When the final curtain falls

In response to the economic crisis, Washington State University has proposed eliminating three academic programs, among them theater. When a state doesn't have the funds to extend health care to the neediest, the arts can seem to some like a pointless luxury.

The current financial debacle has taught Americans that our economy is woven of spider-webs, not steel cables. Bad house loans stimulated the stock market, which enriched some, who then invested in one of the many Ponzi schemes, which collapsed when unpayable bills came due for overachieving homeowners and underachieving automotive giants alike. In hindsight, it's as clear as diagramming a sentence.

At a time when "liberal arts major" is becoming a sardonic punch line, declaring yourself to once have been a theater major gets the biggest snort of all. Someone's always sure to point out that there aren't many theater majors working in professional theater. True, but I suspect there are more theater majors working in theater than there are physical education majors working in professional sports.

Let me give you a real-life situation. My best friend in college -- who was also the best man at my wedding -- and I were both theater majors, several millennia ago, in pop-culture terms.

I went on to grad school and was lucky enough to work as a photographer with the Guthrie Theater for a short time. From there I found my way into advertising photography. Ray, on the other hand, became a harbor master in the San Juan Islands, then opened a boarding stable.

So, were our theater degrees of any use to either one of us? Absolutely.

By the time we graduated, we'd already experienced several worlds' worth of people. We'd seen the world through a kaleidoscope, from Shakespeare to Schiller, from Pirandello to Peter Ustinov. Commedia dell'arte, with its bombastic businessmen, blustering warriors, idiotic doctors, clueless young men and clever cuties, was our Cliff Notes to Life, detailing and explaining the people we'd meet and have to deal with for the rest of our lives.

But neither of us realized how profoundly we relied on what we learned in theater classes until recently.

We're now at the age where our parents are passing on. No matter how much you anticipate that loss, it still comes as a complete surprise.

Both of my parents and my father-in-law passed on years ago. Now my mother-in-law is in poor health. If you have read or seen Sophocles, you already know something about grief. Chekhov teaches you about people whose lives are consumed by regret.

In mid-May of this year, my friend's mother passed on after years of losing ground to Alzheimer's disease. His father is now raging with grief, and with a cruel irony -- another theatrical mainstay -- my friend's honest love for his father is not sufficient to calm him. Like Cordelia, Ray is being treated unjustly by the father he loves.

When he told me of his mother's passing and his father's grief, Ray recalled a piece by Witter Bynner that he'd heard recited in a theater class decades ago:

What is this death

It is not when the far clay-bank turns white

Nor when bright leaves darken in the veins

It is when the mind is too tired to take care of the heart

and the heart takes pity

That theater class gave him something that would help him survive his worst days, decades later, caring for his father and mother.

In our senior year, we did a production of "Spoon River Anthology," Edgar Lee Masters' catalogue of pity and sorrow. Ray was the stage manager, and knew the lines as well as any of the actors. So I sent him something from that play that described his father's current condition:

But, oh, what a fate was mine who lived to the time

When only a few knew me,

And no one knew, or remembered my sorrow.

That is the tragedy of the soul

In pain and alone as the darkness deepens!

Where would we be now, we both wondered, without our college theater? Somewhere else, less informed and less prepared.

---- John Louis Anderson is the author of "Ferocious Common Sense."

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