ITS 90th Archives - Dramatics Magazine Online

Thespian Throwback: Milestones and Momentum

Allison Dolan — Thu, 19 Dec 2019 21:49:25 +0000

THE TURNING of the calendar from 2019 to 2020 draws to a close the International Thespian Society’s yearlong celebration of its 90th anniversary. Yet, with 135,000 active members and 2.4 million alumni, ITS momentum is stronger than ever. The power of theatre to instill confidence, empathy, and compassion is building better communities across the U.S. and beyond.

ITS has achieved numerous milestones since the first Thespian troupe was chartered in April 1929. You can chart this growth — from 700 issues of Dramatics magazine to 56 International Thespian Festivals — in our by-the-numbers summary.

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Thespian Throwback: JumpStart Theatre Launched in 2015

Harper Lee — Thu, 12 Dec 2019 17:48:29 +0000

In 2015, the JumpStart Theatre program launched with three pilot schools in Cincinnati. The goal: building sustainable theatre programs in schools without them. Since that time, 15 schools in five states have joined the JumpStart program, with more than 800 student cast members and more than 200 student crew members participating.

THE EDUCATIONAL THEATRE ASSOCIATION is partnering with Music Theatre International (MTI) and iTheatrics to launch JumpStart Theatre, a pilot program designed to build sustainable theatre programs in middle schools that do not offer theatre education. The program will begin next fall in three Cincinnati-area schools: Finneytown Middle School and James N. Gamble Montessori School in Cincinnati and Holmes Middle School in Covington, Kentucky.

Based on a highly successful New York City program, JumpStart will provide three years of direct financial and logistical support that includes educator training, mentors, scripts, and study guides, as well as teacher stipends and modest budgets for sets and costumes. EdTA plans to expand the program regionally in 2016-17, with the goal of creating similar programs nationwide in the future. The program has received state and local financial support, with grants from the Ohio Arts Council and ArtsWave, the Cincinnati area’s local arts agency. The three 2015-16 pilot schools will also include a research project that will measure the program’s social and academic impact on students and their community.

“The program will make a powerful impact on hundreds of students over the next three years, providing them with a more expansive education to teach life skills that can be applied in other subject areas, such as creativity, collaboration, communication, and critical thinking,” said EdTA Executive Director Julie Cohen Theobald. “We are very excited to be able to provide these opportunities to the students in our community, and we hope to expand the program beyond the Cincinnati area in the coming years.”

This story appeared in the May 2015 print version of Dramatics. Learn about the print magazine and other Thespian benefits on the International Thespian Society website.

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Thespian Throwback: Passion for the Work

Don Corathers — Thu, 05 Dec 2019 19:51:23 +0000

In 2012, Dramatics sat down with Julie Cohen Theobald to discuss her first year as the executive director of the Educational Theatre Association.

ONE EVENING in the winter of 2011, Julie Cohen Theobald (then Woffington) was paging through the messages on the Cincinnati community theatre email listserv, which she tried to keep up with when she could spare a few moments between the demands of her job and her duties as the mother of two small children. One message caught her eye: The Educational Theatre Association was looking for a new executive director.

Julie Cohen Theobald

She had never heard of the organization — even though she had lived in the same city as its headquarters for 15 years — and anyway, she wasn’t looking for a job. She was happy with the one she had as managing director for Procter & Gamble’s Frederic Fekkai line of hair products. She deleted the message.

Still, the idea of running a national organization devoted to school theatre had a certain nagging appeal. Theobald’s own involvement in theatre stretched back to fourth grade, when her mother had enrolled her in an after-school musical theatre program in the northern suburbs of Chicago where she lived. It continued at Glenbrook North High School and reached a peak of sorts while she was working on an undergraduate degree in public policy at Duke. There she was cast in several shows produced by a student-run musical theatre group, made her debut as a musical director on a production of Godspell, appeared in two drama department productions, and spent the break before her junior year doing summer stock in Texas. After earning her MBA at the University of Chicago, she went to work at P&G and quickly got involved in Cincinnati’s community theatre scene, rehearsing and music-directing shows at night while she ran North American marketing for Tide laundry detergent during the day.

She had given some thought to the possibility of pursuing a second career in arts management someday. A year or so before, she had even arranged to meet with some Cincinnati professional theatre executives, trying to get a reading on how she might prepare for such a transition. But that was a long-term plan, maybe five or 10 years in the future.

Still. Later that night (or maybe it was the next day: Theobald doesn’t remember exactly), she opened her deleted messages folder and found the email about the EdTA job.

Which is how, to shorten a long story, we happened to be sitting in her office on a July afternoon 18 months later talking about her first year as executive director of the Educational Theatre Association. Here’s how the conversation went.

You stepped off the corporate career track, where you had been very successful, to take a job in the nonprofit sector. Isn’t that a little bit crazy?
In some ways, my move to this job seems crazy, and in other ways it’s like my entire life led me to this. I was in theatre growing up, and I’ve kept at it. I majored in public policy, which has a lot of issues related to this job. Going into my senior year of college, I worked as an intern at the Kennedy Center, and that’s where I first began to contemplate the idea of arts management. I had an arts management certificate from Duke, and I thought about arts administration pretty seriously when I graduated from college.

It was crazy in that I wasn’t expecting it or looking for it, in terms of the timing of it. But I feel like it wasn’t crazy at all. It was actually a very easy decision once I started getting into it.

It’s been a busy year since then. Have you been able to check off most of the things that were on your list the day you started?
I only have three things that I keep on my desk all the time. One of them is my monitoring reports, to make sure that I don’t miss my reports [to the board]. One of them is my personal calendar because I’ve been trying to do a better job of remembering people’s birthdays. And then the third thing that I keep on my desk is my 2011-12 focus areas. I did this in my first month on the job. This is my personal checklist.

There were four things on it. Establish a strong reputation — building respect and rapport with the staff and the board and the chapter directors. Take over the operation — have a smooth transition. Lay the groundwork for the future in a five-year strategic plan. And professional development, which was more about my own understanding of nonprofit management. And there are detailed items under each of those headings.

And I feel really good about the checklist. One thing I had on here — establishing a regular communication rhythm with stakeholders — is something I would still like to structure a little bit more.

What are the things you learned during your time at P&G that you think have been the most helpful to you in this job?
There’s so much that P&G has helped me with. So many things come naturally now that I was not very good at 15 years ago. The biggest thing that P&G does is train you to be a leader. When I came here and heard there were folks that were skeptical because I wasn’t a teacher, I wanted to say, “I’m not coming here to be a teacher. I’m coming here to be a leader.”

I think I’ve learned to listen to what people need and then communicate that in a really simple way so that everybody can embrace it. That’s what I have tried to do with the strategic plan. The whole strategic planning process, that came directly out of the P&G playbook.

Probably the biggest thing I’ve learned from P&G that I’m applying here is: When you’re launching a product, say you’re launching a laundry detergent, the way you start is understanding the consumer. A.G. Lafley, who was CEO at P&G for a long time, had a simple saying: “The consumer is boss.” And whenever you get into a useless debate and can’t resolve it, you go back to “The consumer is boss.” What does the consumer need? What does the consumer want? Here, it’s like, the member is boss. We’re here to serve members, just like P&G exists to serve consumers, whether they are consumers of laundry detergent or paper towels or theatre education.

So, you start with the member: What’s on their mind, what do they need, what are the barriers, and then you need to structure the work around meeting those needs.

Why is school theatre important?
One thing is just the skills it teaches, which are life skills. It’s interesting to go to meetings in Washington and hear about how education is changing. There was a video that I saw about how education used to be like a factory. It was all rote learning. Now, there’s an increased emphasis on problem-solving and critical thinking. It’s all about how you think, how you relate to people, getting people to follow you, coming up with ideas, getting folks to believe in those ideas, communicating. All those things that education now needs to teach are really experienced in theatre. It’s just a great way to learn. It’s an engaging way to learn.

So, there is the educational value of the skills that are taught. And then there’s a secondary thing I hear a lot: Kids feeling like they can belong, and huge issues with bullying in this country, huge issues with self-esteem. I believe that almost all the social problems in this world trace back to self-esteem issues, whether it’s drugs or crime, child abuse, acts of violence, all those things go back to that. Theatre, when done well in the right environment, creates a family and an openness and an empathy for other people, by putting yourself in the character’s shoes, that I think makes people into better humans and that can help with a lot of the really big problems we have right now in this country.

It’s also got that built-in mechanism for positive response.
Um-hmm. The high, the adrenaline. Yes, totally. My kids are doing theatre for the very first time. My son is 5 years old now, he was 4 when he was in Willy Wonka [which Theobald music-directed at a Cincinnati community theatre last winter]. I remember the look on his face from the applause after the first night, and afterward he was so energized. On the second night, he started to really get it, and by the second weekend his performance was just lifted. He was so confident. In the beginning, he did all the moves and sang all the words, but the second weekend the way his face lit up, it was like, you know, he’d got the bug. I think there’s a spirit and a life when you’re onstage that hopefully carries through beyond that.

That must have been a moment for you.
Oh, I’m going to start crying right now. It was awesome.

What are the core strengths of this organization in your view?
Scale is a huge strength. Wow, do we have scale. Sometimes I think we don’t always use that scale to get everybody to understand the power that we can have. … We’re spread across the country, we’re strong in a lot of states. I think the passion for the mission is an important strength. Everyone’s got a passion for the mission. It’s something we all can agree on.

Just in terms of organizational strength and stability, if you look at our tax returns, our balance sheet, we are a very strong, stable organization, and we’ve got resources to accomplish whatever we want to accomplish.

I think we have amazing people. I’m amazed by the amount of stuff that we get done with the relatively small staff we have and by the passion that they have. And then we have these amazing volunteers. People do incredible things for us because they care, and they want to. So, I think the people are a huge strength.

The students, the student leadership — I think that’s an untapped strength. We leverage some of it, but gosh, we’ve got 80,000 students around the country and some incredible leadership and spirit. Right now, we still have a long way to go in terms of the tools to bring everybody together, so they’re not just coming together 3,000 at a time at the International Thespian Festival, but they’re able to communicate and work together on bigger stuff all the time.

I would also say that the board is a strength. We’ve got a dedicated, professional, productive board. There’s a healthy board dynamic, and not every arts organization can say that.

And what are the things that we need to work on?
Those things are listed in our strategic plan. I don’t think we have a lot of deficiencies. I think we have a lot of untapped potential.

You know, technology is one of the things I think we were starting to fall behind on, and I think we’re quickly catching up. That’s going to be something we never stop working on because technology is always in a state of change. …

Other things we need to work on: I think we’re the world’s best-kept secret. The fact that I have been involved in theatre my entire life, that I was living in Cincinnati a few miles from this office, and I had not heard of this organization, says to me we have a long way to go in terms of building our awareness and our stature. We’re doing it. We just have to share what we’re doing already with more people and the right people.

Diversity and access. We have a long way to go both in our own organization as well as in the field of theatre education. We know from the data that it’s really unfortunate that the people who probably could most benefit from theatre education, those students in high-poverty schools, are the ones getting it the least, so we have a long way to go in the field. But we also have a long way to go in our organization. That was one of the first things I noticed when I came to Lincoln [for the International Thespian Festival] last year, that there’s not a lot of visible diversity.

The fourth big opportunity we’ve identified is involvement and engagement. It seems like we’ve got this core group of people who are like the EdTA diehards, and they’re at the festival and they’re at the conference, and they’re volunteering for this and they’re volunteering for that, and they’re in the Hall of Fame. They’re wonderful people, and we would die without them. Then there’s a whole lot of people who are kind of more peripherally involved. They use the Thespian points in their school, they may or may not go to a state conference, they probably read the magazine, but they’re not as emotionally and physically involved and engaged as that core group. And I think the more we can get of that involvement, the more we’ll be able to get done, and the more impact we’ll be able to have on the field when it comes to advocacy. The question is, how do we ignite all these folks who are kind of in a more passive role right now into a more active role?

What is your personal vision for where this organization will be and where school theatre will be five years from now, 10 years from now?
Right now, about 50% of high schools have theatre in the curriculum. And it’s under threat; it’s in a defensive mode. In public elementary schools, only about 4% of students have regular access to theatre. It’s almost nonexistent. So, my vision — and I don’t know if it’s five, 10, or 50 years — is that the majority of K-12 schools have theatre education in the curriculum, and that it’s expected and valued and recognized.

In some schools, everybody is involved in the theatre program and the whole community is behind it and it’s huge, and the football players are involved, and the choir teacher is happy about it. Then there are other schools where it’s this tiny thing in the corner, if it exists at all. I would love to see the majority of schools have thriving theatre programs, starting with high schools, then working our way down to the lower levels.

I think that’s the end goal. It’s hard to figure out how to make that happen, but I feel like the stronger the organization is, the bigger we get, the more resources we have, the more people we get involved, the more impact we can have on how decisions about school theatre programs are made. Some of them are made at a community school board level, and it’s one passionate teacher that turns it around.

Advocacy work needs to happen at every level. There’s a community and school board district level, there’s the state level, and there’s the national level. So, I feel that the stronger the organization is, the more we can have an impact at all levels. We can have a bigger impact in D.C. if someday we have an office there, and we have a professional lobbyist, and I have direct relationships with members of Congress. If you see where music is in the curriculum, they’ve made some strides, and we can look to get to that same level nationally.

At the local level, we need to give teachers opportunities to be part of a network, so they don’t feel like they’re on an island. They can go online and converse with other teachers all around the country, and we give them stuff to help them make their school board presentation, and their peers are rooting them on. And at the state level, it would be great if we had the staff resources to support our chapter directors on state issues like teacher certification and curriculum standards.

You sound like a person who is happy with the choice she made a year ago.
I’m very happy. I really feel like it’s a great fit. Like any job, I have tough days; I get stressed. But in general, when I come to work every day, when I go to bed at night, I feel very grateful this worked out.

This story is excerpted from the September 2012 print version of Dramatics. Learn about the print magazine and other Thespian benefits on the International Thespian Society website.

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Passion for the Work appeared first on Dramatics Magazine Online.

Thespian Throwback: Over 2 Million Served

Don Corathers — Thu, 21 Nov 2019 22:09:06 +0000

In 2009, the International Thespian Society reached a new membership milestone: the induction of the organization’s 2 millionth member: Raymond “R.J.” Harding.

THE THESPIAN SOCIETY is now indisputably the largest ensemble cast in the history of theatre. The 2 millionth Thespian, a 15-year-old sophomore at Ola High School in McDonough, Georgia, named Raymond “R.J.” Harding, was inducted as a member of Thespian Troupe 7321 this fall, joining a line of theatre students that extends back to a small West Virginia town in 1929.

R.J. Harding in classroom scene work with Rachel Ward at Ola High School. Photo by Tracina Wyatt.

Many of R.J.’s 1,999,999 predecessors have gone on to do important work in the performing arts — among them Tom Hanks, John Goodman, Goldie Hawn, Stephen Schwartz, Dick Van Dyke, and Madonna — and other Thespians have distinguished themselves in virtually every field of human endeavor.

Actually, if it were not for a Thespian of a previous generation — Ola High School principal Ross Iddings — R.J. might not have had the opportunity to become a milestone member.

When Ola drama teacher Cynthia Sigler started her job at the then-two-year-old school in 2007, Iddings called her into his office. “He was a Thespian,” Sigler said. “And he told me, ‘I want a Thespian troupe here. I want a full drama program. Let’s get this thing going.’”

Sigler now runs a program that involves 150 of the school’s 1,700 students. She teaches two dance classes and four theatre courses. R.J. first got interested in theatre as a middle school student, when he and a friend prepared a scene for an in-school competition.

At Ola, he had a small role in Grease as a freshman and has worked on one-acts for Georgia Thespian events. He loves doing improv and works as a technician on lights and scenery, and he dabbles in making short films with friends. Outside the theatre department, he’s an enthusiastic member of the Ola marching band’s drumline. He said he likes acting well enough that he might consider it for a life’s work but is also thinking about other options, including joining his family’s plumbing business.

As the 2 millionth inductee, R.J. will attend the 2010 International Thespian Festival as a guest of the International Thespian Society. Executive Director Michael J. Pietz said a special observation of the membership milestone is planned for ITF.

This story appeared in the January 2010 print version of Dramatics. Learn about the print magazine and other Thespian benefits on the International Thespian Society website.

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Changing the Tune, Changing the Time, 2000-19

Anita Martin — Tue, 19 Nov 2019 17:04:14 +0000

To celebrate 90 years of the International Thespian Society (and this magazine, originally called The High School Thespian), we at Dramatics offer this five-part series tracking highlights of our institutional memory, two decades at a time. Follow and add to the ongoing celebration at #ITS90th and #ThespianForever.

THE FACT THAT hysteria surrounding a computer-based non-disaster underscored the dawn of the 21st century (search “Y2K” for details) seems appropriate. The first two decades of the new millennium heralded the rapid proliferation of social media, smartphones, and “fake news,” changing the way we respond to our world — including its very real disasters, from 9/11 and a global financial crisis to natural catastrophes — and fueling grassroots movements such as Occupy Wall Street, Me Too, and March for Our Lives.

During this time, the International Thespian Society continued to grow, celebrating its 75th birthday in 2004, opening the 2005 International Thespian Festival with the first national company production in more than 20 years (Ragtime: School Edition), and inducting the 2 millionth Thespian, Raymond “R.J.” Harding of Troupe 7321 (Ola High School, McDonough, Georgia) in 2009. The present decade also brought a change in EdTA’s leadership (to current Executive Director Julie Cohen Theobald in 2011) and another move for EdTA headquarters (to Cincinnati’s Norwood neighborhood last year).

In between, the organization saw the rise of the Next Generation Works program, as Thespian Musicalworks, Thespian Filmworks, and Thespian Criticworks joined the original Thespian Playworks program; an increase in both EdTA teacher services and theatre education advocacy efforts; and the launch of the Educational Theatre Foundation, EdTA’s fundraising arm, in 2017. Finally, in 2019, we found our online home, Dramatics.org, letting us share more Thespian stories, plus photo galleries, videos, polls, quizzes, and more.

2009: Raymond “R.J.” Harding is the 2 millionth inducted Thespian.

2011: Julie Cohen Theobald becomes executive director of EdTA. Photo by Don Corathers.

2012: EdTA and Utah State University release study of eductional theatre in the U.S.

2013: Thespian Musicalworks premieres at ITF with Love at First Site. Photo by Susan Doremus.

2015: EdTA launches JumpStart Theatre. Photo from the 2017 James N. Gamble Montessori production of Annie Jr. by Susan Doremus.

2017: EdTA establishes the Educational Theatre Foundation. Photo by Harper Lee.

2018: Thespian Criticworks and Thespian Filmworks launch at ITF.

The world and ITS have both changed tremendously since 1929, but through all nine decades, at least one thing has remained steady: the power of theatre education to build confidence, creativity, and compassion for better communities.

Thank you for being part of our 90-year tradition. Share your personal Thespian journey with us.

This story appeared in the December 2019 print version of Dramatics. Learn about the print magazine and other Thespian benefits on the International Thespian Society website.

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Thespian Throwback: A Century Spinning

Don Corathers — Thu, 14 Nov 2019 21:42:22 +0000

The International Thespian Society celebrated its 75th birthday in 2004, opening the 2005 International Thespian Festival with the first national company production in more than 20 years, Ragtime: School Edition.

A FEW MOMENTS before it was time for the Thespian national cast of Ragtime: School Edition to go onstage for the first of two performances at this year’s Thespian Festival, there were visitors in the crowded dressing suite. Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty, who wrote the words and music the 41 students would soon be singing, had dropped by to wish the cast well.

“So, you had 18 days of rehearsal, is that right?” Ahrens asked.

“Sixteen,” various cast members replied. “Sixteen days.”

“I think originally it took us 18 days to get the opening number right,” Flaherty said. “The fact that you did that and an additional three hours of material is very impressive.”

The 2005 International Thespian Festival national cast production of Ragtime. Photo by R. Bruhn.

The national cast production of Ragtime, featuring Thespians from 29 high schools in 14 states, was designed to help put an exclamation point on the Educational Theatre Association’s 75th anniversary celebration. The production plan, a variation on the three successful Thespian national cast shows directed by Robert Johnson in the early and middle 1980s, came with a compressed rehearsal schedule and daunting logistical challenges built in.

The paths that led each of the 41 members of the national cast to this moment in a dressing room at the University of Nebraska’s Lied Center stretched back all the way to a series of regional auditions that began in the fall of 2003. Three hundred students participated in auditions at Thespian conferences in California, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Texas, and Nebraska. A hundred were invited to three days of callbacks at the 2004 International Thespian Festival, and a cast of 40 (later expanded by one) was selected from that group.

The 16 days of rehearsal came in three sessions last spring. There were two three-day weekends in March and May at the Las Vegas Academy of Performing Arts, where co-directors Glenn Edwards and Gerald Born and most of their production team work. After the mid-May session, most of the cast members didn’t see each other again until early June, when they rehearsed for seven days and did three performances in Las Vegas, spent two days getting the show moved and ready in Lincoln, and performed it twice for International Thespian Festival audiences. Later that week, they worked two days in an Omaha recording studio laying down the vocal tracks for a cast album that Music Theatre International plans to distribute as part of its director’s guide for the school version of the show.

Yes, the national cast production was a huge amount of work for everybody involved in it, Edwards acknowledged. “But it was worth every minute. It was really special. There was really a combination of things that made it special. The show itself. The team of people we had working with the kids. And the cast. It was so great to have 41 kids who were so dedicated to it and so proud of it. These were kids who were playing leads at their own schools, and yet here they were cast in the ensemble and proud of it. You just know that when you have that many great kids working on something, it’s going to be a great experience.”

When Edwards and Michael Peitz, executive director of EdTA, began talking in summer 2003 about doing a national cast show as part of the organization’s anniversary celebration, they decided early on they wanted a musical that would feature a racially diverse cast. They found it very quickly: It happened that MTI was looking for a way to showcase its new school edition of Ragtime, the 1998 Ahrens-Flaherty-Terrence McNally musical based on E. L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel.

Edwards put together his production team and went to work. His Las Vegas Academy colleague Born would co-direct, with Nancy Andersen as musical director and John Morris as technical director and lighting and scenic designer, both of them also on the faculty at LVA. Tammy Pessagno, a Las Vegas choreographer and dancer who has worked on many of Edwards’ academy shows, would handle the dance numbers. Terry McGonigle, director of technical theatre studies for Gwinnett County Schools near Atlanta, signed on to do costumes. Robert Connor, who joined the LVA faculty last year, was added to the production team as associate director in the spring.

One of the lessons of the experience, Edwards said, was “You can’t be overprepared for something like this. You really have to prepare and plan. The logistics are daunting. Just the national cast logistics are daunting, and Ragtime is a big, complicated show.”

A three-hour pageant that examines the yeasty and turbulent early years of the 20th century in the United States, Ragtime focuses on the stories of a penniless Jewish immigrant and his daughter, a WASPy family in the suburbs of New York City, and an African-American piano player named Coalhouse Walker and his fiancée and child. In a way that became clearer as the production took shape, it was a brilliant choice for a national cast show: The process of assembling a multiracial company from all over the United States and forging its members into a creative community held resonant echoes of the musical’s melting pot themes. The cast might easily be the great-great-grandchildren of Tateh, Mother, Coalhouse, and Sarah, and as they rehearsed the show and got to know one another, they came to understand that.

Ragtime is also a potent history lesson. Its principal characters share the stage with Harry Houdini, Henry Ford, Evelyn Nesbit, Emma Goldman, and Booker T. Washington, and the provocative central strand of the story confronts the hatred and violence that is as much a part of the American past as benevolence and invention. The show follows Coalhouse Walker’s journey as he is first enraged by the racist vandalism of his Model T and then radicalized when Sarah, the mother of his child, is beaten to death by police.

“We had some intense circle talks after rehearsals about what the show meant, and how each of us would deal with the situation that Coalhouse and Sarah were in,” said Jared Brown, who played Tateh, the immigrant ragpicker who eventually becomes a movie mogul. “We talked about it a lot.”

It was on the third day of rehearsal, Edwards said, that he began to feel pretty good about what the national cast show could be. “The Sunday night run-through at the end of our first rehearsal weekend was when I knew it was going to work,” he said. “We were on a bare stage with just chairs, and it was fantastic. Everybody was weeping at the end. After that, we realized it was our job not to screw it up.”

The national cast of the 2005 International Thespian Festival production of Ragtime. Photo by R. Bruhn.

Cast members said they learned some important lessons about professional discipline while rehearsing the show. “It was a real eye-opener to the professional world for me,” said Brown, who graduated form Hartford (Washington) High School this spring. “That’s the closest I’m going to get to working on a touring Broadway show, for a while at least.”

The compressed rehearsal schedule meant there “was no time for us to second-guess ourselves,” he said. “In some rehearsals, though I knew my lines, I realized that I hadn’t really done all the work to establish the intent behind the line yet. I felt guilty about sleeping when I could have been working on my character.”

Lisa Weiner, who played Mother, had a different perspective on working and sleeping. “This is going to sound funny,” she said, “but it’s so humid where I live and so dry in Las Vegas that going through that climate change every time I went out for a rehearsal session was really hard for me.” A spring graduate of Pennsbury High School near Philadelphia, Weiner said, “Dealing with that and the pressure that we were under both physically and psychologically really taught me to be a smart performer. There were lots of parties that we were invited to during rehearsals, because the academy was graduating, but I knew I had to take care of myself and get my rest. I wasn’t going to ruin this experience by wearing myself down partying.”

Claire Longest, who graduated from New Albany (Indiana) High School in the spring and played Evelyn Nesbit, said the hardest part for her was the fragmented rehearsal schedule. “I hated leaving every time,” she said. “Every rehearsal was like ‘Oh, we’re getting there, we’re getting there’ and then we all had to go away. It was frustrating not to be able to keep working.”

Everybody says it was over way too soon. Once the show was ready in the middle of June it was a fast ride to the end: three performances at LVA (which Edwards included in his 16-day rehearsal count), then two days to move everything to Lincoln, load in, build, tech, run through it once, and show it to an audience at 3 and 8 p.m. By the time the 2005 Thespian Festival was fully up and running, the national cast Ragtime was history.

Both performances came off flawlessly, except for a moment of quiet panic when the computer running the digital score locked up during the second show. (For economy and simplicity, Edwards used digital synthesized music augmented by a live rhythm section.) In the pit, the two human players kept the rhythmic line going without dropping a stitch, and Jared Brown, who was singing “Buffalo Nickel Photoplay Inc.” when it happened, sailed right through it. The computer was rebooted before the start of the next song and most of the audience, according to Edwards, had no idea there was a problem. “But we were dying,” he said.

The audience response was sensitive to the nuances of the story and wildly enthusiastic. Christy Clark, playing Sarah, remembers the scene when Father arrives home from his polar expedition. There’s a swift mood change when he discovers a black woman and her child have been living in his house. “The audience suddenly got so quiet then,’” Clark, from Tri-Cities High School in Atlanta, said. “The way all those people responded to the show, it was the most incredible audience. They made me feel like we were doing our jobs, doing what we had rehearsed for.”

“There’s nothing like performing for that audience,” said Edwards, who has directed 10 ITF main stage shows and insists Ragtime is his last one. “There’s a level of empathy that you don’t encounter anyplace else, because they’re peers. And because everybody in the audience knows what went into the performance they’re seeing. I tell my kids when we spend eight hours working on a couple of measures of a musical number that nobody in the audience is going to know how much work went into getting that moment right. Well, in this audience they do know. Nobody responds like an International Thespian Festival audience.”

The sweetest reviews came from Ahrens and Flaherty, who were back downstairs after the second performance. (In the interim, they had the unusual experience, for a composer and a lyricist, of receiving prolonged standing ovations when they were introduced to the two Ragtime audiences.)

“We were really impressed, first of all, with your commitment to the story,” Flaherty told the cast. “Every moment of the story was crystal clear. Your passion, your focus, and your commitment were wonderful to watch.”

“You guys are extraordinary, each and every one of you,” Ahrens said. “We are very honored to have been here to witness this.”

Many of the cast members graduated from high school this spring and will be sitting in their first college classes this month. Jared Brown is going to the University of Evansville, Lisa Weiner to the University of Cincinnati CollegeConservatory of Music. Christy Clark will be at Wright State University. Claire Longest is heading to Otterbein.

During the two months since the festival, a lot of them have kept in touch by phone and by posting to chat spaces like Myspace.com, where there’s a Ragtime cast page. Brown predicts the friendships that formed during Ragtime rehearsals will be enduring ones. “There’s a lot of us going to schools in the Midwest,” he said, “so it won’t be that hard for us to get together. And it’s good that Devere [Rogers, who played Coalhouse] is going to NYU, so we’ll have a place to stay in New York.”

At EdTA, Peitz considers the first national cast adventure in 18 years a great success. “We gave our audience a memorable event to mark our 75th anniversary. We showcased the work of a lot of talented Thespians. We gave the 41 cast members something they’ll remember all their lives, and provided a rich learning experience not just to the students who were cast but also to all 300 who participated in the auditions. We’d love to do it again if the conditions are right.”

This story appeared in the September 2005 print version of Dramatics. Learn about the print magazine and other Thespian benefits on the International Thespian Society website.

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Thespian Throwback: Diamond Jubilee

Don Corathers — Fri, 08 Nov 2019 02:37:08 +0000

As the celebration of the 90th anniversary of the founding of the International Thespian Society draws to a close, take a look back at Dramatics’ coverage of the festivities surrounding the organization’s 75th birthday in 2004.

THE EDUCATIONAL THEATRE ASSOCIATION kicked off the celebration of its 75th anniversary in July with a Homecoming Convention in Cincinnati and will wrap it up next June with the world premiere production of a new school version of Ragtime, featuring a cast of Thespians from all over the United States.

In between those two events, the association is encouraging its members to participate in a grassroots observance of the milestone by contributing to the Thespian Spirit Quilt, which will be assembled from squares submitted by member troupes and displayed at the 2005 Thespian Festival. The association is also making available commemorative announcements that can be included in programs during the anniversary year and encouraging Thespian alumni to share reminiscences of their school theatre experiences on a special page at the EdTA website.

A performance by nonagenarian ingénue Kitty Carlisle Hart, who as it happens was 18 years old when the Thespian Society was founded in 1929, was a highlight of the Cincinnati convention. Mrs. Hart made her Broadway debut in 1933 and later married playwright Moss Hart, who, incidentally, is the co-author of the most-produced play in the history of the Thespian Society’s production survey. She counts among her friends just about everybody who worked in the American theatre during the past 70 years, and many of them — George S. Kaufman, Irving Berlin, Harpo Marx, George Gershwin, and others — turned up in the stories she told in the course of performing My Life on the Wicked Stage, a revue of show tunes and standards.

Ragtime: School Edition is a new version of the Stephen Flaherty-Lynn Ahrens-Terrence McNally musical, commissioned by Music Theatre International for the educational theatre market. The world premiere, performed by a cast of Thespians from all over the United States, will mark the other end of the anniversary celebration at next year’s Thespian Festival in June. A cast of 36 Thespians was selected in a series of auditions held at state Thespian conferences last winter and spring and a three-day callback session at the 2004 Thespian Festival. They’ll rehearse next spring under the direction of Glenn Edwards at Las Vegas Academy, perform a couple of warmup shows for Las Vegas audiences, and open the 2005 Thespian Festival at the University of Nebraska on June 21.

The national-cast production of Ragtime: School Edition is underwritten by a major gift from Procter & Gamble Productions, with costume support by Dodger Costumes, and is being produced by special arrangement with Music Theatre International.

This story appeared in the September 2004 print version of Dramatics. Learn about the print magazine and other Thespian benefits on the International Thespian Society website.

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Thespian Throwback: New Home for ’95 Thespian Festival

Don Corathers — Thu, 31 Oct 2019 22:01:26 +0000

In 2019, the International Thespian Festival marked a milestone: the end of a successful 25-year run at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. In 2020, ITF will move to Indiana University Bloomington, once again giving the event room to grow and flourish. For this Thespian Throwback, Dramatics rewound to the last time EdTA announced a big ITF move — when UNL was selected as the new site for the 1995 event.

AFTER MONTHS OF SITE-SHOPPING and consideration, the International Thespian Society has announced a change of scene for the 1995 Thespian Festival. Having gathered at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, for the past 24 years, ITS is taking its show on the road and a few states to the left — to the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, to be precise.

Several factors weighed in the decision to move the festival to Nebraska, said Nancy Brown, festival chair. The location is almost perfectly central (Lincoln is only about 125 miles from the geographic center of the continental United States) and is more easily accessible than Muncie by air, train, and interstate highway. The university’s theatre facilities are convenient and first-rate, and its residence halls are completely air-conditioned, something that anyone who attended the 1994 Thespian Festival will be thrilled to learn. The city (population 200,000) is home to an Equity theatre company — Nebraska Rep — and offers good shopping and dining near campus.

Main stage events will take place in the Lied Center for Performing Arts, a 2,290-seat venue built in 1989. Its backstage area connects to two smaller theatres, Kimball Hall (849 seats) and the black box Johnny Carson Theatre (300 seats). These performance areas are soundproof and have adequate support facilities to run three shows simultaneously. Workshop facilities, Brown said, are more plentiful and suited to theatre training.

“We’ve had a good run at Ball State,” said Brown. “We’ve put on some great festivals there. But Nebraska is offering us an opportunity to grow and take this event to the next level, and we can’t pass that up. We’re very excited.”

Unless you live near Muncie or Lincoln, the move will probably not substantially affect the cost of attending the festival. Transportation costs will go up for some, down for others, depending on where they’re coming from.

This story appeared in the September 1994 print version of Dramatics. Learn about the print magazine and other Thespian benefits on the International Thespian Society website.

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Thespian Throwback: Blood on the Pages

Don Corathers — Thu, 24 Oct 2019 16:36:10 +0000

At the 2019 International Thespian Festival, the Thespian Playworks program marked 25 years of celebrating and nurturing original writing by and for high school students. In the decades since the program was founded in 1994, Thespian Playworks has been expanded as the Next Generation Works suite of writers’ programs, which now also includes Thespian Musicalworks, Thespian Filmworks, and Thespian Criticworks.

Dramatics connected with the original Thespian Playworks writers the fall following their Thespian Festival debuts to get feedback regarding the impact of the program.

TWO NIGHTS BEFORE his play Flambée was to be performed in front of an audience for the first time, Jim Buescher had a dream. He was sitting in the theatre watching the staged reading, and about halfway through, the actors stopped saying his lines and began uttering streams of obscenities and gibberish. Every member of the audience turned in their seats to stare at the playwright.

“I’m glad I can at least figure out what it means,” Buescher wrote in his production journal the next day. “I could have dreamed I was tearing off my skin or urinating in a microwave or something and then I’d be twice as concerned and nervous tomorrow.”

The published scripts for the original 1994 Thespian Playworks finalists.

It’s no surprise that Buescher’s work found its way into his dreams. He was one of four student writers who were selected from a field of 40 entrants and invited to participate in the first-ever Thespian Playworks program at the 1994 Thespian Festival at Ball State University. It was an intense week of developmental readings designed to give the students a taste of the process a professional playwright goes through when a new play is workshopped.

The writers spent the week watching directors run companies of student actors through rehearsals of their shows; consulting with dramaturgs; and writing, rewriting, and rewriting some more. At the end of the week, the plays were presented in script-in-hand staged readings before a Thespian Festival audience.

The four Playworks finalists and their plays:

Buescher, a 1994 graduate of Penn Manor High School in Holtwood, Pennsylvania. In his play Flambée, a writer creates his own made-to-order world, including the woman of his dreams, and then has to contend with the consequences.
Alayna Dusenbery, a spring graduate of Aztec (New Mexico) High School, who brought Puppet’s Strings, a dark exploration of a disturbed child’s delusions.
Christopher McNeil, who was a senior at Arroyo Grande (California) High School when he wrote God and Poker. The play tells the story of a young man whose theological curiosity involves him in a high stakes card game with Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, and Krishna, among other adventures.
Doug Rand, a 1994 graduate of Stanton College Prep in Jacksonville, Florida. Rand’s play The Idiot and the Oddity sends up pretty much the entire canon of Greek literature and mythology.

The Playworks professional staff included directors Carol Patterson, Madelon Horvath, and Jane Armitage, and playwrights Steve Gregg and Kira Obolensky, serving as dramaturgs.

The people who put Playworks together — Jane Armitage, Steve Gregg, and me — weren’t sure what to expect when we published the call for scripts last fall. We and others associated with the Educational Theatre Association, notably president Joe Burnsworth, had been talking for a long time about establishing a student playwriting program, and two years ago the board gave the proposal a green light. The program would be a memorial to former Assistant Executive Director Doug Finney, who died in 1992.

One reason we felt it was important for the Thespian Society to support the development of young playwrights was also one of the reasons we were a little uneasy about the program. We suspected that most American high schools haven’t been doing a very good job of teaching people about writing, let alone teaching people about writing plays. We weren’t sure what we would get.

What we got was some wildly imaginative, highly sophisticated work. A play that wonders, wisely and hilariously, just what God is up to. A full-tilt-boogie parody of everything the ancient Greeks held dear. A meditation on the line that separates sanity from whatever’s on the other side. And a play that revisits the territory Luigi Pirandello explored 70 years ago, and finds something new to do there.

“I was surprised at how good the plays were, even before they were workshopped,” Gregg said. “And I was very pleasantly surprised by how much work the writers did on them during the week we had together, how much better they got.”

In an early meeting, the writers talked about how their plays came to be. Alayna Dusenbery wrote Puppet’s Strings for a classroom assignment. Jim Buescher was writing on assignment, too, but Flambée had been simmering for quite a while. Chris McNeil wrote God and Poker and a couple of other plays because he thought the exercise would give him a new perspective on his work as an actor. Doug Rand had written The Idiot and the Oddity two years ago for a student one-act festival at his school, won a Florida playwriting competition with it, and didn’t learn that former Florida Thespian director Deb Barnum had submitted it to Playworks until we called to tell him he was a semi-finalist.

Plays were cast in an open call during the first day of the Thespian Festival. That was another thing we need not have wasted any time worrying about: We were casting, after all, from possibly the richest pool of young acting talent that ever gets together in one place.

“I don’t think any of these kids had ever worked on a new play before, and yet almost all of them were instantly tuned in to what we were doing, and to what the writers needed,” Armitage said.

“The actors that are reading the script are dynamite,” Doug Rand marveled to his journal after the first read-through of his play The Idiot and the Oddity. “Some of the characterizations were almost instantaneous — during a semi-cold reading!”

Rand took full advantage of his cast’s imagination and talent for improvisation. A key scene late in the play takes place on the Isolated Nether-Island of Infamous Evil Greek Women, introducing the protagonist (whose name is, of course, Protagonis) to Clytemnestra, Medea, Circe, Helen, and Pandora. Rand knew the scene needed some serious attention; he began referring to it as “The Void.”

“On the third day, it was time to read that scene, but I hadn’t had time to work all the problems out of it,” he said. “I didn’t have a scene done, but I knew I didn’t want it to be staged like it was. So, I just gave the actors some ideas, and they just went with it. All kinds of really cool things happened.”

From Rand’s journal entry about that day’s work: “It was great! The actors would improv their way up to a point, after which the action disintegrated. So, Jane [Armitage] would offer suggestions, back it up, and replay until the old hang-up was overtaken and a new one was discovered. Fresh, hysterical ideas came flying in …

“I got a great sense of how the scene could work in new ways, with more movement and business and action and conflict than before. The exercise helped me see ways of making the scene more dramatic, not literary and static. And it was a wellspring of great ideas to boot.

“Now, if only I actually revised the scene …”

Over the next two days he did. When the writers weren’t observing rehearsals, meeting with their directors and dramaturgs, or attending festival main stage shows, they were either eating, sleeping, or hunched over a keyboard in a Ball State computer lab. One of the lessons of Playworks was about the collaborative quality of writing for the theatre. Another was about how much hard work a playwright has to do after he thinks his play is finished.

Saturday was showtime. The audience is the last unknown quantity in the theatrical equation, the mysterious pudding that the proof is supposed to be in. A half-hour before the staged readings were scheduled to begin, the playwrights were, variously, somewhere between bad anxiety and exhilaration. The stakes had gone up some the day before when the readings were moved from the cozy black box Strother Theatre to Pruis Hall, a cavernous, 700 seat recital space, to accommodate the anticipated crowd.

Obolensky and Gregg had taken pains to make certain the writers understood that they were under no obligation to make changes in their scripts. “We didn’t want them to rewrite for the sake of rewriting,” Gregg said. “We wanted to give them the opportunity to see and hear their plays, and decide for themselves what, if anything, needed to be done.”

Still, three of the four plays were substantially changed between Tuesday and Saturday. Buescher systematically brought his actors new pages every day. McNeil wrote an entirely new scene and a revised ending. Rand, whose play was scheduled to be performed at four o’clock Saturday, handed his cast a rewritten major scene, replacing The Void with his response to their Thursday improvs, at three-fifteen.

Audience reaction to all four plays was warm and intelligent. They laughed and clapped in the right places and asked smart questions and said nice things during the discussion periods that followed each reading. Just the same, seeing his play in front of strangers for the first time was a wrenching experience for at least one playwright. From Buescher’s journal:

“I was terrified when I sat there waiting for the play to start. You have no control once the play starts, none. It is all in the actors’ hands, and you pray to God they don’t make a mistake. Every joke that the audience doesn’t get makes you feel like dying. It’s like taking the SAT times 20 and then realizing that you forgot all your pencils at home.

“It went well, I think.”

“For me, the best thing about Playworks was that by the time it ended, I had more to do than when I started,” said Rand. “At least, I was aware of more to do.” He’s at Harvard, still circling around a major. Will he write another play? “I hope so,” he said.

“I’m very happy about what happened in Muncie,” Buescher said. “It was a wonderful tool to polish Flambée. I want to get home and assemble all the ideas I scribbled on napkins and scraps of paper into a well-written one-act.”

Buescher is at Wake Forest now. He’s considering a theatre major, but for now he’s more interested in acting than playwriting. (About three hours before the staged reading of Flambée, he learned he had won a Thespian scholarship on the strength of his acting audition.) “I learned a lot more about acting, being on the other side of the stage,” he said. “I think that was the most valuable thing. It was wonderful seeing something I had written come to life, but even more important than that was what I learned about acting by watching actors work on my play.

“When I feel the need to,” he said, “I probably will write another play.”

“It was tremendous,” Dusenbery said. “I thought it was a really great learning experience. I’m telling all my friends who are still in high school to write a play and submit it next year.” She’s now at the University of New Mexico, undecided on a major but interested in continuing writing.

McNeil added a chorus to God and Poker after he got home, solving a tricky staging problem, and tinkered with the ending some more. “For me, the process hasn’t stopped,” he said. Not long ago he learned the play had been named a finalist in a California young playwrights’ competition and will be produced at the Old Globe in San Diego in November. He’s in the actor training program at the Pacific Conservatory of Performing Arts, and he likes the way his acting and writing fit together. “Playworks made me a better actor,” he said. “It made me a more respectful actor.

“But the important thing is that it hit me in the head that it’s possible to become a playwright. I thought of it before as something you’d have to spend years in college and take a few hundred courses to prepare for. Now I realize that’s not true. It’s like acting. It’s something you learn in the doing.

“That’s an important thing to learn. And it’s contagious. Three or four guys who came with me saw what was going on and said, ‘I can do that.’ And now they’re writing plays.”

This story appeared in the October 1994 print version of Dramatics. Learn about the print magazine and other Thespian benefits on the International Thespian Society website.

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Thespian Throwback: Diversify

André De Shields — Thu, 17 Oct 2019 21:10:13 +0000

Veteran Broadway actor André De Shields earned a Tony Award in 2019 for his role as Hermes in Hadestown. In 1996, he was a guest of the Educational Theatre Association’s National Conference in New York for a panel discussion on cultural diversity in theatre education. At the time, according to a survey conducted five years earlier, fewer than 2 percent of the theatre teachers in the United States were African American, and about 1.5 percent were members of other ethnic minorities. Here’s what De Shields said then about diversity.

HERE’S AN IDEA that I used to think I understood so specifically, and now it’s getting a little amorphous for me: this idea of cultural diversity in theatre education. I look at the group in front of me, and I think I can presume that we are all teachers of some sort, mentors of some sort.

I don’t have any problem with the concept of cultural. We’re all educated; I’ve got a B.A. from the University of Wisconsin and an M.A. from New York University. I don’t have a problem with the idea of theatre; that is where I make my living, and that is where I’m sure many of us go for our entertainment, for our diversion, for our enlightenment. I don’t have a problem with the idea of education. That certainly is one of the two basic tenets of the theatre: to entertain and to educate.

So, what word did I leave out? Anybody? Diversity. I have a problem with the concept of diversity. If I had a camera and I took a snapshot of this room, the room would look white. Not diverse. Now of course, we have an African American lady here, an African American gentleman there, an African American lady here. But if you look at this room, it looks homogenous, which is the exact opposite of diverse.

So, I say, problem number one lies somewhere with those of us who are trying to lead the way for diversity. Those of us who consider ourselves the pioneers in cultural diversity. Those of us who think we are making a difference. If we are making a difference, then it should show among us. It has to show among us. Otherwise, we will be accused of hypocrisy. Otherwise we will be accused of not practicing what we preach. Because what we’re doing right now is preaching to the choir, to the converted. And we can stroke each other and slap each other on the back and say, “Wow, you said some trenchant things. You really have some progressive ideas. Boy, are you forward looking.”

But we are not those people who need the medicine, who need the help, who need the change.

I now say so often because I want it to reverberate in our minds: In 1903 — which every year becomes a more perfect bookend because we are now in 1996, we are now four years from the millennium, four years from the 21st century — in 1903, W.E.B. DuBois said, “The problem of the 20th century is the crisis of the color line.” He said that in 1903, and here we are about to change millennia, and we haven’t really addressed or resolved that crisis. We revere Dr. Martin Luther King. We revere Mahatma Gandhi. We revere any number of human rights and civil rights avatars. But in our personal lives, in our specific interactions, we have not carried that lesson to the point of changing this land, the United States of America, which is the most diverse culture on this planet. But our diversity is as separate, segregated, and unequal as our memories of colonial America, when society in America had everything to do with the politics of plantocracy.

When I talk to African American groups, and when I talk to my African American friends, I use the term “slave mentality,” because I want us to understand that part of this idea of progressivism has to do with letting go of these ideas that somebody did something to me and therefore I am disabled and I cannot achieve the way other people achieve. My slice of the American pie is necessarily going to be smaller because I have been handicapped. My dream is not going to be as large as your dream; I have this emotional scar because my grandfather, five times removed, was a slave. That’s slave mentality, pointing to you and saying, “Ah, You’re the reason I can’t get over this hump.”

I’m beginning to understand now, however, that it isn’t just those of us whose skin is of a different hue who suffer from slave mentality. Obviously if you are the progeny of the oppressor, of the master, you must be dealing with some kind of slave mentality too, or we wouldn’t have to come to these kinds of seminars. We wouldn’t have to come and hold these kinds of colloquia. We wouldn’t have to be, as I said before, preaching to the converted.

There’s another kind of separation that we need to heal, and that is, although we put the words together often, the implied separation between education and theatre, or theatre and education. I do a lot of work as a distinguished visiting professor, which means that I go to schools like New York University, Southern Methodist University, the University of Michigan, Morehouse College, Buffalo State College, where the young people who want to pursue careers in the performing arts are trained to be actors, directors, playwrights, administrators, etc.

There is — we talk about the invisible ceiling that we hit in this society sometimes — there is an invisible wall that separates what happens in the academic circle from what happens in the commercial circle, what happens in the marketplace. But if you talk to any of the people in charge, they will tell you that the program is designed to put the young people in the marketplace, to make them highly competitive.

We must restore the performing arts to education on every level, long before we get to college, long before we get to the university. We must restore arts to our educational curricula. Otherwise we are cheating our young people and we are lying to ourselves, to think that someone is going to get through 12, 16, 20 years of education, come out a well-rounded individual, a responsible citizen, a happy person, with a concept of personal success, but has never had an opportunity to express him or herself in a way beyond those things that are in a textbook, beyond those things that ignore his or her soul, essence, heart.

I make this test when I speak to young people: I ask them about the Preamble of the Constitution. Not only do they have no idea what the word preamble means, but they don’t even know what the Constitution is. So, I remind them. Anybody want to help me? [Widespread mumbling of the Preamble in the audience: “We the people …”]

And what about the Declaration of Independence? [More mumbling: “When in the course of human events …”]

And what about this marvelous concept: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, and that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

I am one who believes you cannot have life, you cannot have liberty, and you cannot know how to pursue happiness if you have not been exposed to arts in your education.

This story appeared in the October 1996 print version of Dramatics.

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