Closing Night
By Grace Holmes | Literary Journalism
The curtain rises. The lights come up. An empty stage holds its breath in the lingering moments before the opening lines. The air stands still and the audience escapes into the new world in front of them. The actors transform from impassioned theatre kids into the vibrant characters they portray. This is when Nora says she feels the most like herself. Under all the makeup, the outrageous costumes, as she becomes somebody else, Nora comes to life. Her energetic confidence shines through as she breathes life into the script she’s been given. She thrives in the bold lights and lively caricatures. She pours her soul into every performance until the very last bow, the last round of applause, and the anticipated curtain drops.
Unfortunately, life doesn’t always end like it does on stage. This isn’t one of those stories where you learn something at the end and walk away a better person with a renewed hope in the perseverance of humanity. This one doesn’t end with the slow descent of the curtain, no dramatic fade to black, no final bow, no final thank-you, no last goodbye. No. At the end of the night, the lights go down, everyone goes home, and no one is remembered. In this story, the curtain dropped too early on the Bethel Theatre department.
Nora remembers the day she found out. Surrounded by her fellow majors and minors in their beloved theatre classroom, all together just to be told that their program was to be cut. “I was sitting next to a freshman and I thought about how devastated she must be, to have someone tell her her disregarded future was no more than the side effect of a financial decision,” Nora said, “It broke my heart.” In that room they sat together. They cried together. They mourned the loss of the community they and the faculty have all worked so hard to build. In the midst of their anger, Nora thought to herself “They don’t realize they aren’t just tearing down a department, they’re tearing apart a family.” And in that moment, they were just that. A family. United by their creative passion, and now their pain and frustration at being condemned by the very place they all chose to call home.
For Nora, the stage is where she feels safest. A girl too nervous to raise her hand in class is suddenly completely comfortable squawking like a bird in front of a crowd in Fuente Ovejuna, or dramatically exaggerating Shakespeare in I Hate Hamlet. Growing up, Nora had a surplus of creativity dwelling inside of her with no outlet, yet she was prone to shutting down when faced with uncertainties. That’s when she found her love for performance. “I never stepped on stage without knowing everything that was going to happen and that made it the safest place in the entire world,” Nora says.
Bethel’s theatre department became Nora’s next step. The theatre community is known for being accepting, and for Nora, she found this to be true. While Nora acknowledges that the community isn’t perfect, she notes “no one is going to tear you down for being who you are.” The theatre community created at Bethel has always been a safe space for originality and creative expression. Students have been consistently loved, challenged, and accepted there, both by faculty and other students. Offering a safe environment for self-expression has the power to make shy kids glow with confidence.
For the audience, theatre is an escape from reality. For approximately two hours, audience members are intimately immersed into a world they will never be able to experience the same way again. Theatre demands immediacy and captivating cordiality in a way film could never duplicate. “Theatre is live. It breathes. It is happening right now,” Nora says. It gives the viewer a demonstrational education of different cultures, religions, sexualities, and lifestyles they may have no access to otherwise. The arts offer the opportunity to alleviate ignorance in a natural, demonstrative way.
People will argue that the arts don’t matter because creative expression has nothing to offer the “real world,” but ask any artistically-minded person and they will wholeheartedly disagree. They’ll tell you that the real world is built upon creativity and emotion. Humans are, after all, emotionally driven creatures. It’s in our very nature. Art connects people. It makes them feel whole. Humans need to create, it bonds us. And those who realize that can’t help but be impassioned by it. That’s why diminishing the arts is that much more heartbreaking. This is a field built on passion.
Bethel’s Theatre department isn’t the only casualty of chronic practicality. Universities everywhere tend to cut their art and theatre departments first when facing financial difficulties, regardless of the monetary successes of the program.
“It’s confusing,” says Amanda Hamilton, head of Bethel’s Art and Design department, “Our department grows at a rate of 7–8% per year. We’re proud of the art and design programs.”
Since learning of the significant budget cuts made to the Art Department in 2018 and 2020, Hamilton and the remaining art professors have been working double time to reinvent the curriculum to make it worthy of its spot at Bethel. Yet, even with the changes made, the arts are still cut first.
“What is the decision making based on?” Hamilton laments. “It’s like being in a class and not understanding the assignment. . . I thought we were meeting all the requirements.”
Hamilton wants nothing more than to grow and celebrate the art community at Bethel. Countless students tell Hamilton they regret they had to wait until the second semester of their senior year to find room for an art class in their schedules, when that’s the only class they’ve ever truly wanted to take.
There were so many promising, incoming freshmen, particularly within theatre. Many have transferred or dropped out entirely because someone unexpectedly shut the lights off on them. They didn’t get their chance to perform, to share in the storytelling, to grow their confidence. Instead, they were left stumbling blindly in the dark. But this is just a sad story. There’s no twist of fate, no happy ending. They didn’t get their slow fade to black, no chance to take their bows and accept their round of applause.
When asked what advice she would give to any university considering cutting their arts, Nora pleaded, “Don’t. Fight like hell to keep them. Make your arts students feel like they made the right choice, because when they’re successful, brilliant, joyful people and they’re asked where it all started for them, they’ll say your name.”
