The Season Selection Committee is made up of faculty members in the many areas of concentration in the Division of Theater. For the first time, they included students in the process this year. They also decided to bring back the musical.
For the 2015-16 academic year, the lineup of plays produced by the Ohio University Division of Theater will feature a piece written and directed by one of its own professors, a William Shakespeare comedy and the return of the musical to OU’s stages.
And it all only took about 15 weeks of planning.
The lineup is determined by the Season Selection Committee, which consists of faculty from the different areas of concentration in the program.
The committee has representatives from each area to ensure the show season is balanced. Dennis Delaney, chair of the committee, said it is much more than simply picking their favorite plays.
“Just like a regional theater, we try to get a balance of plays that will make an exciting season but give all the actors, designers and directors the opportunity to get their hands dirty on different kinds of plays,” he said.
The committee had many caveats to meet. For example, it needed enough roles — for both men and women — to cast from the large pool of actors in the undergraduate and graduate programs. The third-year graduate directors must choose their thesis project, which is a mainstage show. The season should be balanced between the size and type of the shows each semester. Additionally, the committee must analyze the lighting, scenic and costume needs of the shows and make sure they match the needs of the students.
“It’s a complex matrix,” C. David Russell, head of scenic design, said. “There’s no way around a lot of that.”
Students were included in the selection process for the first time this year. The participants selected were Rachel Mock, a third-year graduate actor, Jeremiah Stuart, a second-year graduate student studying lighting, and Sam McClain, a sophomore studying stage management and production design.
“(The students) have a real voice as opposed to making assumptions,” Russell said.
At first, Shelley Delaney, head of the performance program, said she wasn’t passionate about doing Elbows Off The Table by Rebecca VerNooy, assistant professor of theater, but McClain’s enthusiasm for it made her see the play in a new way.
“The faculty, while brilliant, wanted to further understand the audience we’re doing shows for,” McClain said. “I enjoyed saying, ‘I feel people will relate to this and will want to go because they’re excited about it and not just because they have to.’ ”
Every year, Dennis said they read about 20 scripts, which they need to narrow down to four mainstage shows. It needs to be done in the Fall Semester, because design meetings for next year’s first mainstage shows happen that upcoming Spring Semester.
Adding more complexity to this year’s process was the absence of an MFA acting class for the first shows of the year because the current group is graduating. The new class cannot audition until it arrives in the fall.
Musicals were typically infrequent, but Dennis said they are now discussing doing a musical every other year in order to further broaden their students’ experiences, and they wanted to do one this year. The last OU musical production was Assassins in 2012.
“It’s challenging for us because we’re not a musical theater program so we’re not training them to perform specifically in musical theater,” he said. “But they’ll be going out into the professional world where musicals are very popular.”
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