Sights And Sounds: Explorations In The Arts
Theatre as Laboratory: Developing New Plays
According to Jim Petosa, professor and director of the School of Theatre, students of all disciplines might view the University as a large laboratory—a place where new knowledge is gained through experience and experiment. “Works of art have to gestate,” he states, “but not in a library.” When creating a new play, a writer should ideally have an opportunity to see the work-in-progress staged. Just as researchers in the sciences refine their hypotheses through repeated experimentation, playwrights can best revise their works after seeing them performed. Petosa hopes to make the development of new plays a major part of the School of Theatre's mission by working closely with emerging playwrights.
One of the most important aspects of training in the School of Theatre is students' interaction with professionals in the field, enabled through collaborative programs with several professional theatre companies. Petosa is most enthusiastic about the opportunities that these professional affiliations provide for creating and workshopping new plays. Universities offer the ideal environment for this sort of experimentation, he explains, due in part to their relative freedom from the economic constraints that professional theatre groups often face.
Top to bottom: Set and costume designs begin as sketches on the drawing board; students in the stage carpentry certificate program construct a set; Nicky Moody, a graduate student working toward her MFA in design, puts the finishing touches on a mask; dancers perform Aurora Borealis; Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade at Studio 210, directed by Clay Hopper.
The School of Theatre's collaborative programs date to 1982, when the Huntington Theatre was founded in-residence at BU. Although the Huntington now functions independently, it is still affiliated with the University and remains a cornerstone of training at the School of Theatre by involving students in the preparation and staging of its productions. In 2002, the Professional Theatre Initiative expanded this collaborative approach, affiliating the School of Theatre with several other professional groups, including the Actors' Shakespeare Project, the Boston Playwrights' Theatre, and the Olney Theatre Center near Washington, DC.
Alumna Kira Lallas provides a striking example of the benefits that this professional workshopping model provides to young playwrights. She originally wrote Translations of Xhosa—an exploration of her experiences studying abroad in South Africa—for her senior thesis project in 2002. The play was subsequently staged at the Boston Playwrights' Theatre, and Lallas was then invited to participate in the prestigious National College Theater Festival at the Kennedy Center in 2003. This fall, BU students and Huntington Theatre staff will present another original work by a graduate of the program—Ronan Noone's Brendan.
These collaborations with professional theatre companies complement the University's commitment to providing students in all areas of study with a broad liberal arts education. In breaking with the old model of conservatory training, which sequesters young performing artists and steeps them in their chosen discipline, the School of Theatre provides the ideal environment for students to think beyond the classroom or the stage. According to Petosa, performing artists must not only be skilled in their art form, they also need to strive for broader intellectual development. Art never exists in a bubble, cut off from the world around it, he says: “Contextualization of the art form is everything.”
For more information, see www.bu.edu/but and www.huntingtontheatre.org.
