“The Bench (A Homeless Love Story)” is a piece that has been online performing arts education expert and playwright Robert Galinsky’s calling card for the past few years. Galinsky wrote the first draft when he was collaborating with August Wilson in 1986-87 in New Haven. At the time, he was also working with Lloyd Richards at Yale University’s performing arts education department.

The structure of “The Bench” evolved over time. “It really came down to discovering that there was one character, Joe, who was going through something, traveling a journey, and was potentially going to be changed or not changed,” Galinsky says. “And everybody else was serving that particular cause and that arc.”

At the same time, all of the other characters have something at stake with Joe’s journey. There is something at risk for everybody, and it will result in either a reward or a loss based on what he goes through.

Joe is in love with somebody, but he will not admit it. “It’s a real simple structure, but simplicity is great because now we can see how complex human beings are with their behaviors over such simple things,” comments Galinsky. “The guy can’t admit he loves this woman so he goes out and basically trashes her all the time.”

Joe’s behavior has an effect on everybody else in their little community; because of it, the townspeople do not all get along. They finally tell Joe to man up. “Go tell her you love her. It’s simple as that,” Galinsky says.

It’s “as simple as that” according to the townspeople, but for Joe, it’s not that simple. He lost love in his heart years ago and had been through many different things that destroyed his sense of hope. He didn’t know that he could find love again; in fact, he was afraid to find love again. Ultimately, four other vagabonds gave him the courage to face his fears and give love a shot.

Joe proceeds to go and profess his love to the woman. She rebuffs him and resists. Just like Joe, she is hardened and doesn’t want anything to do with love. It was too vulnerable, too soft of a place to be, and too scary. For her, it was easier to put the wall up and have a thick layer in front of everybody and everything in life.

Nonetheless, Joe persists in his confession, and the woman begins to see him in a different way. He comes to her in a different way from the past, and she relents a little bit. “She doesn’t give him the full on, yeah, I’m with you buddy, but she gives him a little window into the possibility that she might love him back, just a tiny window,” says Galinsky.

Joe has no guarantees; nor does he have promises. He knows, however, that there is a tomorrow. He will see her again, and life just might be different.

Generational change impacts not only society but also the performing arts that reflect and comment on it. This is an important point to keep in mind as you continue your online performing arts education. Harvey Young, Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Boston University, and Elizabeth Bradley, Broadway theater critic and professor at New York University, share their thoughts on emerging African American playwrights and how they’re transforming the dynamic of the theater.

Harvey Young sees a passing of the torch from August Wilson, whose plays chronicled the 20th-century African American experience decade by decade, to notable Black playwrights giving voice to the African American experience today. “You see Suzan-Lori Parks, you see Lynn Nottage, receiving additional support and mentorship. You begin to see folks like Katori Hall emerging as well,” Young says.

“You can see every 20 years, there is this generational passing in which the lessons, the struggles as well, the histories, the life lessons go from generation, to generation, to generation,” he observes.

“If the job of art is to tell society what it can’t know without art, I think that the white American theater has stepped back far too long from that responsibility,” says Elizabeth Bradley.

She comments on the contributions of the new generation of Black voices: “The playwrights who have emerged in the last four to five years, whether they have been working quietly away and we just haven’t discovered them, or they are new voices such as Lynn Nottage, who has had a very long career. A more recent career is that of Jeremy O. Harris. Dominique Morisseau is another example of a very important African-American female writer.

“Of course, Suzan-Lori Parks has been heralded for decades now and is a Pulitzer prize winner. Katori Hall is another example. With plays like ‘Fairview,’ and plays from the African diaspora like ‘African Mean Girls’ or the ‘School Girls’ play, there has been a push forward. Tarell Alvin McCraney with ‘Choir Boy’ or Branden Jacobs Jenkins with ‘Everybody.'”

Bradley continues, “It has been manifest that there is a depth of talent on the musical side. For example, there’s Michael Jackson — not the one with the white glove, but the one who wrote the musical, ‘Strange Loop,’ which is the most recent Pulitzer Prize winner. “These voices are coming to the forefront, and they are going to change the conversation between artist and audience,” she concludes.

Look for this and other generational shifts as you continue your performing arts education and pursue a career in the field.

One of the most challenging things about an actor approaching a script is that by time they finish working on it, they’re going to be living inside a role with a really unique perspective about that story. But in order to do that well, they have to start from a much more zoomed-out place.

That moment when you first read the text, you can never get back. And so it’s really important that when you first read it, as you move along, you take notes about the things you expect to happen, the things that surprise you, the way you think the relationships are happening inside the script, where you think the story is going. That is the journey your audience will take when they eventually come see the production or the film or watch the TV show. And there’s no way to recapture that experience when you already know how it ends.

Once you’ve gotten that initial, raw response to the text from an audience’s perspective, then you can begin to explore the text in a few different ways. In the performing arts, it’s important that actors go on a journey of curiosity to explore the things they don’t understand about the world that the text inhabits.

Maybe it’s about specific places that they don’t know anything about. Maybe it’s about the job that the character has. Maybe it’s about the nature of the relationship between the character and other people. No script is without a huge number of things to get curious about and dig into as a part of the research process in your online performing arts education.

There are classic ways of thinking about performing arts genres. For example, there are dramas and comedies and musicals. Talking about genres isn’t the same as talking about tones of theater. Even still, we can say that the tone is dramatic or comedic and that there’s musical theater and so forth.

To me, that becomes both interesting and complicated because much work in the contemporary moment actually jumps through those styles and those tones in really exciting ways. For me, the barrier building that comes with classifying genres and tones is not very helpful in online performing arts education. My personal interest lies in disrupting all of that.

Let me give you a little personal context about myself. I grew up in northern Mexico along the border with the US. The city where I’m from, Ciudad Juarez, is right on the border of an American city called El Paso, Texas. I grew up crossing the border between those two cities every day. That is how that community worked. My experience was both 100% Mexican and 100% American. It involved interacting with those communities and bringing the best of them to create and support my community.

For me, the idea of crossing borders is ingrained in who I am. As a theater maker, the minute that I’m given these kinds of binaries and I’m told, “This is this and that is that,” my immediate question is, “What happens when you begin to cross that border and begin to actually create a third space?”

I hear the ideas of playwright-driven work and collaborative work and classical work. I hear of proscenium in the theater work and site-specific work and immersive work. And when I do, I start to think of ways that we can begin to blur all that together and create another space that’s dynamic.

So for me, getting a handle on genres is an important and interesting part of performing arts education, but only inasmuch as it allows you to begin to blur the lines and acknowledge what’s inherited.

What are the inheritances that we have from our really old theater tradition? Those traditions stem from as early as the human creature delving into imagination and ritual. I like to cause trouble when it comes to that.

Even still, it’s important to understand where a work comes from so that it’s legible. You need to understand where the traditions come from. Again, to me, getting wonderfully lost in that is a really cool thing and a really exciting thing.

First, you write a play. If you’ve been invited or commissioned, then you have a place to submit it. If that isn’t the case, you have to figure out how to get your story put out in the world and entice industry professionals to read it. You have to know the market. It’s important to be aware of the kind of play that different theaters and directors are looking for. You can acquire this valuable insight from a performing arts education.

Then, after writing your play, you can submit it to theaters or directly to literary managers, if you know them, where they read scripts to artistic directors. If you have a director you prefer working with, you can submit the play to that person who might then pitch it to a theater.

These are some of the more effective ways of sending your work out for consideration. The National New Play Exchange allows playwrights to post scripts and describe them. This program attempts to reverse the traditional submission method. So, a theater might find your play on the National New Play Exchange and approach you instead of you trying to contact them.

I am often asked how to get a play produced. It’s not like sitting in a factory assembly line where you’re doing the same thing each time. Each script submission is always different, as an online performing arts education will teach you.

If you’re curious about how to get your play produced in Hollywood, off Broadway, or on Broadway, one thing is critical: it has to be good, and it must be enjoyable. Performing arts professionals have to like it and want to produce it. I discovered this when I asked Jay O. Sanders, who’s a well-known actor, to direct my play. Not only is he a friend, and I love his work, but I also knew his name recognition was going to bring Chris Noth into the mix, and then Barry, and then my investor to bring my story to life.

You’ve got to have a good product. You need to have a good story. You must have a good screenplay. But you then have to put together a team that’s compelling and committed. A little trickery, if you will, doesn’t hurt. When I called Chris Noth, I said, “Jay’s pretty close to being in; he’d love to do it.” And when I called Jay, I said, “Chris is pretty close to being in; he’d love to do it.” And as soon as I said Jay was in, Chris said, “Oh, well, if Jay does it, I will.” Then, Jay said, “Oh, I’ll do it. So Chris is in; that’s great.” The simple thing they had to do was to be a presenter. Teamwork in the performing arts can help a playwright to achieve that otherwise-elusive success.

Gianni Downs tells us that if you’re working in New York, almost every house is a union house. That means there are specific people who are trained and paid to do certain jobs. So, for instance, as a designer working on a Broadway show, you aren’t supposed to touch certain things on stage because there’s someone else who is employed to do so and knows how to do it safely.

Because of this, you want to be very conscious of what you’re doing in any house with which you’re unfamiliar. You want to make sure that you talk to your production manager, and also talk to the union heads who might be there with you. You need to find out what you’re allowed to do and which things require that you ask permission before you proceed.

These things are also true across the country. Yes, New York has many union houses, but most of the other major cities do as well. And those unions also might control different aspects. So, for example, you might work in a scene shop that isn’t union, and you might load a set right to the doors of a theater. Then, the union crew will take it and load it the rest of the way from there. That’s because the actual theater itself is a union house. Your scene shop, however, is not union. This type of thing is a pretty common experience for people who are doing shows and traveling from space to space.

Perhaps you’re in some sort of tour or you have a small professional theater, and you’re renting other houses to do your productions. “You can also be unionized in your shops themselves,” says Downs, “and these are people who have been trained and have joined the union, whether it’s IATSE, or in my case, I’m a USA 829 member.” This will not only dictate what you’re able to do professionally, but it will also help when you’re negotiating your contracts. As a union member, you’ll have certain guarantees within your contracts that will help you negotiate with potential producers and employers.

You can learn more about these concepts with performing arts education, or even learn from home with online performing arts education.

Openly experimental plays are the pieces of performing arts that will try to say, “we’re breaking down forms” when they invite the audience into a space. We’re really putting things together differently. Be prepared for the adventure of an environmental movement of immersive theater.

These are examples of things that changed the relationship between the actor and the audience. You are much more directly involved and implicated. You’re not simply sort of sitting in a red tufted seat and behaving yourself and clapping when appropriate.

One of the preeminent examples at this moment is a remarkable piece called Sleep No More by an incredible company from England called Punchdrunk. This is a really remarkable exploration of a Shakespearean play and the source material within it. The audience actually walks into this incredible, abandoned hotel, which is a warehouse. You travel through it. You are really experiencing this in a truly immersive way.

There are many other remarkable companies, like Third Rail Projects, that are exploring this in really exciting ways. Again, location becomes really interesting. Now that is not all the kinds of theater there are in terms of genres, but it is a way to understand contemporary theater when studying performing arts education or online performing arts education.

If you look at the beginning of the whole idea of the United States, what does it mean to move from a colonial place to a place where there are a lot of different kinds of people doing a lot of different kinds of things? This is a question worth pondering as you pursue your online performing arts education.

There are people who are very clearly connected to a European sense of theater. That might have to do with Shakespeare. It might have to do with a certain formal kind of theater that has ties to Europe.

Meanwhile, in the United States, there are a number of other kinds of folks who are looking for something else, something that feels American, something that speaks to a kind of roughness, a kind of humor that is rougher and bawdier.

And then there are also all these Black people, these Black people who are here with other kinds of theatrical traditions, other kinds of musical traditions, and other ways of telling stories that involve sound and a certain approach to energy, an approach to the voice, an approach to movement.

One of the ways in which the United States developed this whole way of thinking about theater hearkens back to the early 1800s, when there was a white traveling theatrical performer named Tom Rice. He supposedly saw a Black groomsman in the street, somebody who took care of horses. The story is that this enslaved man was singing a song and doing a dance, and when Tom Rice saw it, he said, “Oh, I’m going to copy him.” And so he copied him, including blackening his face. And he created this notion of blackface comedy.

Now, blackface existed before then, but in the United States in the early years of the 1800s, it really started to take off, and it became this massively important entertainment form. From around 1830, through the 19th century and into the very early years of the 20th century, it continued.

When you think about Broadway, you think about the American musical, you really want to think about all the roots that are in it. In performing arts education, you’ll learn about all the things that had to come together to make what we know in today’s theater.

In the period from 1900 to 1920, there was a lot happening. There were different kinds of epidemics that were happening. I think we all know about the Spanish flu in 1918. Sexually transmitted infections were also extremely dangerous. And STIs took a lot of folks out. Syphilis, for example, was responsible for a large number of deaths.

Some leading African American theatrical figures died for various reasons early in the 20th century. Ernest Hogan, the first Black entertainer to produce and star in a Broadway show, died in 1909. Bob Cole and George Walker, prominent figures in early 20th-century African American musical theater who began their careers in blackface, passed away in 1911.

Now, these folks were at the center of organizations. They weren’t just solo people. So, when they died, a certain kind of large-scale Black musical theater started to become more scarce, certainly no longer being seen on Broadway.

The core of theater, going back to the Greeks, was to actually see yourself represented on stage. W.E.B. Du Bois said that Black theater should be theater that is written by us, by African-Americans, to be representative for us and to be shown near us.

Now’s the time to create a new representation of Blackness, a new look, and a new authentic appearance in the performing arts.

Performing arts education can help people understand Black theater history better by explaining why some performers did the types of shows they did.

Let’s go back to this idea of seeing yourself appearing on stage. If you were to read an issue of “The Crisis,” which was a magazine that was published by W.E.B. Du Bois, you would encounter stories of authentic Black life. Those stories would be presented on stage eventually, and not just by families by the fireside.

Slowly, over time, across the 1920s to the 1950s and so on, an Americanized version of theater emerged. We tend to imagine and pretend that Black theater came along in the 1960s, and that’s not true. Online performing arts education will hopefully start to dispel this false idea.

We had people in the 19th century like Bert Williams, who began as a blackface performer. He partnered with his friend, George Walker, and they went on stage with one in blackface and one not. They traveled across the vaudeville circuit and performed this way.

George Walker was the straight man to Bert Williams’ more comedic, stereotypical character. With the pairing of those two, they began to strip away the artifice and the mask that was blackface.

By the 20th century, the most heavily laden aspects of the blackface stereotype had gone away. You could begin to see the kind of comedy that was beneath it. That’s what Bert Williams did. He was the most popular performer in all of US theater, certainly in the first decade of the 1900s.

We had other actors who emerged, as well, like Charles Gilpin. Gilpin’s claim to fame was “The Emperor Jones,” which was a play by Eugene O’Neill. Charles Gilpin played the proud, confident character of Brutus Jones, a Chicago-born Pullman porter.

In the play, Jones moves to Haiti and becomes an emperor under somewhat corrupt circumstances. Later, he finds himself haunted and possessed by the spirits of the island.

That play was a Broadway hit for Gilpin, making him a star. George Walker also became a tremendously successful and well-known figure until he was replaced by a young up-and-coming actor by the name of Paul Robeson.

Paul Robeson started performing a national tour of the “The Emperor Jones.” Because of that, it seemed like his career catapulted. He did the film version of “The Emperor Jones” and went on to star in a number of other films. He went back and forth between the concert hall as a singer and Broadway as a performer. And he was there when the LA entertainment culture emerged.

In the world of performing arts, there are multiple different categories, or “buckets,” of theatrical performances. We have a canon of work in which the plays are performed in what would be known as elevated language. In this bucket, you could put the plays of Shakespeare, Ben Johnson, and Christopher Marlowe. You could also put in the restoration comedies of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. You could even put in latter-day 20th-century verse plays by playwrights like Maxwell Anderson.

When it rhymes, or when the language is particularly poetic or unusual, that would certainly be one canon. And Shakespeare, for one, is still among the most frequently produced playwrights across the United States. Here in New York, we have the New York Shakespeare Festival in the public theaters that still remain committed to classical work. So that covers the first bucket.

There is also another bucket, which consists of new playwriting—plays that have not been produced previously in a professional context. Oftentimes, these plays can be written in everyday conversational language. However, of course, the language of these plays varies enormously from context to context and playwright to playwright.

For example, an Irish playwright like Seán O’Casey or a contemporary Irish playwright like Martin McDonagh would be writing in an Irish dialect, but they’re also experimenting with form enormously. So you could have a black comedy, you could have elements of horror in what is a conversational text-based play. As you can see, it gets harder and harder to actually come up with the different bucket labels for genres.

Playwrights like Ibsen and Chekhov, of course, represent a form of 19th-century naturalism, which was all about character and closely observed character. Now, certain American directors are approaching that work and staging the context in which those plays appear so that we will either discover them anew or see them differently.

Spectacle theater is represented, in some cases, by the Greeks although it is certainly possible to do an intimate production of a Greek play. There has been a tremendous interest, particularly in the last 20 years, in physical theater, in which the movement is certainly as important, or perhaps even more important, than the words.

You can learn much more about the history of theater and the many different forms it takes by exploring online performing arts education. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be able to enjoy the benefits and lessons of performing arts education from the comfort of your own home.