In the opening of Act III of As You Like It, Jacques proposes that we are all actors in our own lives: “All the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances and one man in his life plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.” These seven stages of life include the infant, the schoolboy, the lover, the soldier, the justice, the old man, and then the even older man, who fades into oblivion. Now a self-proclaimed “justice” with a complete career in acting under his belt, Professor Harrison Long is providing students at KSU with both the well-rounded education and the real-world experience to become working actors—or whatever else they may decide to do in life.

Harrison’s story begins in 1966, when he was born into a long line of Methodist Ministers in Cobb County, GA. Each Sunday he witnessed his father’s performances to his congregations, and saw him shift between the divine, ceremonial leader onstage, and the more human role he played when raising his family. He learned the power of storytelling by seeing his father use the biblical text to stir transformation, inspiration and celebration in his congregations. Harrison’s father also played the role of comforter; he recalls his father accompanying a sheriff to notify a family of their son’s death in a car accident. Being immersed in these heightened moments of death, deepest pain, and greatest joy provided Harrison with a firsthand experience of the human experience.

Harrison has always had the ability to empathize with others’ circumstances and to put himself wholeheartedly into whatever role he is playing in life, whether it be teacher, actor, or drill sergeant as he commands his son Oliver to put his pants on. In one memory, Harrison recalls watching a movie about an orphan that had been adopted by a Korean group of soldiers, and weeping for him after thinking of himself in the orphan’s place.

In another instance, when I was in Harrison’s acting class in 2007, he recalled a deeply personal account of a leaf that his grandmother gave to him, and how he saw the leaf differently after she had passed away. He sobbed while telling the end of the story, and the class was moved to tears, only to find out later that he had completely fabricated the story by arranging childhood memories in a new way to create an authentic moment. In the acting studio, Harrison says that recalling one’s past memories is a learned skill that uses one’s essential experiences as a set of raw materials that can be rearranged into the present circumstances.

In 1988, Harrison earned a B.F. A. in Acting from Florida State University, and then he moved to Texas to start at Southern Methodist University for one of the strongest classical training programs in the country. As Harrison’s approach to acting says, “Character is defined by the sum of your actions.” Rehearsal means going into the text and answering the question, “What am I doing?” The actor’s job, once he determines what he is doing, or what he is trying to accomplish in the scene, is then to meld the circumstances of the play with his own imagination and to orchestrate each moment so that it illuminates the journey of the character, from the beginning of the play to the end. Harrison often describes the lines of a play as a “telephone line,” through which the real message is transmitted from one character’s gut to another through the vehicle of language.

For fifteen years, Harrison worked primarily as an actor in New York and all over the country, and he considers himself one of the lucky ones: “I know what it’s like to get in line on a cold, rainy March morning on West 46th Street and wait in the rain for two hours, just to be let into the building, and hopefully have enough time to sign up for an audition, and then know that two-hundred people in line behind me got turned away because they didn’t get there at 6:00am. They got there at 6:30am. I also knew that the two-hundred of us who actually got in over the period of two days to audition for a role, ten of those might have been hired. Maybe.”

After witnessing the birth of his first son, Harrison realized that he could no longer look for a new job every six to eight weeks if he wanted to be as present for his son Oliver as his father was for him. He decided to pursue his other passion of teaching, but faced an ethical dilemma as he realized that he would be contributing to the vicious cycle that is making the actor’s likelihood of a successful career in theatre even slimmer: as actors face major changes in their life and look to settle down, they often all make the same move toward academia and begin creating even more training programs for even fewer real-world jobs.

After interviewing all over the country and receiving offers for positions at prestigious schools such as the Guthrie Theater [often called the greatest regional theater in America], he decided to teach at a school where he could provide something more than just competitive acting training, so he joined the faculty of KSU. “The reason I did it is because I knew that I had to offer my students something more substantial than the superficial lure of celebrity. I needed to know that I was offering my students something worthwhile, even if they didn’t become professional actors.”

Harrison emphasizes that an education in Theatre and Performance Studies is about more than just “making it” in the dog-eat-dog theatre world. “People learn empathy in our department. They learn to put themselves in someone else’s shoes… That’s good for society.” He’s proud that his students are learning to become well-rounded individuals that are good at writing and articulating their points of view. “I hope to offer them some ways of interpreting the world and decoding their place in the world in a way that is substantial and meaningful.”