Boxed Up Knowledge

4 min readMay 30, 2024

Boxed Up Knowledge

The other night, I found myself watching an interview with a theatre practitioner I admire a great deal. He’s an amazing performer, director, teacher and thoughtful analyst of his craft. I found myself taking notes — adding them to previous documents I’d created, filled with his tips and tricks.

But as I was taking notes, full of enthusiasm and excitement, I felt an undercurrent of “Why?” Why was I furiously writing down his clown exercises or his recipe for comic developments? I haven’t put on a clown show since 2009. I haven’t had need to exercise my physical comedy chops in ages. I know a fair amount about these things. I care about them. I still have curiosity about them. If any of my beloved teachers gave a workshop here, I’d sign up for it. But not because I have any use for it. I don’t have a life for which any of this knowledge is necessary, which somehow makes me very sad. There’s something about having spent decades growing my knowledge about things that I now never get a chance to exercise that feels so wasteful somehow.

This applies to my years of accumulated knowledge and experience in teaching Shakespeare as well. I quit doing this when it became clear that the people I worked for did not care about that accumulated, organized and diverse knowledge. I valued it enough to refuse to be undervalued for it but now that knowledge and experience just sits in me, quietly disintegrating. No one wants the book I started writing about it. No one comes asking for what I’ve got in my back pocket. It’s just….sitting there.

It feels as though I spent my 20s and 30s furiously obtaining knowledge and skills that I now have rare occasions to use. I might call all that a waste of time, except for the fact that I still care about a lot of those things. Given the opportunity, I’d make use of any and all of them. It feels a little like a language I learned to speak in situ and then had rare opportunities to use again. However, there are two Italian women here next to me at the café where I’m writing and I can eavesdrop, if I work at it. But there’s no accidental use of highly specific theatre training. I may be able to make myself cry with a shift in breath and body but I never have a reason to do that out in the world. There are many theatre skills that translate to the rest of the world beautifully, many things I can do because of that grounding in the collaborative matrix of the performing arts. But I feel the loss of opportunity to exercise my other theatrical muscles, my other theatrical curiosity.

Ten years ago, I was pretty sure I’d be back in these worlds before long…but as I’ve focused more on writing, on audio, on podcasting and music, I’ve found myself further and further away from many of the things I used to spend so much time thinking about, experimenting with, wondering about. I suppose it is similar to my experience of Italian. I thought I’d find ways to return to using those language skills but in the 30 years since then, I’ve only had a handful of conversations. Was it a waste to learn it in the first place? Of course not. Going deep with that language changed my perspective, my personality and my brain. The same is probably true of all that highly specific theatre training. I might stumble upon someone speaking Clown or Viewpoints or Rasa Boxes or Archetypes or Chorus Work or something else, in a coffee shop, and find I can eavesdrop, if I work at it. And who knows where the next decade will take me. Maybe I’ll find myself returning to some ideas and scenarios that I’d left behind and I’ll be glad I took those furious notes.