Long before the audience encounter, often as long as a year before, a season's plays are chosen. We present tour main stage shows each academic year. The design and directing responsibilities (with student assistants) are taken on by faculty for three productions and by students for the fourth. Now in its fifteenth year, the all-student project (known as the Student Honors production) is a capstone experience for many of our majors. It is a project that emphasizes independent study, research, and integration of learning. In the past this Honors production has balanced the season with offerings such as the American classic, The Glass Menagerie, Spring Awakening, an expressionistic German play, and Nicky Silver's contemporary absurdist comedy, Raised In Captivity. Playwright Silver spent three days on campus during the week of production working with the director and actors and visiting classes.
Since his graduation the student costume designer for the Silver play, James Thompson, has gone on to work in design in Las Vegas and California. The 1997 Honors production was Fragments, a play by alumnus John Jay Garrett, directed by J.J. Mayes. The play won the Kennedy Center/ American College Theatre Festival Fourth Freedom Forum Playwriting Award, gaining a sizable stipend for author Garrett, as well as a fellowship at the Sundance Theatre Laboratory. The play also was produced in Los Angeles by a group of theatre alumni, including Jeremy Aldridge (director) and Michael Moon (lead actor), who had both participated in Honors productions as directors and actors. Michelle Gore, director of the production of The Boys Next Door, is currently working in New York City as an assistant stage manager and in wardrobe. When Michelle looked at the original cast list of The Boys Next Door, she noticed an Oswego connection. Alumna Christine Estabrook (1973) starred in the OffBroadway production of the play in the late 1980's. The Student Honors Production for 1999-2000 was an adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. The production team included Theatre majors John Smiley (director), Rebekkah Meixner (scene design), Nathan Fleming (lighting design), and music major Emmett Van Slyke (composer of the original music).
With mentoring from the faculty and staff, and assistance from many other students, the student team for the Honors show manages the complex process of research, budgeting, rehearsing, scene, lighting and sound design and construction. One element of scenery for Dracula, Lucy's tomb, designed by Rebekkah Meixner, was constructed and painted by sophomore Becky Sagen. When finished, the piece had to look like a marble sarcophagus. Constructed of wood, the outside and lid were base-coated a medium gray; then using a sponge glove a lighter shade of gray was applied in diagonal streaks to give some basic marble texture. After that a feather was used to apply thin twisting "cracks" across the texture in a dark gray color. Both the darkest and lightest colors were splattered in certain areas to give the final look of marble. The last step was a gloss finish to give it a shiny and polished look. The Dracula script also called for a candelabra to be lit by remote control. Junior Jason Grasso constructed it from flexible copper tubing, attached into a base made from a worklight reflector and held together with a fiberglass bodyfill. The remote control mechanism was a motor out of a remote airplane kit. The "flames" were flicker lamps that Jason wired so that they would go on and off with the remote control. These are just two of many examples of the art in the artifice and the use of somebody's trash to make the stageworthy treasure that the production process requires.
The four to five week rehearsal period for a production here at Oswego represents approximately 100 hours of work to prepare for opening night. The skills and theories that students develop in their classroom training are tested and refined in the laboratory of production on the stages of Waterman and the Lab. Of course, the process of production is never finished. A production is a living work of art, which in performance reaches a stage that constantly tests the talents of all involved (the performance abilities of the actors and the organizational skills of the crew). While maintaining as high an artistic standard as possible, cast and crew collaborate on the journey that is a play. The energized unpredictability of live performance holds the potential for new discoveries, heightened awareness and the challenge of perfecting timing. That charged moment of awareness and communication between the actors and the audience happens when a production ignites with spontaneity, clarity and energy. The work of serious playing requires perseverance, discipline, stamina, an ability to think with the body, as well as the mind, and a capacity for meaningful collaboration. This ability to work together in the service of the play is pivotal to the development of a theatre artist. The world is inhabited and brought to life by the cast. Our students with their energy, creativity, and passion for making theatre are the backbone of any production.
The second half of our current production season (the Spring 2000 semester) saw a cast of forty students working with Director/Choreographer Ron Medici and Musical Director Juan LaManna on a production of the classic musical Brigadoon. Acting, dancing and singing (the "triple threat" combination for a performer) came together in this production. The empty space that is Waterman stage was transformed into an idealized vision of the Scottish Highlands through the designs of faculty members William Russell Stark, Sr. (sets and lights) and Kitty Macey (costumes). The designs were given shape through the construction process in the scene and costume shops in Tyler, supervised by Johan Godwaldt and Michaeleen Melita respectively, with guidance for sound and lighting given by Jon Vermilye.
The final production of spring semester 2000 was a re-visioning of Oedipus The King by Sophocles. Director Tom Kee translated the world of the tragedy to twentieth-century Cuba. The production featured a cast of thirty students. Once again, the process of discovery that unites all of the Liberal Arts was underway as the director, designers, cast and crew searched for meaning and work to make the invisible visible for the audience.
The four productions for the 2000 2001 season have been chosen. They are Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray, Alan Ball's Five Women Wearing the Same Dress, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath in an adaptation by Frank Galati, and Angels in America by Tony Kushner. Nancy Fox, the Tyler Hall Box Office Manager, has begun work with students to plan marketing and promotional strategies for the upcoming year. Each season presents worlds of art and artifice, the ridiculous and the sublime and lies like truth, where the pressures and joys of life, the ideas and experience of history and literature, the expression of music, art, dance and poetry come together to reveal the inner life of a play.