By Gideon Lester
Hullo, brats. This is Tony Award® winner Gideon Lester, former Artistic Director of Bard’s Theater & Performance department. In case you blinkered philistines missed the news of the century, baked as you are in your interminable cannabis haze, allow me to bring you up to speed: I, Gideon Lester, have elected to step down from my post at the request of my ungrateful students and staff. Though I was more than content to keep this information on the down-low, the Administration has made it clear that I must issue some kind of statement regarding my departure. Since your backwater college has new real newspaper to speak of (the Bard Free Press? Don’t make me laugh), I’ve been forced to print this communiqué in what you slack-jawed American halfwits consider a satire publication. So it goes.
Let me speak plainly: I know very few of you like me. You think me “pompous,” “callous,” “an obsequious sycophant to our mid-tier visiting artists,” a man with “no discernible enthusiasm or aptitude for running a college theater program.” Frankly, I don’t care. The chips are down, the gloves are off–I can finally tell you self-righteous guttersnipes what I’ve wanted to say for eight long years: I don’t like you either. When I first came to Bard in 2012, the Theater department was a shambles: a quietly well-regarded program run by an acclaimed theater-maker. I, Gideon Lester, took it upon myself to rebuild this crumbling façade from the ground up. This was to be my legacy: I would be remembered as the brilliant, charming, devilishly handsome man who changed the American theatre forever. And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for you myopic, meddling kids.
So what if a Zocalo guest said something racist? So what if I’ve favoured treacly lip-service to actually addressing the inequalities present in my department? Stop your sanctimonious handwringing and look at all the good I’ve done. I won a Tony® for our SummerScape production of Oklahoma! I singlehandedly organised a department show starring everyone’s favourite rock star, Amanda Palmer, alongside my two protégés, the members of PWR BTTM. I roped award-winning novelist Neil Gaiman into teaching a Shakespeare class once every two-and-a-half years! And, after all of this, you’re still not impressed? You’d prefer to focus on a couple dozen inadequacies than recognise my several successes? You poor, uncultured swine. How I pity you.
Well, hurrah. You’ve won. Good always triumphs, blah blah blah. But know this: your pitiful little minds cannot even comprehend how good you had it under my reign. While you stay stuck in grotty Annandale-on-Hudson, smoking your cigarettes and listening to your Phoebe Bridgers, I’ll be traveling this wide world over, returning to my homes in New York and London, staying at my palatial Irish summer estate. I’m Gideon fucking Lester, firstborn son of Baron Lester of Herne Hill, and you–all of you–are nothing. Don’t you forget that.
Rule Britannia!
Fondly,
Gideon Lester
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