For World Teachers Day: The One Who Changed My Life the Most

I swiped this particularly fabulous and glamorous photo of my high school theatre teacher off of social media. I hope she doesn’t mind, for it makes her look like a movie star.

Her name is Diane McNeil. Her surname was Falk or Faulk when I first started taking classes with her in 1979; later she married a Scotsman named Duncan. Falk means “falcon” in German and its sister language Yiddish. As with Peter Falk, it’s the latter tongue that would be applicable to Diane. She was both the first significant Jewish person in my life and also my most significant teacher by leagues, though as I mentioned around this time last year, this gent was very important as well.

There are times when I’ve bemoaned the impact she had on my life, “actor” being up there with “architect” among the most unemployed professions, but if it hadn’t been her, it would have been someone else, as I had been involved in church theatricals and the Junior High drama club prior to coming under Diane’s wing. But I must immediately qualify that, for it’s highly unlikely that anyone else would have had as MUCH of an impact at that time in my life. For Diane (and whatever forces made her work possible, I’m guessing the local school board, and liberal education funding) created a situation where it was possible to become deeply immersed in theatre. My school, a public high school, had an entire theatre program, nearly as robust as, say, the art department, or the English department, though in Diane’s case it was a department of one. So that in addition to the extra curricular activity of the drama club, and my own performances at local venues (I was already doing that when I was around 14 or 15), there was an entire menu of classes I could take as part of my academic curriculum. There were classes in performance, and script analysis, and improv, and kid’s theatre, and musical theatre, and even theatre history! The latter is what’s most mind boggling to me in retrospect, for though I had been interested in American history since childhood, I was not particularly into theatre history as a 13 or 14 year old. I wouldn’t become serious about investigating American theatre history until decades later. But at the time, I was pretty bored in that class and even made fun of a song lyric I have never forgotten:

I’m looking for the man who wrote “The Merry Widow Waltz”/ If I chance to find him he’ll need more than smelling salts!/ He’ll never write another/ He’ll dream of home and mother/ I’m looking for the man who wrote “The Merry Widow Waltz”

And, welp I almost just went down a rabbit hole researching that song. It’s all there on the internet, but it’s a digression. The salient point is that I first learned about the history of such things as vaudeville, burlesque (the clean early kind), farce, melodrama, musical comedy and so forth from Diane. She brought us on field trips to see Broadway shows, my first trips to New York! She thrilled me by showing up at the book launch event for No Applause in 2005. There is absolutely a lot of her influence in it.

But I also want to stress that I learned a lot about performance from her too. I’ve never considered myself primarily a historian or even a historian at all, but a playwright and performer who takes care to know the background of the art I practice. And HOW she indulged me during those years! I was cut loose and allowed to thrive to an extent you can scarcely imagine. I was shy at first, and then went properly crazy. I was insufferable really, but I’ve always been grateful to her for allowing me the scope to explore. Diane’s classes were an outlet that kind of saved my life. Later, at Trinity Rep, came a second phase of my education where I learned more discipline. But the fire in the furnace came from Diane’s program.

She’s funny and caring. She let me be a brat when I needed to be. Once or twice I even became a little monstrous, but she’s never held it against me. I’m beaming all the gratitude in the world to her on this World Teachers Day. And thank the Gods daily I was born in a part of the country that values public education.