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College Life 101: Dramatically Stark Orientation
Many colleges around the country feel obliged to caution entering students about what to expect and what to avoid, but few offer more hard-hitting warnings than New York University’s theatrical orientation created by the New York playwright and director Elizabeth Swados.
The musical “The Reality Show: NYU,” which has already played to nearly 5,000 incoming students at the university and will be shown twice more this month, tells of drugs and date rape, drinking and anorexia, depression and suicide.
It is not a pretty picture, but it is not far from the reality of a large urban university. And N.Y.U. feels more pressure than most because of the spate of student suicides during the 2003-4 school year.
“This production came out of that terrible year,” said Marc Wais, N.Y.U.’s vice president for student affairs. “There was a sense of urgency.”
In the fall of 2004 the university used an outside theater group to tell new students about a telephone hot line and counseling and referral program it created after the suicides. But N.Y.U. officials decided that a production by students, for students, might be even more effective, and turned to their Tisch School of the Arts. Arthur Bartow, chairman of the undergraduate drama program at the time, recommended Ms. Swados, 55, who first gained fame with her 1978 Broadway musical “Runaways,” and had just become a full-time teacher at the school.
“I knew Liz had a way of working with students to get them to tell the truth rather than some adult’s version,” he said in a recent interview. “They produce something that is much more stark, much more real, much more shocking than adults would allow themselves to write.”
Suicide and depression are topics Ms. Swados knows well. Her mother and brother took their own lives, and, as she explained in “My Depression: A Picture Book,” published last year by Hyperion, she contemplated doing the same.
But Linda Mills, senior vice provost for undergraduate education and university life at N.Y.U., who commissioned Ms. Swados, said her personal history was not an issue. Ms. Swados was being brought in as “a creative talent and director, not a clinician or therapist,” Ms. Mills said.
And Ms. Swados, whose teachers and mentors included Joseph Papp, Peter Brook, Ellen Stewart and Andrei Serban, said she did not want to put too much of a spotlight on suicide “because it’s so easily romanticized by young people.” She added, “The N.Y.U. kids have no relationship to the darkness of my past.”
The students, chosen from Tisch after several rounds of auditions by Ms. Swados, provided their own darkness.
Vella Lovell, a senior, said that while at times the students did portray themselves, other times they were portraying “someone far removed from them.”
“To do this piece we all had to be willing to play the most outrageous characters because to at least one person in the audience it’s not so outrageous,” she said. “If we were playing ourselves, we tried to make it as big as possible — all extremes.”
Ms. Swados worked with one group of Tisch students, who produced the first version of the musical last year, and another group this summer, who revamped it, cutting numbers and adding others, including a segment on Facebook.com and other online communities.
The students — there were 10 actors and a stage manager this year — were paid by N.Y.U. and worked through the summer, writing the musical, including all the songs.
Ms. Swados, who has no children, says she is “not maternal,” but thinks of herself as a kind of gang leader.
“The kind of kids who would take on this kind of project tend to be disciplined,” she said. But she also tells them that “anyone with an attitude toward me or toward each other will be fired.” She added, “Everything else, they can do anything.”
Joanna Shaw Flamm, a senior who worked on both shows, said, “Liz was pretty merciless, and we started being merciless ourselves.”
Jordan Woods-Robinson, another senior who worked on both shows and was musical director, called Ms. Swados an inspiration: “She has a genuine love for everyone and can see what must be said in order to take each person to the next level, again, whether in a rehearsal space or in life.”
One scene that drew gasps was performed by a dark-skinned woman, who announced in a naïve-sounding patter: “So I got this letter the other day telling me to go back to where I came from, and it was all about ‘peace in the Middle East,’ and how my kind isn’t welcome in the United States. But I’m from New Mexico, and I’m not even Middle Eastern. So the letter obviously wasn’t meant for me. Should I pass it along to my friend Radia down the hall? I think she would really appreciate it.”
Another portrays a date rape. At the end the young woman says: “I’m sick from it. I feel so dirty.” The young man echoes: “It’s embarrassing. I feel so dirty.” A narrator sums up: “No always means no, and it’s never the survivor’s fault. But you both have a responsibility to control your actions before they get out of hand.”
There were tamer topics too: how not to worry about getting lost in New York, how to find a cushy couch in the library for a nap. And there was one brief upbeat respite, when a student told how she could “wake up to a view of the Empire State Building, stroll through Washington Square Park with breakfast, attend art history class at the Met, tan in Central Park with friends and Frappuccinos, window-shop on Fifth Avenue, student-rush a Broadway show and enjoy tea and cheesecake at my fave cafe.”
Jesca Prudencio, the student who wrote and delivered that monologue, said: “The first time I wrote it, it had a lot to do with money and doing fun things in the city that involved spending. Liz made a great point that I didn’t even realize. She had me make it less about spending and more about the things that are free.”
And always there is the commercial: Whatever the problem, help is there. Again and again the cast sang the hot line phone number that students could call for help. By the third or fourth time the number was a joke but one students would remember.
So far the musical has played to hoots and hollers.
“I was at the edge of my seat, wondering what topic they were about to cover next,” said Katherine Cheng, a first-year student from New York City, who called the show “extremely hysterical yet thought-provoking.” Arnold Ng, another New York freshman, said he loved the singing, dancing and comedy.
Mary Schmidt Campbell, the Tisch School’s dean and one of the N.Y.U. faculty and staff members who saw the performance, said she had been educated too: “I guess there really is a lot I don’t know about students’ lives outside the classroom.”
