Team-Building

For the first time, team yet-to-be-named met in the classroom of the McCoy Theatre at Rhodes College to discuss the best implementation of the project I have designed to lead during my senior year. I will briefly describe our mission below, but first I must provide some background information.

The McCoy Theatre is the campus-run theatre at Rhodes. During its twenty-seven year history, the theatre has produced some challenging and controversial material. And this has been intentional. It comes from a faculty and student understanding that the theatre exists not only as a means of entertainment or as a distraction from everyday life. Instead, it is provides new perspectives for looking at everyday life. Theatre challenges our prejudices, disrupts comfort, raises questions about personal and societal identity. To put it more bluntly, theatre provides a means of seeking truth.

Why would a college theatre opt to pursue this more challenging route of producing theatre? Part of the reason comes from being a part of a liberal arts campus. The contemporary philosopher William Nord describes two kinds of liberal arts education; Rhodes College fits into the second category, a tradition that "takes as its patron saint Socrates, and it is moved by the continuing search for truth. It values free, reasoned inquiry and tolerance; its is skeptical." A campus community designed around these principles inherently requires a theatre that aids its larger purpose of seeking truth.

Unfortunately, students don't necessarily see attendance at plays or theatrical discussion groups as an extention of the liberal arts system of which they are a part. The production of plays is outside the academic realm; it is extracurricular, separating it from the larger curricular goals of the college. My senior project is an effort to change that attitude.

I have asked a team of five- Lindsay Johnson, Jessica Batey, Katharine Gentsch, Luke Branim, and Kevin Collier- to help me in this endeavor. This capable, hopeful, and insightful team will work on methods to help educate students at Rhodes to envision theatre as an extension of their education, as something in which they must participate in order to fully experience their time at Rhodes. Our goals, therefore, are two-fold: Education and Promotion.

In our first meeting, ideas for promotion were plentiful, including visual reminders on campus, casts wearing their costumes on opening day, scenes from the show being performed on campus, etc. The educational side, however, was met with some ambivalence. It was my feeling that some of the team members are skeptical as to how possible it is that we can expand the understanding of theatre of the average Rhodes student. I plan on convincing them of this, though; we can make it work!

My inspiration for this education process comes from the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, California. For each of their productions they provide a series of essays, lectures, and discussions to give their audience insight into the meaning and message of the production. If we can provide this information for the mainstage shows at the McCoy each year as well as potential discussion groups and talks with cast, directors, and designers, Rhodes students will graduate with a new understanding of theatre, a passion for the challenges it raises, and they will seek this in whatever community they enter.

The challenge I posed at the end of the meeting was for us to ponder where exactly to begin. How will we promote these educational opportunities, making them appealing to students already bogged down in schoolwork? How will we organize a play promotion system that can be codified into a series of steps for future students (and other theatres) to utilize? That comes next week (as does a name for our team).