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The Rice Thresher
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Guest column I've known I wanted to work in theater for a long time. How I ended up at a school with no theater major is a mystery to many, myself included. Something about a well-rounded liberal arts education ... as if that gets anyone a job anymore. During Owl Weekend, I saw my first show at Rice and left crying during intermission. I called my best friend and despaired at spending four years at a place where they let engineers act. Since coming to Rice, I've worked on a couple of shows. As a member of the Martel College Founding Committee, I am now faced with starting a new college theater program. This has forced me to evaluate the relationship Rice students have with theater. I think it is a beautiful love affair. And I fear the fire is running out. Despite being a merciless theater snob, watching campus theater productions makes me realize that this is what amateur theater should be about. It is exposing many people to the magic of theater. It changes them. It teaches new ways of seeing the world. I see Rice as a powerful example of why theater is of value - it enriches lives, both through its creation and its performance. Now that I have such high regard for campus theater, I worry about the direction it is taking. Twenty or more productions a year is simply more than this campus can support. Audiences can't even see all of the shows. College producers are begging people to come fill the casts of their shows and the same people are working themselves to exhaustion to mount one show after another. I am very concerned about what this is doing to the students' experience of theater. I am not an expert on theater, but I have some experience about being a member of an ensemble. Therefore, I'd like to give you some relationship counseling. There are too many productions on campus. Every college feels like it has to mount a comedy and a musical and maybe a drama every year just because all of the other colleges are mounting a comedy and a musical and a drama. What if each college did only one production each year that became its signature? What if some colleges combined to produce one big musical? This would lead to bigger productions that would be more fun for the participants because there would be more people to divide the work. It would also lead to higher quality productions because more people would be available and have more time to work on the shows. It would also behoove theaters on campus to collaborate and create a comprehensive Rice theater season so that production, and especially performance times, overlap less. A key to this sort of collaboration is a realization that theater is not competitive. Trying to "beat" another production is the antithesis to creativity. Rather than defining allegiance to a certain company, I think students should utilize all the theater resources to give themselves a variety of enriching experiences. When it's time for you to act Shakespeare, go to Baker. When you're at a place where you need to work with a professional director and designer, go to the Players. If it's your time to direct your own avant garde production, try Lovett. Want a musical? How about Sid? And soon, when you want to try your hand at playwriting, come to Martel. And when it's time to just hang out and have fun with other members of your college, that is where you need to be. Students can gain from companies what they need to learn and then move on to have different experiences elsewhere. More than anything, I think Rice needs to remember the mission of its amateur theater projects: to encourage students' creative growth through theater. Rice has great resources in the new theater professors and the classes they are adding to the curriculum. These are skills students can apply in their respective theater companies across campus. However, I think Rice has to remember why theater is important to this campus - it brings the benefits of creating theater to people who will move on to become engineers, lawyers, teachers and doctors. Therefore, we must preserve the joy of theater for this community by making the process manageable and maximally creative for those involved. People should be building stages not because they've been assigned the task, but because they love using power tools and building big stuff out of chicken wire. People should be coming to rehearsal because it is enriching and fun and there is no place they'd rather be. If the producers of theater on this campus can concentrate on building these sort of strong theater ensembles, built on passion for theater and communal creative spirit, I think Rice will reignite its love affair with theater and begin again to enrich each other through these creative initiatives.
Victoria Zyp is a Wiess College sophomore and a member of the Martel College Founding Committee.
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