Last Saturday, an intimate group of artists, scholars and friends gathered in Leeds Theatre to honor John Emigh’s retirement, after 42 years of teaching and directing at Brown. Many of the participants, mostly former colleagues and students, shared stories regarding the tremendous impact John has had on their life journeys. While each tale was unique, the deep sense of gratitude and respect was shared. I felt myself tremble at the magnitude of experience and humanity that lay thick in the room. When the right moment came, I felt compelled to share my own involvement in theatre at Brown, much of which I owe to John.

At theatre orientation freshman year, my younger, eager self peered around Leeds Theatre, trying hard to envision what my involvement in theatre at Brown would be like. We were encouraged to audition for Sock and Buskin’s first show, “Much Ado About Nothing.” Having had a brief but off-putting encounter with Shakespeare in high school, I tried to seek some consolation for my intimidation with verse by approaching the director, a white-haired man with quiet demeanor, standing in a corner.

“Are you John Emigh? I don’t know much about Shakespeare,” I said.

“Have you read the play? It helps,” John replied.

Failing to pick up on what could well have been an unassuming statement of encouragement, I turned away, blushing at my own ignorance at display. I did not read the play, nor did I show up for auditions. I stayed out of TA 3 in my first year, but wet my theatre-feet at Rites and Reason and PW. In the fall of sophomore year, I was struggling to continue my involvement in the theatre. Being rejected from TA 23 had left me mildly crushed. After that, I had even less success getting cast in anything. Trodding from audition to audition can be a gloomy process, as all actors will know. Being told that “Your audition was one of the strongest, but we have to consider the cast as a whole” is of little consolation.

When I finally attended the shows that I had auditioned for, I was still hot for answers. That semester, it happened to be that every play I attended featured white upper/middle-class America. This seeming mode of default I took to heart as the cause for me being “good, but not castable.” While in high school, I had played roles ranging from warrior Karna in the Indian epic the Mahabharata to a pregnant teen in Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey. At Brown, I got the message that my Chinese heritage and ambiguous accent made me problematic, to say the least.

If I had come to Brown questioning my interest in the theatre, one semester of involuntary abstinence proved to me that without it, the colors of my world were fading rapidly. “This is it,” I thought to myself, “Brown theatre is not for me, so I am leaving.”

Metaphorically speaking, “leaving” meant allowing the last flicker of hope in my chest perish. Concretely speaking, I thought I should take time off, go to Brazil and find some Boal-inspired community-service theatre which I had practiced in high school.

Before making the moves to leave, I made one last attempt at connecting with the faculty by emailing Rebecca Schneider, chair of the department. She suggested taking classes in performance theory, and applying for funds to start my own theatre group. This was arguably good advice, but an unlikely feat for someone who felt excluded from and disillusioned by Brown theatre at large. A few days later, John Emigh, who had been included in the e-mail by Rebecca, wrote to me:

Jing, I enjoyed your work last year a great deal. Drop by office hours sometime (Tues 1:30-3:30) if you wish to explore what is already here. And I’d love to hear what you feel is missing. John

I went to his office, and waited outside for the full hour while he was talking to someone else. As I got up to go to class, John called me through the open crack of his door.

“Why are you leaving?” he said.

“I have class.”

“You should have told me,” he said with apparent disappointment. “Come back later and we’ll talk. There is a place for you.”

Those last words not only melted a lump in my throat, but planted me so firmly in the theatre that I have not been able to leave ever since. Six department productions later, I cannot but believe that John’s words literally and figuratively created space for me to explore and grow. It has never been something I take for granted, and I am grateful for all the opportunities I got to learn.

While in rehearsals for Peer Gynt, I remember being puzzled by the lack of concrete directing notes from John. However, during idle offstage time — which my fellow older actors spent gabbing or doing work in the green-room — I would often sit in the audience of Stuart theatre, just to be in his presence. When we were let out at the end of the night, usually around 11:15 p.m., I was always the last to leave. Lingering, I’d watch him turn on the ghost light and listen to his muttering, which probably made more sense to him than to me. That semester, my grades did suffer, but I gained something that I probably have yet to realize to its fullest power. For all that has been said, and left unsaid, Thank You John.

Daniel Alexander Jones, MA ‘93, lucidly invokes the influence and metaphysics of John Emigh: “When I think of John, I think of physics and metaphysics. John is a person to me, who has the ability to open portals between dimensions. Just the way that I look up to Orion, and I remember that I am part of something larger, when I’m in John’s presence I feel that I am trembling at the edge of the time that I am in, the space that I am in; things wobble. John is not walking around like a holy man, he is a regular person, full of humor, full of kindness, which is one of his great tools of teaching. Patience. But the patience I think stems from that John is able to see, trans-temporally. He is able to look at someone when they are stuck and see them when they will be unstuck; to abide in the moment of stuck-ness and be patient. He is able to look at someone who is free, and to look back in time to a point when they were not free, and honor the journey that they’ve been through.”