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Leading a Double Life

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By Julie Crosby

Quiet scholar by day. Quixotic theater manager by night. Butler Library one semester. Broadway the next. Decode Shakespeare for distracted undergrads. Decode union rules for distracted producers. How do I explain to potential employers that I have been leading a double life?

I arrived in Manhattan un-bifurcated, coming by way of Michigan. I caught my big break in professional theater when I was hired into the exalted position of apprentice-assistant to the assistant manager for the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Carrie, a musical based on the Stephen King novel. The show was a failure of epic proportions -- it still reigns as one of Broadway's greatest flops -- but for me it was pure romance. I fell in love with the process, despite the long hours, low pay, and loopy personnel. I have since managed my fair share of hits and flops on and off Broadway and on touring productions spanning the globe. The inanity of the process -- its excess, its passion, its sassiness -- seduces me every time.

Given such theatrical experience, my eventual transition into graduate-student life at Columbia University was remarkably easy. Initially I planned only to get my M.A., but once again, I grew enamored of the process and decided that I had to pursue the affair. Studying medieval literature seemed like a perfectly natural undertaking. Theater is a very medieval business. It is perhaps the last of the handcrafted trades, and productions today come together much as they did in the Middle Ages.

For the past eight years, I have performed these dual roles with a startling degree of dexterity. By and large, I productively moved between the frenetic theatrical environment and the gentle solitude of the stacks.

Things did get dicey one semester when I was teaching composition, studying for orals, and preparing a tour of Black and Blue for Europe. By mid-spring of that semester, I began falling asleep at all the wrong times -- while waiting for my won-ton soup to cool, during long phone calls from the restless producer, and once or twice while reading Augustine. I left on the tour the day after my oral exams and, instead of celebrating or sleeping, I spent the plane ride grading students' final papers. In Zurich, I stumbled badly through customs and found myself exiled to a small room where a nasty Swiss officer interrogated me for several hours. This made me late for the first theater-company meeting. In a desperate attempt to resurrect myself, I began lecturing about Charlemagne's economic policies. I went on for at least five minutes before the producer expressed his impatience. The scary part is that it took me a moment to realize that I was not still talking to my orals committee.

There were also moments when the two roles peacefully coalesced, and these moments allowed me to imagine a career that combines my theoretical and practical experiences. I directed two medieval plays for Columbia's annual Medieval Guild conference after cajoling professional actors and musicians into working for medieval wages. I landed a job as dramaturg for two plays by Hrosvitha that were performed at the Cloisters, a medieval-art outpost of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I employed all sorts of stagecraft in my teaching endeavors. Moreover, my dissertation -- "Divas of the Dark Ages: Women and Early Medieval Drama" -- would have been inconceivable without my Jekyll and Hyde background.

This fall, my little drama will move on to its second act. I am happily scheduled to defend my dissertation, and I am planning to tackle the academic job market. I have not yet seen the script for this job-market scene, so I am still looking for direction on how to present my schizophrenic life to potential employers. In truth, I can more easily explain my double-dealings than I can explain how parallel the two lives really are.

Academe and show business are surprisingly similar -- a concept that folks in either profession might find shocking. Both are feast-or-famine endeavors. Thespians can work on Broadway and buy a condo during one week and wind up waiting tables and looking for a roommate the next. Adjuncts might move from sharecropping to the university equivalent of landed gentry -- a tenure-track appointment. Both are high-risk ventures that require a huge investment of time, money, and mettle with no guarantee that an audience beyond a couple of cantankerous critics or your dissertation committee will see your work. Both involve mysterious rituals -- just think about orals, graduation, tenure and other academic rites of passage. Advertising meetings, opening-night parties, and reading the review of your show in The New York Times can be equally bewildering experiences in the theater.

Academe and the theater share a more profound similarity -- outsiders mistrust both professions. Plato, Augustine, Tertullian, and a host of noisy patriarchs proclaimed the theater a place of moral depravity, a site of steamy sexual sin. Thespians and promiscuity remain connected even today. While such anti-theatrical prejudice is highly distressing, it is for me less insidious than the anti-intellectual bias that infects America. I have frequently encountered prosperous adults who find scholarship more frivolous than the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber, and the Ph.D. less desirable than tickets to The Producers.

At the moment, the mistrust of outsiders is not nearly as worrisome as the possible mistrust of academic insiders. I fret about how I will be received on the job market. Will there be suspicion that I am less than fully committed to scholarship because I have led this double life? Will the sad remains of the anti-theatrical stance taken by the patriarchs tarnish my reputation before I have a chance to make one? Will it be hard for employers to see me fitting into a traditional program of study? These concerns vex me (even more than the dismal hiring statistics in the Modern Language Association) because I would presumably face them even if the job market were brimming with opportunities.

While on one hand I fret, on the other hand I cheerfully, perhaps naïvely, imagine that my duality will seem commonplace in nontraditional, interdisciplinary programs. My dream job would be in a department like performance studies, which is designed to embrace the intersection of the theoretical and the practical. To my knowledge, only a few universities have such departments, and their faculty rosters are short. Call me an optimist, but I have confidence that these departments are in dire need of a managerial medievalist.

I do not yet know what to expect of the job market, or what I will do if I am deemed unfit to enter this new stage. A professor once told me that she figured she could always drive a taxi if an academic appointment eluded her. I am keeping this scenario in mind, especially since being a hack probably pays more than working as an adjunct. I also keep reminding myself that the academic job market is a process. With any luck, I just might fall in love with the inanity of it.