By Rick Peterson
Lawrence Today magazine, Summer 2005
As
curtain calls go, it would be hard to find one more deserving than the extended
collective bow the Lawrence theatre arts department enjoyed
during the 2004-05 academic year. In a celebration that has been part tribute,
part thank you,
the department
has basked in the glow of the 75th anniversary of its own humble beginnings
as well as the 100th anniversary of the birth of its visionary founder and
long-time guiding force, Ted Cloak (pictured, right), who nurtured it during
a 40-year career on the Lawrence faculty.
Where Harvard had its Hasty Pudding society, Lawrence had the Sunset Players,
who performed plays under the direction of Lucile Welty in the 1920s. Former
Sunset members would likely be astounded to see how their simple shows have
evolved into today’s full complement of departmental productions, covering
the theatrical gamut of main-stage classics, full-orchestra operas, musical
theatre, dance concerts, student-written plays, and even theatre of-the-air
taping sessions of classic radio programs, all performed in the span of a
single academic year.
The anniversary year
The department paid homage to its milestone anniversary with a series of
events throughout the academic year designed to commemorate the occasion.
Among them
were a production of First Lady, a 1930s political satire about
the role manipulative women play in presidential politics that provided a
period
piece from the
department’s founding era, and a panel presentation in May — appropriately
held in the theatre named in Cloak’s honor — that featured a
50-year arc of Lawrence graduates who shared their personal reflections on
the theatre
department’s impact.
Highlighting
the 75th-anniversary celebration was the Fred Gaines New Play Festival, named
for the former holder of the James G. and Ethel M. Barber
Professorship in Theatre and Drama (pictured, left), who retired in 2000
after 23 years in the department.
Over the course of two Winter Term weekends, more than 40 students combined
their writing, directing, acting, and technical talents to stage eight original
plays, each in some way focusing on the pleasures and pains of love and the
arts
.
“New play production was very important when I was a student here,” says
Timothy X. Troy, ’85, associate
professor of theatre arts and J. Thomas and Julie Esch Hurvis Professor of
Theatre and Drama, the current chair of
the theatre arts department, who returned to his alma mater as a faculty
member in 1997.
“Fred was one of my mentors and one of the reasons I’m a playwright
today. We wanted to honor Fred and provide the current generation of students
an opportunity
to work with him and create some original theatre, as I had the chance to
do,” Troy
says.
The festival provided a comfortable homecoming for Gaines, who served as
its producer and dramaturg. He also conducted a series of workshops last
fall with
the individual playwrights.
“The strength of the department during my time was the student productions,” says
Gaines. “So many students did their own writing and directing. Not
many students at other universities could say that.
“This year’s festival gave students an opportunity to write about
right now, their current lives, what it’s like to be 18, 19, 20 years old.
Theatre is best when it is about personal experience. You don’t really
know what you’ve experienced until you have to find the words to describe
it and put them on the page. Theatre at Lawrence has a long tradition of
seeking out the new and helping students find their feet as young artists.
That’s
really what the students did for this festival.”
Dealing with the here and now of the “real” world has long been
a staple of the Lawrence theatre department. Bonnie Morris, ’72, who
co-founded Minneapolis’ Illusion
Theater 30 years ago and currently
serves as its producing director, says that approach was a hallmark of Cloak’s.
“Ted expected you to be a citizen of the world and to be fluent in so many
areas, politics and history, not just costumes and sets. It was a challenge,
but an
exhilarating challenge. You couldn’t do theatre in an ivory tower,
you had to embrace all of life, even its messiest sides.
“The Vietnam war was raging when I was a student,” Morris adds. "It
was a very rich time to be engaged in theatre, and Ted encouraged you to think
about what was happening in the larger world. Those of us who were lit up
by Ted, got even brighter by the times in which we lived while we were there.”
At the beginning
While theatre productions are a staple on virtually all college campuses
today, it was a vastly different landscape when Cloak arrived at Lawrence
in 1929
to carve out a new department in a field that, up to that point, had been
virtually little more than the poor stepchild of English departments everywhere.
Lawrence’s
entire theatre curriculum at the time consisted of two speech classes.
In 1915, Carnegie Tech, a small engineering school, had the country’s
only theatre department. Ten years later, Yale University became the first
major college to establish a separate department exclusively for the study
of theatre. There were only ten chapters of the National Collegiate Players
in existence at the time Cloak first began staging plays on the fourth floor
of Main Hall
.
“Nearly all college theatre departments grew out of English departments
that offered courses in dramatic literature,” says Troy. “As American
theatre grew during the 20th century, theatre studies added fields of inquiry
like acting, directing, and theatre history and, in turn, deserved its own
department home. The fact that Lawrence had the foresight to recognize that
distinction as early as 1930 put it at the leading edge.”
Ted Cloak came to Lawrence fresh out of Northwestern University graduate
school, where he had studied under Alexander Dean, considered the godfather
of American directing. He brought with him a sea change to the Lawrence curriculum:
the perspective of theatre as a performing art, not just as literary study.
“When Ted started the theatre department, there were only a dozen or so
theatre departments in the entire country, and those were basically all at major
schools,” Gaines
notes. “At that time, there was nothing like that around. To see a
theatre production, you either went to see a national touring company or
you went to
a place like Lawrence. Appleton and Lawrence were really given a gift by
Ted. He helped give the place an identity.”
One of the keys to the fledging program’s early success was Cloak’s
decision to open all the plays to any student, a philosophical shift from that
of the Sunset Players and an enduring part of his legacy that still is embraced
today. While some of the Sunset Players’ productions included campus-wide
casting calls, many were limited to members of the club.
“The best part of the Lawrence theatre department is that it is all-inclusive,” says
Gaines. “Some of our best actors over the years were non-theatre majors.
You need that reservoir of other students. I had the sense the students always
felt like the department was really theirs. Ted had empowered them.”
“What
attracted students was Ted’s imagination and his ability to
motivate — and
he could motivate,” says Joe Hopfensperger, ’52 (pictured, left),
a member of the theatre department faculty from 1958-77. “Whatever
Ted had to sell, it was love for the theatre. He turned that into an art
form.”
At last, a home
Cloak’s appointment to the faculty was undoubtedly one of, if not the,
defining moment in the theatre department’s storied history, but so too
was the construction of the Music-Drama
Center. During much of the department’s
infancy and adolescence, it was a make-do operation moving forward largely
on Cloak’s sheer willpower and ingenuity. Plays were staged on the top
floor of Main Hall or in the Chapel — where the removal of the organ
console and the installation of a false proscenium for each production were
required — at the gym, or even outdoors. Sets were built and painted
in a nearby unheated horse barn and hauled to Main Hall or the Chapel.
All that changed in 1959 when the Music-Drama Center opened with its 500-seat
theatre, a flexible “black box” theatre that was ten years ahead
of its time, a fully functional scenic shop, make-up rooms, and costume facilities.
At a cost of nearly $1.5 million, the Music-Drama Center was the most ambitious
building up to that point in the college’s history, although then-President
Douglas Knight emphasized that the building’s planning was guided by “adequate
minimums. There is no lavishness anywhere.” Spartan or not, for the
first time in nearly 30 years, the department had its own home.
“The highlight of my career was when we moved into the Music-Drama Center,” Hopfensperger
says.
“My God, to have a real theatre! I was in heaven, designing for a stage
with wing space, fly space, lighting instruments and controls that would provide
more than illumination, state-of-the-art sound, and an audience that expected
Broadway-quality entertainment.
“Since none of the faculty had ever worked in a real theatre, we knew
little more about how to operate the equipment than did our students,” he
adds. “We
did what we had to do — assigned areas and taught each other what
we learned. The students reacted as expected, enjoying the role of
teaching the teachers.”
For Martha Valentine Bresler, ’62, a mathematics major with a love for
the theatre, the department’s move into its new home her sophomore
year was the turning point of her college career.
“When I think back, there aren’t many classes I remember, but I certainly
remember my time in the theatre,” she told an audience of 50 during
the alumni panel presentation. “We lived at the Music-Drama Center
when we weren’t in class.”
David Hawkanson, ’69, executive director of Chicago’s famed Steppenwolf
Theatre Company and another alumni panelist, felt that, amid a rapidly changing
national theatre scene, with professional theatres such as the Guthrie springing
up throughout the country and, in the process, producing new career options
other than just teaching theatre, Lawrence offered the best of both worlds.
“Lawrence not only had a first-class facility, but it had a first-class
faculty. As a student, you couldn’t ask for a more diverse and talented
set of mentors.”
Changing times and changing lives
In 75 years of performances, Lawrence has produced shows from one end of
the theatrical spectrum to the other. Outward Bound was the first play Cloak
directed
here. Arthur Miller’s All My Sons was staged just 18 months after it
played on Broadway. Eve Ensler’s Necessary Targets was performed in
Stansbury Theatre in 2003 before it had even been published. Despite their
diverse styles
and subject matters through the decades, all the productions seemed to carry
one commonality: the ability to forge a special relationship between theatre
faculty, budding actors, and technical crew members.
On rare occasions, a production was even powerful enough to produce life-changing
effects. One such show was the 1969 production of The Investigation, an emotionally
gripping story of the Holocaust, based on actual court records of a German
trial of soldiers stationed at Auschwitz. Directed by Hopfensperger just
three years after it debuted in Germany, it was one of the most memorable
productions
of his career and arguably even more so for Walter North, ’72, who
portrayed a concentration camp witness in the play.
“Like many young people, I was not particularly disciplined nor focused
early in my college studies and there were a lot of dissolute temptations, even
in
Appleton, that I succumbed to or embraced,” recalls North from Washington,
D.C., where he is deputy assistant administrator of the Asia Near East Bureau
of USAID.
“It was through The Investigation that things started to change for me.
I can’t
remember precisely how I got ensnared in the production, but I did and that
began a process of peeling away a lot of those distractions. The topic of
the Holocaust was compelling, and I learned a lot about some appalling things,
which was a part of the attraction of the process.
“More importantly,” North says, “Joe’s high professional
standards and drive to get things right imbued the production and, eventually,
me. His
version of tough love helped me to get centered and drew me into the theatre
department. He was a great mentor, and the theatre department turned out
to be a good place to grow intellectually, aesthetically, and emotionally. Good
people, good hard work, and some excellent productions. It turned out that
it probably wasn’t something that I should have been doing. I might
have done better to focus on U.S. history or economics, but that came later.
At
the time, Joe was a formative influence.”
Performances like that are always worth a curtain call, even if they only
come along every 75 years.