As told by Isaac Smith
Being in the room with these incredible UVU professors helped me feel like they didn’t want me to be anyone else. They wanted me to be me and to help me grow into the best version of myself.
Photo by Kenney Evans
Growing up, I jumped around to different hobbies. I played the clarinet for a while in the band at school and took a couple of dance classes and piano lessons, but none of it stuck. I had a hard time connecting to something and following through. But theatre was the thing that I just kept going back to, and my family was very encouraging in my theatrical pursuits.
My parents came home from moving my brother to UVU and said, “Hey, UVU has a good theatre program. Do you want to audition for it?” And I said, “Sure.” It was due a couple of days after my parents brought it up to me. So, I threw the self-tape together, put it on YouTube, and emailed it to UVU. Then, I got a callback.
The next week, I came to Utah, and from the moment I was in that room, I felt so accepted for who I was. I grew up with the craft believing I needed to fit into a certain mold, but being in the room with these incredible professors — Amanda Crabb, Laurie Harrop-Purser, and Christopher Clark — helped me feel like they didn’t want me to be anyone else. They wanted me to be me and to help me grow into the best version of myself.
I was terrified in my first acting class. My teachers asked things of me that I didn't have to give in high school theatre. They wanted me to be vulnerable in front of all my classmates at 9 a.m., and that was really hard.
I had to overcome the personal roadblocks I had set for myself and adjust to the level of work and dedication that was expected of me as a student in college. In high school, it was my extracurricular, but in college, this was my career and my degree track.
Getting cast as the lead in Cinderella was a big moment. The show and role were just perfect for me. It was so affirming to be a part of something that showed me that my voice was great as it was and that I didn't need to be someone else.
I took my modern legacies class with Dr. Brian Birch, who is the head of the Religious Studies program here at UVU, and that class completely changed my life.
Near the end of that semester, he called me and said, "I have this opportunity for you that I think you'd be really interested in,” and he invited me to attend the Student Conference for Religion in the Public Sphere.
It was this incredible opportunity to be in a room with students from across the country who cared about religion as much as I did, and to be with intellectuals and academics that were great examples to me and would talk to me for hours about religious things that I love to talk about.
I wasn’t a very good student growing up, and I graduated high school thinking that I was stupid, that I couldn’t be an intellectual or academic, but I came back after that week at the conference feeling like, “Oh my gosh, I need to do this with my life.” That was when I decided to add the religious studies minor.
You need to get to know yourself well enough to know what you want to do and how it feels to be doing something that you love. That's what has drawn me over and over again to religious studies and theatre, because studying them makes me feel like a whole person.
There were moments I had on stage in Cinderella where I was like, “This is it. This is what all my work has been for. This is what my life is for, to feel this way.” But I also had moments at that conference for religious pluralism where I felt whole, like, “This is it. This is my life work.”
I really, really encourage students to just do what they love, because otherwise you will not be happy.
Links:
UVU Department of Theatre
Sundance production of Cinderella
UVU Religious Studies program