While the main plot of the play involves murder, blackmail, and virginity-testing among the aristocracy, the subplot takes place in an insane asylum and provides an element of dark comedy filled with sexual innuendo, for which the student actors chant their own quirky interpretations of mad characters ranting, raving, and writhing. “I can’t believe they wrote plays so racy and sexy and violent that long ago,” director Christine Morris’ students told her as they reviewed the play in the fall for a spring production by Duke Players. Duke Players, whose origins go back to 1931, is the principal student/faculty producing organization for dramatic art at Duke. Staging three productions and a new-plays festival each academic year, the theater company is one of many vehicles for Duke students to gain experience in theater—in dramatic text interpretation, acting, directing, design, and all the other elements that go into producing drama. Attending a rehearsal of The Changeling in the sparse trappings of Branson Theater is to see the talent and versatility of the Duke student—speaking lines like, “Why, ’tis impossible thou canst be so wicked” in excellent Elizabethan English one minute, and shooting the breeze about being an actor at Duke the next. “We put in more hours than athletes during these productions,” they say. “But we don’t see any perks coming to us.” “In fact, if we could just get [basketball’s] Shane Battier to try out for a play, the school would probably start throwing some money our way to give us a real theater space on East Campus,” says Charles Aitken, avid actor and senior history major, referring to a dearth of rehearsal and production facilities. The Changeling provides a good opportunity to learn about more than play production, madness, and mayhem. Students will delve into science, technology, medicine, psychology, and social science, both on the stage and in a related symposium, “Medicine and Madness on the Renaissance English Stage: Exploring Middleton and Rowley’s Changeling.” The symposium will bring Duke faculty from the departments of psychiatry and behavioral science, history, drama, and English together with a noted literary scholar from the University ofIllinois to examine the medical, psychiatric, and gender issues in the play. 
“We are always trying to branch out and find more ways to interact with other disciplines in the liberal arts,” says Zannie Giraud Voss, assistant professor of the practice of drama and producing director of Theater Previews at Duke. “We cross-list a lot of our course offerings with other departments. Aspects of theater arts cross over into public policy, marketing, management, business. In fact, entrepreneurs and artists have a lot in common: They are both constantly innovating and taking risks.” “Innovative” is a word that characterizes the drama program. New plays written by faculty, students, alumni, and professional playwrights occupy an important place in the program’s mission. Outlets for this work might be in the new-plays festival each year, or a staged reading with a guest playwright-in-residence, or in a mainstage show in Reynolds Theater as part of Theater Previews at Duke, the professional arm of the drama program. “We feel that presenting new work fits perfectly into the mission of a research university,” says Voss. “The real value of research is to add to the greater body of knowledge. With the creative acts of the writer or actor or designer, they too are adding to the greater body of knowledge.” Establishing its place in the research-oriented liberal-arts university hasn’t always been easy for the drama program. In the fall of 1972, a Drama Planning Committee was formed in response to student interest. The committee, headed by John Clum, then associate professor of English, proposed the creation of a drama department that would include a chair, a director of undergraduate studies, one assistant professor, an actor-in-residence, and other visiting artists. The ambitious proposal was turned down. But the dream lived on. The committee resubmitted a simpler proposal in 1974 for an Interdisciplinary Program in Drama, for which no additional personnel would be needed. That proposal was accepted and, in 1975, courses listed as “Drama” rather than “English” were first offered. The response to the first courses prompted a follow-up proposal for a drama major, which was approved in December 1975. John Clum was director of the new program, and he and two other original faculty members, Scott Parker and Kenneth Reardon, were soon joined by additional faculty to help carry the growing load. In 1985, the university brought in David Ball from Carnegie-Mellon University to be the director of the program, and Ball brought with him a conservatory-style approach to drama education. “Actor training became the absolute heart and soul of the program,” says Clum. But the conservatory style left little time for drama students to explore outside their field. They were being prepared as if they were graduate students; the rigorous acting schedule, with classes, workshops, movement drills, and rehearsals, often ran seven full days a week. In 1991, David Ball stepped down and, in 1992, Richard Riddell was hired to change the overemphasis on actor training and steer the program back to providing a well-rounded liberal-arts education. “I was asked to integrate the program more fully into the larger liberal-arts environment at Duke, to make the program more inclusive, and to provide stability by building up the faculty,” says Riddell, whose credentials include a doctorate from Stanford and a Tony Award for lighting design. He was also the first director of the American Repertory Theatre’s Institute for Advanced Theatre Training at Harvard University. Under Riddell’s leadership, the number of full-time, regular-rank faculty has grown from four to nine members who regularly write, design, produce, act, teach, and win awards. The curriculum has been revised, particularly strengthening the areas of dramatic literature and playwriting. Theater Previews at Duke has co-produced four professional shows, with a fifth, A Thousand Clowns by Herb Gardner, starring Tom Selleck, on tap for May 15 to June 3. Riddell receives a lot of credit from his colleagues for the thriving state of the program. Dale Randall, professor emeritus of English and drama who was interim director of the program after Ball’s departure, compliments Riddell on his “democratic style of leadership.” “Richard is very positive, very inclusive,” says Randall. “There’s an extraordinary feeling of camaraderie in the program now, of everybody pulling together.” Jeff Storer, associate professor of the practice of drama and co-founder and artistic director of Durham’s Manbites Dog Theater, points to “an amazingly varied and accomplished faculty. One of the greatest aspects of the program is that the faculty are all still deeply involved in creative activity. We are all working professionals. We practice what we preach,” he says. “We teach by example—our work and explorations and research and pieces of theater we make are there for our students. “My struggles to keep my small theater company alive are happening parallel to my teaching. They see the real world. And I can give opportunities in my productions that can start careers. Maybe Manbites Dog is relatively low on the food chain, but we have a strong sense of professional integrity and standards, and these kids can be paid for the first time and go on to bigger opportunities after graduation.” And those kids appreciate the opportunities afforded them by faculty. “It’s an incredibly strong faculty,” says junior drama major Jim Iseman, an actor in The Changeling. “I hope to get involved next year in some of the productions put on by my teachers in their own companies.” Says Reggie Harris, another junior drama major, “Drama classes are my only classes at Duke where the teachers know you. And you get to meet interesting people. You don’t have the same opportunity to interact in other classes as you have in drama classes and plays.” Making sure theater in all its forms and at all levels of development is available to students is a hallmark of the drama program. Theater Previews at Duke, in productions such as A Thousand Clowns, gives students the opportunity to intern with professional playwrights, composers, actors, directors, designers, managers, and technicians, learning to assemble a show from the ground up. And the producers in partnership with Theater Previews at Duke have the opportunity to perfect their product on a regional stage: A Thousand Clowns will go on to play in Chicago, Boston, and New York. “Our theater in Durham offers commercial producers a venue without the pressure of New York City,” explains Riddell. “We can nurse the embryonic piece here. We can be the place where the art is developed. And the financial scale is much smaller.” Previewing plays at Duke was the brainchild of legendary Broadway producer Emanuel Azenberg. He came to Duke to visit his daughter, Lisa Azenberg Hayes ’85, and fell in love with the campus. A Tony Award-winner with a tremendous track record, he was asked to guest lecture. “I was doing lots of plays at the time,” he says, “and I looked at Reynolds [Theater] and had this idea to preview shows at Duke. There was lots of cooperation; it all worked nicely. To me it’s always been pleasurable—and my phone doesn’t ring here.”
Azenberg still comes to Duke each spring semester to teach one course, “Leadership and the Broadway Theater.” He is well versed on the subject, having produced more than fifty Broadway shows, including twenty Neil Simon plays. “I read plays with the kids,” says Azenberg, with an affection in his voice surprising for a stereotypically fast-paced, crusty New Yorker. “It’s a lot of preparation for me because kids here are smart, you know, and I have to keep up with them. But kids here are also ‘prived’ (as opposed to deprived)—many of them have missed the struggle in life, so we read the plays as metaphors to teach them about life. I encourage my students to strive to find real fulfillment in their lives instead of just trying to make a trillion dollars.”
Azenberg stays in touch with promising students, as do other professionals and playwrights-in-residence who bring their work through. “Our students don’t have to break into the ‘world out there,’ ” says the Theater Previews’ Voss. “The world comes here, and students get to know the professionals as real people.” O’Malley, whose credits include a number of Broadway musicals, plays, films, and television shows, recently played Jo March in Little Women, The Musical, a workshop production co-produced with Duke’s Theater Previews. It played to sold-out audiences in Sheafer Theater. O’Malley, tossing her auburn curls, had the audience in the palm of her hand, first luring them into laughter with a comic flair reminiscent of Lucille Ball, then bringing them to tears with the dramatic deftness of Greta Garbo. In fact, an audience survey participant suggested handing out boxes of tissues to audience members as they arrive. |
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