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Wendy Salkind, chair of the Department of Theatre |
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For UMBC theatre students, preparing for performances involves
more than endless nights spent memorizing lines. With each production, they join faculty directors and designers in research that looks beyond the play and the playwright into the cultural, political, and social history of the time, examining everything from music and paintings to statistics and physics. The result of this intensive collaboration between students and their teachers has brought the department national acclaim -- UMBC has been invited to the American College Theater Festival at The Kennedy Center five times, more often than any other university in the country. "When we performed The Diary of a Scoundrel at The Kennedy Center, many people assumed our students were in a graduate program," notes Sam McCready, associate professor of theatre and the play's director. The honor of being chosen for The Kennedy Center is not to be underestimated, says McCready. It is "like getting to the national playoffs. . . . If this was a lacrosse team, there'd be victory parades." How did UMBC come to create such a center of excellence in theatre? Department chair Wendy Salkind, an accomplished actress who performs with UMBC's resident professional company, The Maryland Stage Company, shares some answers. |
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TM: The Department of Theatre calls itself a research
department. How do you define research in your field? First I'd say that, for students, research really encompasses both an intellectual and a psychophysical pursuit, where they use theatre, literature, history, and technique as a venue for learning. They're not just learning about theatre, but that theatre is a way of learning about a lot of things. What they study in theatre at UMBC is always developed within a larger context, so we don't just ask who is this playwright? We explore why was this play written? What was the impact of the play? Why would this play have been written when it was written? We expect that students bring what they're learning in other courses at the University to any discussion that we have of how we approach a play. For faculty, research is the same, except that faculty in a research university are expected to be knowledgeable about all the current trends that are going on in theatre, so that we have to keep up our reading and viewing of whatever we can find in European productions, even what's going on in Eastern European countries, which may be very different from what you'd see here. And we look at companies that spring up in this country that to do community-based social theatre. We have to bring all of that into our classes, so that we're not just teaching historically, creating a kind of museum-piece play. It also means that faculty have to keep up with other areas that impact on theatre. For design and technical people, it's technological areas. But in performance, there are certain areas -- sociological studies, things that are being learned about the brain, emotions, understanding about the body. Our knowledge of all of that has to be current. TM: What distinguishes our approach to studying theatre in contrast to the approach taken at other universities? Is ours an atypical program? WS: -It's not that other theatre programs don't research a play, that they don't study a playwright, or maybe read other plays by that person. But in many schools, there's a tremendous emphasis on quantity, to give students lots of experiences. They choose a season and say, we have to do a certain number of plays, and take one from this period and one from that period, a couple of comedies, and a couple of serious plays. They really don't have the time -- they put up a play in four weeks. We will spend a whole semester with a production, and that I think is quite unique and unusual. Our productions are courses. In most universities, they do their whole courseload, and then they do a show at night. They don't get any credit for that work. Here, because it's a course, we treat it as we would any other course in the discipline, and I think that's probably where we're different. TM: The Theatre Department also has a professional theatre company in residence, The Maryland Stage Company. How did the Company come to exist at UMBC, and in what ways does it benefit the theatre students and the community? WS: -While it's obvious what scholarly research is in terms of writing papers, books, or articles, there are other levels of research. People who are performers or directors or designers do spend time in libraries for what they're doing, and the product of that research is really practice. As faculty at UMBC, we felt a tremendous need that our research be validated in some venue other than just directing and designing with students. Certainly for some of us who are performers, other than doing solo pieces, that we might be able to act as an ensemble with our colleagues was one of the impulses that was driving it. The Company's Artistic Director, Xerxes Mehta, also had the idea that there was so much talent in the Washington-Baltimore area, professionally, that we might draw on those people who were not working or not working enough, and were not working at Center Stage, which tends to draw from New York. So the idea was that it would be a research venue for faculty here, and that we would incorporate professionals from the Baltimore-Washington region. And that we could use our students. The reward for the students is that they get to work with professionals, that they get to see their teachers do what they're teaching, and that they work in a very intense professional environment. The Maryland Stage Company also gives a kind a visibility to the University, because on a campus that is identified strongly with the sciences and technology, where fewer than twenty percent of the students are in the humanities and arts, to show the community -- Baltimore, Maryland, and outside of the state -- that this university values the arts is a tremendous statement about the relationship of arts and humanities, and that the University cares not just about science and technology, that they're integrated. TM: What's the value of an undergraduate degree in theatre? WS:-I think when you study theatre, in our department, you learn a lot of skills and you learn a lot about yourself. It's a constant study of self in relation to the world, which I think is part of any liberal arts study. I've been talking to recent graduates to find out what our students are actually doing, and we have students who are working in radio. We have a student who's hosting a children's program, as well as people who are working in theatre. I just talked to three students who have finished their law degrees, and one who's just finishing it, and they all want to work with disadvantaged people. Part of the reason they want to do that is that their interest in law is not corporate law or about money, it's about working with groups, it's about working with people who have tremendous obstacles in their lives, and confronting those obstacles and helping them finding a way to overcome them. Well, that's what we do in theatre all the time. We work with a diverse group, and you have an obstacle and you have to move past it and figure out how to resolve it. I've talked to some former students who are social workers. I've talked with a woman who is working with the University of Florida, and she's doing community relations with the theatre in order to help bring younger people into the theatre. We have a student who's stage managing for opera in Europe. We have someone who's working in the law area, looking at legal issues for a film company. They're really moving into a lot of fields, and part of what they gain here is, first of all, they're very tuned into how to work with a group. They understand group dynamics very well. They're very comfortable in talking to people and making presentations. They gain a lot of presence in learning about performance. They have very good analytical skills because we spend so much time in our literary courses and even our production, analyzing not only "How is this structured?" but analyzing it way down to language, down to a word, down to a sound. And they learn a lot of visual skills, because they have to be able to look at and interpret what they're seeing in terms of space. TM: Let's talk about the Artist Scholars Program. Is that a natural growth of the Department's emphasis on scholarship? WS:-Well, interestingly, although we didn't start the program, it really fits in with what we're doing. We look for students who are already academically very strong, and that means that they already have a certain level of discipline about being students, that they take pleasure in it and understand the expectation of working very hard. They're articulate, and also there's a certain amount of inventiveness -- the idea of pursuing something on their own is not new to them. What we expect from the group of the Artist Scholars - the program is new so we're still developing it - is that we really want them to be spokespeople for the arts. We want them to be able to talk about art and culture. And therefore we need to train them. We're trying to expose them to as many of the arts as possible, looking at the connections among the different arts and how they relate to our culture at large. A number of our students are really interested in teaching, and that's an area we're starting to look at a lot more on both the graduate and undergraduate level. We are going to have to develop an audience for theatre. Kids are not being exposed to theatre or any of the arts in their schools anymore. When we get them in college, sometimes they've hardly seen theatre, or they haven't been to a museum. That's very different from even fifteen years ago, as programs have been dropped, so I think it's our responsibility now as a university to train our students to go back into the schools and start educating the younger people about art, or else we won't have an audience. I think that with the Artist Scholars, a lot can happen through them.
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Four thousand area theatre-goers attended performances of The
Maryland Stage Company's Tartuffe at Center Stage in 1997. Some 400
high school students took advantage of free ticket offers. Theatre faculty
actively promoted Tartuffe to student audiences during the spring with visits to area schools where they led workshops about the play and distributed scripts and study guides. The Maryland Stage Company returns to Center Stage in 1998 with a production of Chekov's The Seagull.
The Department of Theatre can't claim sole credit for nurturing talent: for one, there's Ric Ryder '84, who majored in music at UMBC. Just name it, and Ryder's probably done it. He's been part of the national touring company Ryder's most recent Broadway role was Doody in Grease, a performance that drew rave reviews across the U.S. and Canada. He and others from the national touring company performed a scene from Grease at the Tony Awards held at Radio City Music Hall last June. "The voice training I received at UMBC went a long way toward helping me be competitive in the professional world," he says. "My undergraduate experience was immeasurable." |
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