In Support of a Larger Idea

I’ve been on a quest lately to talk to people who are actively and constructively contributing to community. I want to honor the folks who are diving in head-first, saying yes, staying engaged and doing their best, trying to make a difference. It’s the antidote to the despair that lurks. Recently, a friend who understood my mission led me to actor and educator Jeff McKinnon, and I’m still feeling fortified by the free-wheeling conversation we recently had sitting in a Solvang courtyard as pastries baked and morning bells chimed. 

Jeff became a teacher at Santa Ynez Valley High after 15 years as a professional actor in regional theater. He taught high school theater and English for 25 years and directed more than 75 theater productions, tours, and workshops, mostly at Santa Ynez High School. His advanced theater classes participated in performance and workshop programs at more than 30 Santa Barbara County schools, and he twice took his high school Theater Group to perform at the International Fringe Theatre Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland. Shortly after his retirement two years ago, the local nonprofit Artist Advocacy Foundation created the McKinnon Theatre Group Scholarship to celebrate and support students who intend to pursue higher-level theater training and have demonstrated a commitment to social justice. Now, he is co-producing a scholarship fundraising benefit that will feature alumni who have gone on to become professional musicians, actors, dancers, and visual artists. Stay tuned. 

But Jeff admits to feeling a little lost since retiring. “There’s a lot of reflection going on in my life right now,” he muses, “and I can see how easily I could become isolated, but this is not a good time to be introverted. For me, community is a place where I can contribute, and it’s about supporting a larger idea that is beneficial to all.”

He channels his contributions through theater, which is itself a metaphor for community. “A play production is the most collaborative of all the arts and sciences,” he says. “Every participant in a play, from the actors to the techies, from the designers to the people who sew the costumes to the people who pass out the programs, we are all part of the same community. We are spokes on the wheel. We all matter because we all contribute.”

The purpose, however, is more than just entertainment, at least in Jeff’s view. “Yes, it should entertain,” he explains, “but it should primarily make people think and act. The power of performance is impossible to imagine to its full extent. Not just how it can raise hope, but how it can inspire, and prompt action.”

Jeff has turned his theater expertise into a considerable force for good. He changed lives throughout his career, helping students to discover their strengths and their voices, providing opportunities to become confident collaborators in shared purpose. He is particularly proud of a two-year production project called The Circuit based on a novella by Francisco Jiménez, that mixed Latino and white kids, involved more than 60 students, toured by bus for more than 70 performances in Santa Barbara County schools, and culminated in a performance in Edinburgh, Scotland, at the International Fringe Theatre Festival. “The point is, for a short time, we created a community on campus that was a shelter for white and Latino kids to find common ground in a common project, and it happened under the roof of the high school’s Little Theatre. For two years, we had a tribe, a little family. As it turns out, many of those students went on to become teachers and artists. That’s what theater can do.”

And that’s what Jeff is still doing. He (and his equally impressive wife, Carey, with whom I plan to talk soon) unfailingly apply their knowledge and skills to events and programs that benefit the community. “Service is my religion; the theatre is my church,” Jeff says, and retirement has not changed that. 

Perhaps his credo reflects the progressive mission of the Catholicism of his childhood. Feed the poor, look after those less fortunate. “That was the Jesus that I grew up with,” he says. “Many of us from my generation left the church as practitioners. I never liked being told what to do, or how to believe. But I understood the task — let’s try to take care of each other.”

Theater has proven to be a substantial path to achieving this. “I have my parents to thank for never preventing me from doing a school play,” he reflects. “Hats off to my dad for letting me abandon sports and pursue high school theater, because it sent me off in a direction that has put me here today. I’ve seen that this is a mission that keeps following me around. I can’t think of a better way to have lived.” 

The scholarship fundraiser is coming up in April, but new ideas are brewing, and who knows what hearts will be touched and minds stimulated? In these difficult and alienating times, it has become clear to me that local action is what will save us, rippling outward in a thousand ways, and community is the key, and each of us must figure out how we can contribute. 

“We need to not simply overcome our differences, but accept our differences,” Jeff says, “understanding that we live for one another, because if we live only for ourselves, we become removed from the common good, and that should be everyone’s priority.”

The common good. Now there’s a concept! Community. Caring. Doing something. It makes me think of these words from the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi: 

There is a community of the spirit.

Join it, and feel the delight

of walking in the noisy street

and being the noise.

Why not gather in the circle outside the realm of “fear-thinking” and make hope happen? Why not live for one another? This is why people like Jeff McKinnon inspire me.