University Theatre Breathing New Life into Talented Souls through Expanded Facilities

Electra (2001) Walking the basement halls of Villard Hall, home of the theater arts department, you could easily imagine them to be haunted with thespian spirits of a century ago. Sawdust radiating from the backstage set-building shop seems to hang in the air everywhere. But the ominous knocking and squealing coming from the back room aren’t ghosts at play -- it’s the washing machine loaded with freshly dyed fabric. The moans and groans you hear are the faculty members trying to be heard over the screams of the circular saw in the backstage scene shop. The strange glow emanating from what would appear to be a broom closet is actually makeup mirror lighting, transforming actors into characters for one of the season’s dozen or more shows. The theater smells of decades of grease paint and dusty fog, and generations of perspiration. While some shows, such as the well-known Phantom of the Opera earn millions of dollars and countless awards by staging such an ominous atmosphere, the actors, designers, producers and instructors of the UO theater department win awards and put on countless productions a year in spite of these conditions. In the last five years alone, students have won regional awards in lighting design, costume design and acting. The department’s graduate students are finding excellent jobs at prestigious universities around the country, and alumni are working in such well-known professional theaters as Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Denver Theatre Company, Sante Fe Opera, and Portland Center Stage. The department’s seven faculty members have distinguished themselves as well, having been honored by the United States Institute of Theatre Technology, the Association of Theatre in Higher Education, and the John F. Kennedy Center, among others. And, when the students and faculty aren’t writing papers, preparing lectures, and conducting research around the world, they are staging no fewer than a dozen productions on three stages each academic year. Since its first performance in 1876, theater has been an integral part of campus life. Indeed, in its early years, when the UO’s nascent football team needed help, students came to their aid by putting on a play. Over the next thirty-five years, drama and Shakespearean clubs organized and presented plays. In 1911, theater became an academic pursuit with the creation of the Department of Drama and Speech Arts. In 1926, the department was absorbed into the English department and remained so until 1946, when speech and drama again became a separate department under the speech department heading. The first campus theater -- and, as far as we know, the first purpose-built college theater in America -- was built in 1915 in Johnson Hall, which today houses the UO’s administration. The Robinson Theatre, designed by faculty member Horace Robinson and built in 1949, was a new building, attached to the back of historic Villard Hall. Together, these buildings contained scene shops, lab space and other production facilities, becoming the speech department’s home. After the speech department was dissolved in 1990, theater arts became its own department in the College of Arts and Sciences. University drama facilities are laboratories in which students experiment and learn the skills expected of today’s theater practitioners. The facilities here are now fifty to over 100 years old, and limit students’ learning opportunities. Portland businessman James F. Miller, during his visits to campus, recognized this unfortunate situation when he last visited campus, and has provided a $1.5 million challenge grant to help build an adequate theater complex for the twenty-first century. "This development offers many new opportunities for our students and faculty," says Jack Watson, associate professor and former head of the theater arts department. "Perhaps most important is that we will all have a new sense of pride and purpose, a new momentum to allow us to not only maintain our current high standards, but also to raise those standards and explore new and exciting forms of production." The James F. Miller Theatre Complex will consist of a new flexible theater, equipped with movable staging and seating that allows the theater to be adapted for an almost infinite variety of performance situations. The building, which will be attached to the Robinson Theatre and Villard Hall, will also house sorely needed additional classrooms and lab spaces, as well as appropriate set storage and sound locks. The complex will not only expand available space for teaching and storage, but will also feature safety and aesthetic improvements and technological upgrades to existing facilities. Though the Robinson Theatre seats 380, it is outdated as a performance space. Renovations will improve the proscenium-style theater -- both for better sight lines and in order to properly train students for the theater world of today -- and will upgrade the current theater’s obsolete infrastructure, ventilation and acoustics. The Pocket Theatre, a student-run performance space that boasts a new production each week of the academic year, will no longer need to double as a classroom. With these renovations, today’s challenges will no longer haunt the thespians of tomorrow. Meanwhile, however, the show must go on. This year’s season opens with Angels in America: Part II by Tony Award-winning playwright Tony Kushner on November 2, followed by Thornton Wilder’s The Matchmaker and Elmer Rice’s The Adding Machine in the spring.

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