AMERICAN THEATRE | AT Education Monthly: UCLA, California Wildfires, and College Auditions

I started the new year by stepping outside my comfort zone and signing up for a fiction writing class. There are 10 other students, including playwrights, screenwriters, and comedy writers, and my heart raced at being back in a classroom for the first time in years. I’m excited to learn and hopefully build a creative writing habit over the next several weeks.

As I settle into this new rhythm of reading assignments and writing exercises, it has been difficult not to think about the hundreds of California students navigating the devastation of the wildfires. More than 300 schools temporarily closed when the fires broke out, and while some students will return to classrooms, some schools will need to rebuild entirely.

I spoke to Brian Kite, dean of the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television, about how the faculty and students are navigating the crisis. After holding remote classes last week due to the fires, UCLA returns to campus today.

“It’s going to be really difficult for people to get their minds back to the work,” Kite said, “but I’m overwhelmingly hearing from students who say, ‘We want to get back to work, we want to return to our classes, we want to see our friends, we want to be back in the classroom.’”

Many members of the UCLA community, including hundreds of faculty and students, have lost their homes. The university is working diligently to connect students and faculty with the resources, including campus housing.

“It’s important for us as artists and makers to care for ourselves, but also recognize our responsibility as a public university in the middle of the city during a Los Angeles crisis,” said Kite. “There’s an ongoing conversation about how we can reach out to the larger community—the artists, our audiences, and those who have lost so much—to use our work to somehow make sense of it.”

The theatre faculty is interested in creating a verbatim theatre project with the students to help the community process, reflect, and heal from the tragedy.

I urge you to read Amanda L. Andrei’s powerful piece, “The Fires This Time,” which chronicles her experience and reports on the impact of the city-wide catastrophe on the theatre community.