitable leg of theatre (and Broadway as my top genre on last year’s Spotify Wrapped will back me up on that claim). But—in an artform that is as vast as it is deeply personal for each person in it—it seems silly to have only one level we uphold as “successful in theatre”. Even when we don’t mean to, we might find ourselves making kneejerk assumptions: “Oh, she’s doing theatre where? Must not have been cut out for New York” or a “They took a drama teacher job at a school? Well, the acting thing must’ve gone belly up”.

It brings to mind one of my favorite old sayings: bloom where you are planted. As theatre educators, artists, practitioners, and enjoyers, we get to do just that! When we are collaborating and creating with kindergarteners, highly trained actors, enthusiastic community theatre performers in barns or the world’s most state-of-the-art theater or in the only open spot we can find in whatever building we’ve been assigned to— we are creating. The seeds are being sowed and the blooms are just around the corner.

We do not hold the floweriness of flowers grown in world class greenhouses in higher regard than those pushing through layers of herbicides and cracks in sidewalks. So why do we allow ourselves to treat our art that way?

—Meredith Murphree

BA Theatre
Second Year MFA