7 minute read
The Next Act
By Katie Dyson
On many Thursday evenings over the past decades, students in Todd Bauer’s Newberry seminars have watched Mike Nussbaum deliver a David Mamet monologue from American Buffalo full of, as Todd puts it, “nothing but anger and four-letter words”; they’ve passed around Deanna Dunagan’s Tony Award for August: Osage County; interviewed Pulitzer Prize-winning playwrights like Martyna Majok; and learned about theater from a range of artists, actors, directors, and writers who make it happen.
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Todd believes that classroom learning, like theater, is an embodied experience. It’s a deeply collaborative and communal process. “The more you’re community-oriented, the more you’re nourished,” he says.
Todd Bauer is a masterful teacher and an accomplished playwright, as well as an ensemble member of the New Yorkbased Apothetae Company. His plays have been performed as staged readings, workshops, and productions at venues including Chicago’s Raven Theatre and The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC.
For many years, Todd questioned whether he could turn his passion for theater into a sustainable career. He’s been legally blind since the age of eight. After being diagnosed with a form of macular degeneration, Todd embarked on a career as an accountant, seeking the stability afforded by his business degree from Miami University. “I felt like it was prudent to pursue a very safe and secure path. In my heart, my passion was always writing and teaching.”
Deanna Dunagan, Tony Awardwinning actress of August: Osage County, with Todd Bauer. Todd Bauer poses on the front steps of the Newberry before teaching one of his Adult Education Seminars.
Initially drawn to Chicago for its accessible public transportation, Todd quickly threw himself into the life and culture of the city. “I was just picking up all kinds of pamphlets everywhere,” he says.
In 1992, he made his way to the Newberry for an Adult Education Seminar on American theater with Terry McCabe, now the Artistic Director of City Lit Theater Company. The experience left a lasting impression because McCabe didn’t teach the iconic plays that Todd expected; instead, McCabe focused on the craft of playwriting.
“Terry didn’t teach the classics like Death of a Salesman. These were plays that either Terry was going to do that season or plays that had just arrived in the mail. It was my first little instance of glimpsing behind the curtain, because up to that point my parents had always taken me to the theater but I knew nothing about how it was made.” Enrolling in multiple Newberry seminars gave Todd an escape from his day job as an accountant and allowed him to explore his passions for literature, theater, and writing.
In 1995, Todd signed up for Bill Savage’s Newberry Adult Education Seminar on the Beat Generation. Bill readily admits that Todd, then a writer for Beat Scene magazine, knew more about the Beats than he did. Todd quickly became the seminar’s co-leader. He brought a rare intellectual energy and a genuine desire to connect with others in the seminar, even forming a book club that lasted years after the seminar ended. Recognizing Todd’s knack for teaching, Bill recommended that he become an instructor in the Newberry’s seminars program. Now, after more than twenty years of teaching at the Newberry, Todd is retiring this spring.
The Newberry’s Adult Education Seminars program occupies a unique space in Chicago’s cultural landscape. Todd values the fact that the program offers the purest form of teaching and learning. There are no prerequisites and no grades. All the seminar participants are eager to learn. “It’s not a means to an end in anything,” Todd says. “Learning is an end in itself.”
Todd’s seminars always stand out. Like the plays he teaches, his classes set the stage for many voices and perspectives,
including his own as a working playwright.
At the beginning of each seminar, Todd reminds participants, “The script is not the play. This is the text of the play.” What he means is that “the play doesn’t exist until it’s embodied by actors on stage with music and costumes and everything else in front of the audience.” Todd continues, “Tom Stoppard has a great line that says, ‘The text exists so that something more mysterious may transcend it.’”
As the seminar develops, Todd invites students into the mystery of theater by pulling back the curtain and exploring the artistic choices made by playwrights, actors, musicians, artists, and directors. Each class focuses on a single play and features a guest speaker from the Chicago theater community, inviting discussions of both what’s on the page and what it takes to bring the script to life. This is the magic of Todd Bauer’s theater seminars: their ability to transcend the boundaries between audiences and artists, the classroom and the Chicago theater community.
As Todd’s students enjoy the opportunity to learn about theater from the people who make it, guest speakers also
Literary scholar Bill Savage (right) shares his perspective with students during one of Todd’s classes.
benefit from the questions students ask. Todd cites one of his mentors, playwright Lisa Dillman, in this regard. According to Dillman, “When you’re writing a play you need to see it with inside and outside eyes. When you’re writing it, you always see it with inside eyes because you know everything that’s going on with the characters. The tough skill to develop as a writer is to only view what’s on the page with outside eyes.” Todd’s students give visiting playwrights an audience of “outside eyes,” offering thoughtful feedback and fresh perspectives on both old favorites and works in progress. Todd’s classrooms are democratic spaces where everyone has something to offer and everyone learns something new.
For Todd Bauer, though, theater is about more than art or community—it’s about living.
“The play only exists for that moment you’re seeing it. You can go back the next night or the same day to the same production of the same play by the same company— it’s a different experience. You can see a video recording of the performance you attended—it’s a different experience. There’s a lot of power in knowing that this only exists for this moment. F. Scott Fitzgerald has a great line: ‘Beauty is only possible if poignancy exists.’
“We know that our life is finite and that this experience is ephemeral and that’s what makes it precious, that’s what makes it beautiful. Theater is an art form where the medium itself manifests our deepest experience on a metaphysical level. “A director of mine, Jonathan Wilson, once said, ‘The great plays are depthless,’ meaning that the minute you mine one level completely, a whole other level opens up. Experiencing a
Bauer with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Martyna Majok play like that makes you realize that you are depthless and that you can be opened up to an even larger experience of life. To me, it’s not about finding a meaning. It’s about finding an experience of being alive. And that’s what great theater and great art can do.”
It’s also what great teaching can do.
Todd Bauer has been an invaluable member of the Newberry’s community for more than two decades. In addition to teaching hundreds of adult learners, Todd collaborated with Martha Briggs, the Newberry’s former Lloyd Lewis Curator of Modern Manuscripts, to collect the papers of “all the storefront theaters and hustling playwrights” in Chicago’s vibrant theater scene. In addition to donating his own papers to the library, Todd helped the Newberry acquire the Chicago Reader’s theater photographs as well as archival material from theater producer Hope Abelson, actor Mike Nussbaum, director Bob Sickinger, and playwrights Lisa Dillman, Margaret Lewis, Tekki Lommicki, Mike Ervin, and David Scott Hay. Todd’s efforts to record and preserve Chicago’s theater history will live on in the Newberry’s archives for future generations of scholars, historians, artists, and students to discover.
In a world-class city full of cultural institutions and artistic communities, the Newberry has played an outsized role in Todd’s life. In addition to being a home for his passion for teaching, Todd met and married his wife, Julia Anderson Bauer, in the library. This summer, they head west to Montana for a change of pace, a new adventure, and more time to write.
Todd Bauer is a model of intellectual generosity and spirit. His decades of teaching have indelibly changed the Newberry, and his legacy will continue to shape the Newberry’s community of learning for decades to come.
Unsurprisingly, Todd thinks philosophically—like a playwright—about life transitions. “One of the beauties of saying goodbye is that you fully feel what you’re saying goodbye to,” he says.
Katie Dyson is Manager of Adult Education Seminars at the Newberry.
