There is a term in theater, and more specifically improvisation, when a joke is made more than once and in reference to itself. This kind of joke is called a “callback.” In the manner of a callback, a certain phrase was bellowed by a professor in a class at the University of Georgia on Monday, April 10: “I said contemporary!”
Professor Kristin Kundert was presiding over an in-class exercise for undergraduate acting students in the Department of Theatre and Film Studies. The students were told to prepare a contemporary monologue and two students missed the memo. Kundert caught them performing monologues by William Shakespeare and made her disapproval thoroughly known. “She really pushes. She wants you to do well,” said second year theater major Ellen Everitt.
Kundert is an associate professor at the University of Georgia, but her lectures are anything but typically academic. Gesturing with passion and enthusiasm, Kundert stands as a portrait of the stereotype of a liberal arts professor who is deeply and outspokenly liberal. Referencing her resounding laugh, vibrant and bold fashion, and the unencumbered willingness to speak her mind, students testify to Kundert’s ability to welcome, comfort and encourage students within the department. Her style is bright and brash. “That laugh is pretty iconic,” said Everitt.
“She’s got a fire in her,” said undergraduate theater major Anthony Nash, who has had the experience of both being in one of her classes as well as being a cast member in “A Behanding in Spokane,” a show that she directed for the department. Lovingly referring to her as “Pussy Mama,” a name originating from a monologue Kundert performed for her Theatre 3500 class in the fall of 2014, Nash points out her nurturing and “fiery” approach to guiding students in theater. “There’s a very grounded fire to her and I think that is obviously reflected in her clothing.”
Circling the room as the students simultaneously perform their monologues for each other in pairs lined up lengthwise across the room, Kundert’s flared pants move with an impressive fluidity. They are a lighter shade of the same purple of her flared-arms top and her shoes are bedazzled and flowery.
She pauses occasionally to lean in, squinting, and listen to a student’s performance. “You need to cut it, cut it, cut it,” she says to students whose monologues she can tell are too long. Between these suggestions of shortening are shouts of “I said contemporary!”
Kundert’s classroom is simple, understated and usually too hot or too cold. (One student’s first experience with Kundert was seeing her loudly argue with an air conditioning repairman.) Kundert works in a classroom built to accentuate the creativity and craft of the students she trains. In the basement of the Fine Arts Building, room 115 features bare walls, four storage closets for props and desk chairs that sit on elevated platforms resembling the house of a theater – perfect for viewing students’ work.
Kundert bases most of her acting training in a technique known as the Meisner technique, which, in its early stages, usually resembles the blandness of the classroom in which it is being taught. The Meisner technique was developed in the middle of the 20th century and remains to this day a popular and well-liked technique for actor training. All about repetition and deep connection with a scene partner, the Meisner technique is Kundert’s go-to for coaching undergraduate and graduate students alike in the field of acting for the stage. “She’s really impulsive and goes with her gut instincts and I think that’s because of her training in Meisner,” Everitt said of Kundert.
Lukas Woodyard, a second year theater major from Warner Robins, Georgia, said he specifically sought Kundert out as his professor for his first acting class because of her connection to the Meisner technique. Woodyard took Kundert’s Meisner course during the 2016 Maymester and said her training in the technique is evident and “life-changing.” Kundert sings the technique’s praises because of its ability to emotionally affect and move actors and better their ability to act in the moment and under pressure. The most common exercise using the Meisner technique is a partner-based exercise in which each partner makes an observation about the other and the other must repeat, verbatim, that observation. Though this is often a boring process at first, Woodyard said that the students in the class had “severe emotional reactions” by the time the course ended.
Having been a professor for many years, Kundert deals with resentment for the slow and cautious nature of authority tackling and solving problems in academia. “Who’s in charge, how they operate, blah blah blah,” Kundert said exasperatedly, “it’s a waste of time and it gets in the way of what you have to do.” Despite this, in five years, she still sees herself working as a professor. “Teaching is in my blood.”
It is commonly believed, Kundert notes, that an education in the fine arts isn’t lucrative and won’t get you far. “I think they’re fools,” Kundert said of those who don’t believe a degree in theater is worthwhile. “When you’re a theater artist, you have a better understanding of the human condition and that’s going to be core to any career anywhere,” said Kundert.
“I think everyone in my family thought I was too smart to do theater,” said Kundert. Because of this, Kundert started college at the State University of New York at New Paltz as a double major: theater and biology. However, after taking a semester away from theater to focus solely on biology, Kundert realized that she couldn’t live without it. She dropped her double major and focused entirely on theater thereafter, graduating in 1987. Though she never regrets her choice to do theater, she regrets having given up the opportunity to do anything else. “A doctor can go live wherever they want,” she said. “In academia, you can’t necessarily pick where you want to live.”
Kundert claims that more businesses are hiring fine arts majors than they are business majors. This is a difficult statistic to quantify, but the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that from 2014 to 2024, employment in business-related fields will increase by 8.4 percent, and employment in arts and entertainment fields will increase by 4.1 percent. Though it can’t be determined what training these employees will receive, it is true that the business world will gain more employees than the arts. This projected trend has been reflected in enrollment at the University of Georgia over the past decade. From 2006 to 2016, total enrollment in the arts and sciences has decreased by 35 percent. Enrollment in business has increased by 224 percent.
Growing up in Platteville, Wisconsin, Kundert was always interested in performance and direction. When she was young, she would write, direct and star in short plays with her sisters. These “little kid plays” were performed for relatives whenever they visited. “It cracks me up now because I think, ‘Oh my god, if I had to watch it, I would just – oh lord,’” said Kundert.
“The two jokes in my family were that I grew up in a ‘Care Bear’ family, or we were the ‘Little House on the Prairie,’” Kundert said of her childhood, growing up with her two younger sisters. “Everybody was good, nobody got into trouble, nobody did anything wrong, everyone was perfect.” Through stuttering laughter, Kundert explains that her “dominant personality” was likely why she and her siblings were always referred to as “Kristin and the girls.”
Today, Kundert is a divorced mother to two sons, Kenlee and Josh. When asked what about her is absolutely crucial to know, Kundert said the fact that she is a mother has colored many of her life experiences. “It’s really hard, and I think because of my ‘Care Bear’ family, there were a lot of things about it that I wasn’t prepared for. I just didn’t get a lot of things that were normal,” Kundert said. Described by one student as an “earth mother,” Kundert’s claim that this life experience has bettered her interactions with students has been substantiated in every student interview I conducted.
The “Care Bear” “Little House on the Prairie” relationship Kundert enjoyed in her childhood has been complicated a bit in the recent years, due to distance, the death of her father when she was 25 and clashing political views. Kundert’s mother and sister Kara are more conservative, religiously and politically, than Kundert, and because of that, there are things they “just can’t” talk about.
Kundert’s politics have also played a prominent role in her personal and professional career at Georgia. A staunch opponent of the Campus Carry bill, which would allow those in possession of a concealed firearms permit to carry their firearms on a Georgia university campus, Kundert has participated in protests at the Arch and helped to distribute T-shirts that read “Keep the G Gun-Free!” Touting a baby blue fringe purse with a pastel pink “Fuck Paul Ryan” button pinned neatly to one of the handles, Kundert says she will refuse to let anyone carrying a gun into her classroom if the bill becomes law. “I guess I’ll get arrested, ‘cause if someone comes into my classroom with a gun, I’m going tell them to leave. They could go and have me arrested and I could go to jail.” Some students expressed concerns that these intense political opinions can make Kundert seem “vocal to the point of bullying.” Citing Kundert’s “magmatic” tendencies, one student claimed that Kundert initially “scared the shit out of [them].”
It’s not all teaching and politics for this expressive professor. A big fan of sports, Kundert enjoys crocheting as she watches soccer and basketball games. Though her March Madness prediction bracket is “totally fried” this year, Kundert still uses her season tickets to attend every Georgia Bulldogs basketball game. Aside from crocheting and basketball, Kundert says that most of her time is taken up by her job.
When asked what she wants to say to the world, Kundert paused for a few seconds and confidently said, “Stop letting God get in the way of loving each other.”
