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| Students
on stage: cast members, clockwise from left, Zack Armfield '01,
Charles Aitken '01, and Faran Krentcil '04 in a scene from The
Changeling |
 f
you come to campus in early April and stand outside Sheafer Theater
in the Bryan Center, you might think you’ve happened on a concert
of Gregorian chants. Then you hear groans, squeals, thumps, and cackles
interspersed with the chanting. No monks these—instead, it is
a production of The Changeling, Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s
seventeenth-century classic, which explores the lines between love,
obsession, and evil.
While the main plot of the play involves murder, blackmail,
and virginity-testing among the aristocracy, the subplot takes place
in an insane asylum and provides an element of dark comedy filled
with sexual innuendo, for which the student actors chant their own
quirky interpretations of mad characters ranting, raving, and writhing.
“I can’t believe they wrote plays so racy and sexy and violent
that long ago,” director Christine Morris’ students told
her as they reviewed the play in the fall for a spring production
by Duke Players.
Duke Players, whose origins go back to 1931, is the principal
student/faculty producing organization for dramatic art at Duke. Staging
three productions and a new-plays festival each academic year, the
theater company is one of many vehicles for Duke students to gain
experience in theater—in dramatic text interpretation, acting,
directing, design, and all the other elements that go into producing
drama.
Attending a rehearsal of The Changeling in the sparse
trappings of Branson Theater is to see the talent and versatility
of the Duke student—speaking lines like, “Why, ’tis
impossible thou canst be so wicked” in excellent Elizabethan
English one minute, and shooting the breeze about being an actor at
Duke the next. “We put in more hours than athletes during these
productions,” they say. “But we don’t see any perks
coming to us.”
“In fact, if we could just get [basketball’s]
Shane Battier to try out for a play, the school would probably start
throwing some money our way to give us a real theater space on East
Campus,” says Charles Aitken, avid actor and senior history major,
referring to a dearth
of rehearsal and production facilities.
The Changeling provides a good opportunity to learn about
more than play production, madness, and mayhem. Students will delve
into science, technology, medicine, psychology, and social science,
both on the stage and in a related symposium, “Medicine and Madness
on the Renaissance English Stage: Exploring Middleton and Rowley’s
Changeling.” The symposium will bring Duke faculty from the departments
of psychiatry and behavioral science, history, drama, and English
together with a noted literary scholar from the University ofIllinois
to examine the medical, psychiatric, and gender issues in the play.
 |
| Broadway South: a workshop
production, above, of Little Women, The Musical, wit Kerry O"Malley
'91; producer Manny Azenberg, left, teaches a class each spring
semester |
“Drama is collaborative in nature
and gives us great opportunities to cross disciplines. It makes good
sense for it to be a part of the liberal-arts curriculum,” says
Morris, with an animation suggesting deep passion for her field. “Drama
is the synthesis of many aspects of the world. It makes us access
both sides of the brain and many fields of study.”
“We are always trying to branch out and find more
ways to interact with other disciplines in the liberal arts,”
says Zannie Giraud Voss, assistant professor of the practice of drama
and producing director of Theater Previews at Duke. “We cross-list
a lot of our course offerings with other departments. Aspects of theater
arts cross over into public policy, marketing, management, business.
In fact, entrepreneurs and artists have a lot in common: They are
both constantly innovating and taking risks.”
“Innovative” is a word that characterizes the
drama program. New plays written by faculty, students, alumni, and
professional playwrights occupy an important place in the program’s
mission. Outlets for this work might be in the new-plays festival
each year, or a staged reading with a guest playwright-in-residence,
or in a mainstage show in Reynolds Theater as part of Theater Previews
at Duke, the professional arm of the drama program.
“We feel that presenting new work fits perfectly
into the mission of a research university,” says Voss. “The
real value of research is to add to the greater body of knowledge.
With the creative acts of the writer or actor or designer, they too
are adding to the greater body of knowledge.”
Establishing its place in the research-oriented liberal-arts
university hasn’t always been easy for the drama program. In
the fall of 1972, a Drama Planning Committee was formed in response
to student interest. The committee, headed by John Clum, then associate
professor of English, proposed the creation of a drama department
that would include a chair, a director of undergraduate studies, one
assistant professor, an actor-in-residence, and other visiting artists.
The ambitious proposal was turned down.
But the dream lived on. The committee resubmitted a simpler
proposal in 1974 for an Interdisciplinary Program in Drama, for which
no additional personnel would be needed. That proposal was accepted
and, in 1975, courses listed as “Drama” rather than “English”
were first offered. The response to the first courses prompted a follow-up
proposal for a drama major, which was approved in December 1975.
John Clum was director of the new program, and he and
two other original faculty members, Scott Parker and Kenneth Reardon,
were soon joined by additional faculty to help carry the growing load.
In 1985, the university brought in David Ball from Carnegie-Mellon
University to be the director of the program, and Ball brought with
him a conservatory-style approach to drama education. “Actor
training became the absolute heart and soul of the program,”
says Clum. But the conservatory style left little time for drama students
to explore outside their field. They were being prepared as if they
were graduate students; the rigorous acting schedule, with classes,
workshops, movement drills, and rehearsals, often ran seven full days
a week.
In 1991, David Ball stepped down and, in 1992, Richard
Riddell was hired to change the overemphasis on actor training and
steer the program back to providing a well-rounded liberal-arts education.
“I was asked to integrate the program more fully into the larger
liberal-arts environment at Duke, to make the program more inclusive,
and to provide stability by building up the faculty,” says Riddell,
whose credentials include a doctorate from Stanford and a Tony Award
for lighting design. He was also the first director of the American
Repertory Theatre’s Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at
Harvard University.
Under Riddell’s leadership, the number of full-time,
regular-rank faculty has grown from four to nine members who regularly
write, design, produce, act, teach, and win awards. The curriculum
has been revised, particularly strengthening the areas of dramatic
literature and playwriting. Theater Previews at Duke has co-produced
four professional shows, with a fifth, A Thousand Clowns by Herb Gardner,
starring Tom Selleck, on tap for May 15 to June 3.
Riddell receives a lot of credit from his colleagues for
the thriving state of the program. Dale Randall, professor emeritus
of English and drama who was interim director of the program after
Ball’s departure, compliments Riddell on his “democratic
style of leadership.” “Richard is very positive, very inclusive,”
says Randall. “There’s an extraordinary feeling of camaraderie
in the program now, of everybody pulling together.”
Jeff Storer, associate professor of the practice of drama
and co-founder and artistic director of Durham’s Manbites Dog
Theater, points to “an amazingly varied and accomplished faculty.
One of the greatest aspects of the program is that the faculty are
all still deeply involved in creative activity. We are all working
professionals. We practice what we preach,” he says. “We
teach by example—our work and explorations and research and pieces
of theater we make are there for our students.
“My struggles to keep my small theater company alive
are happening parallel to my teaching. They see the real world. And
I can give opportunities in my productions that can start careers.
Maybe Manbites Dog is relatively low on the food chain, but we have
a strong sense of professional integrity and standards, and these
kids can be paid for the first time and go on to bigger opportunities
after graduation.”
And those kids appreciate the opportunities afforded them
by faculty. “It’s an incredibly strong faculty,” says
junior drama major Jim Iseman, an actor in The Changeling. “I
hope to get involved next year in some of the productions put on by
my teachers in their own companies.”
Says Reggie Harris, another junior drama major, “Drama
classes are my only classes at Duke where the teachers know you. And
you get to meet interesting people. You don’t have the same opportunity
to interact in other classes as you have in drama classes and plays.”
Making sure theater in all its forms and at all levels
of development is available to students is a hallmark of the drama
program. Theater Previews at Duke, in productions such as A Thousand
Clowns, gives students the opportunity to intern with professional
playwrights, composers, actors, directors, designers, managers, and
technicians, learning to assemble a show from the ground up. And the
producers in partnership with Theater Previews at Duke have the opportunity
to perfect their product on a regional stage: A Thousand Clowns will
go on to play in Chicago, Boston, and New York.
“Our theater in Durham offers commercial producers
a venue without the pressure of New York City,” explains Riddell.
“We can nurse the embryonic piece here. We can be the place where
the art is developed. And the financial scale is much smaller.”
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