A Backstage Snapshot of the Performing Arts at Dartmouth

I’ve been interning at the Northern Stage—a professional theater company near Hanover in White River Junction, Vermont—since I was 15. Most recently, I’ve been a props apprentice and stage management apprentice there. The majority of people I worked with at Northern Stage are either Dartmouth professors or alumni. When my senior year of high school arrived, I had a choice between a stage management program and Dartmouth, a liberal arts college where I could get hands-on theater experience while learning about so many other subjects, on-campus and off.

A stage manager’s job is to ensure that the production goes well. In rehearsal, they take down blocking—the positions of the actors on the stage—and track prop and set changes. During the show, they’re calling cues for lights and sounds. I see their actual role in the theater as a kind of bridge between the company and the production team. Theater majors at Dartmouth are required to stage manage at least one show.

Kathleen Cunneen, a lecturer in the theater department and Director of New Student Programs, was actually one of the people who helped me choose Dartmouth. When I emailed the department asking to talk to someone about stage management, she set up a Zoom with me right away. I’ve taken her stage management course and worked with her in my role as a member of Class Council. Everyone in the theater department is so eager to teach students of all experience levels.

I was excited to find out during New Student Orientation that there was a production of Pippin happening my first term. Even though I only found out about it the week before auditions, everyone involved encouraged me to join. And I thought, “You seem so excited about it—sure!” The energy at Dartmouth is electric because everyone loves what they do. I also learned that you don't have to be a theater major to be involved with theater at Dartmouth. Even if theater is a side passion for someone, they’ll bring the same amount of energy and commitment to it as the theater majors do. That's just the nature of Dartmouth as a place—everyone is really committed to everything they do, and they’re here to do what they love. It’s refreshing.

I play King Charles, Pippin’s father, a character full of visceral and comedic anger. I came out as trans in my last year of high school, and this is only my third production auditioning for male characters. I found a lot of support in my small, rural, Southern high school, more than I was expecting. It’s been great to continue to explore that in college and to find that support even more present at Dartmouth. It's a very supportive, encouraging, and accepting community.

I didn't realize just how many different people were going to be pursuing theater in so many different ways—directing, writing, acting, and more. I have multiple friends who have written and produced plays. One is directing a musical next term for their senior thesis in theater, and another is writing a play about queerness and coeducation based on historical documents from Harvard Medical School. Where I’m from, those opportunities just didn't exist at the high school level. But Dartmouth feels similar to home in that the community members support each other. People come out to the shows, games, and events to cheer on their peers in all sectors of campus. When my siblings ask me, ‘Do you miss home at all?’ I say ‘yes,’ but it’s not like I’m missing connection. I’ve found that at Dartmouth.

I first became involved in theater at Dartmouth by joining the Rude Mechanicals, a student-produced Shakespeare company. We hold auditions every fall and winter, but anyone can join regardless of experience level. I joined my first-year fall, and I'm very grateful that I did. The Rude Mechs helped me understand a new form of acting and gave me an instant community to learn from. A lot of the theater that happens at Dartmouth is student-driven—pitched, directed, and designed by students with support from the Department of Theater.

The Leading Player is a really fun character because there's no description about the kind of person who is supposed to play her. I loved working closely with Shirley Jo Finney, our visiting director, to figure out what role she wanted my character to play in the broader design. Shirley Jo had a very clear vision for what the production as a whole should look like, but the wonderful thing was that the directors gave us all room to explore who we wanted to be. It was easy for me to find a character that felt like mine but still lived in the world Shirley Jo envisioned.

While a lot of my high school friends ended up attending theater conservatories, I was excited by the liberal arts approach at Dartmouth. One thing that unites the people who do theater at Dartmouth is that we want to create art. But the fact that students who do theater at Dartmouth are involved with lots of other pursuits really impacts the kinds of art that are produced here. It’s easier to come to theater and love it as an artistic expression when you have a life outside of it. Theater is about telling stories about the world around you—and the liberal arts teaches you about that world. Dartmouth allows you to bring the liberal arts into the theater to tell those stories. I chose Dartmouth because I could be interdisciplinary, and I’ve found that the liberal arts has allowed me to embrace that. Dartmouth gives you space to be yourself in a way that is not contained in any one box. Allow that discovery to happen.

Almost every project that I've done has been rooted in social activism. When we decided on Pippin as the department’s MainStage production, I figured that I could bring a different concept to the piece. I wanted to play and have fun, so that's what we did. For the visual concept, I borrowed from the Belgian surrealist Rene Magritte. We also did a mashup of time—in the play, there was no past, present, or future. The story is quite literally timeless. I like to put my own stamp on each show, and I think I accomplished that.

Yes. I loved that the class was composed of students pursuing a wide range of different majors. One member of our class was a costume designer for Pippin, but each student had varying levels of experience in the arts. And because they all came from different backgrounds, each student had their own objective of why they came to class. It was wonderful, and I found the students to be highly disciplined.

My teaching philosophy is built on the idea that acting is a study of human behavior. In exploring character, you're exploring people's universal needs, wants, and desires—and in doing so, you learn that you are not alone in your doubts, fears, and insecurities. In my classes, we build camaraderie as we conduct self-investigations about who we are. Students commented at the end of the course how much they’d learned about themselves.

I am an actor's director, and I'm also an emotional director. When someone sees a project of mine, I want them to feel and experience that. On each show, I set intentions with the production and acting teams: When people come into the theater and sit down in those seats, what is our intention? What is it that we want them to feel? What do we want that conversation to be as they go out the door? Everything in the story—from the color palette to the music—must then serve that purpose.

Know that you will draw outside the lines when it comes to your craft, but Dartmouth provides a safe space for one to create. Theater helps you throw off the yoke of your doubts and your fears and your insecurities and get in contact with your core as a human being. Whatever creative space you're in—know that you can walk in that space, feel it as a safe space in which you can explore, expound, and transform as you develop your craft.

Yes. During class, we studied artistry and craft. Then the students worked on technology for the show—they hung and focused all the lights and ran the light board. Two other classes are also tied directly into Dartmouth’s MainStage shows: members of THEA40: Technical Productions help build and run the production, and members of THEA41: Stage Management serve as stage managers on the show. Fascinatingly, only about a third of the students in my lighting design class were theater majors. The fact that the art of lighting attracts people from both artistic and technological perspectives gives students a different way of seeing the world. My classes focus on strengthening creativity and collaboration.

Lighting is the art of making specific choices about how we see. We don't see objects; rather, we see light reflected off objects. For any show, everything you see is a collaboration between light and the objects it illuminates. Lighting allows you to paint without using your hands—and it’s very much like music in the way it allows you to set tone and mood. In Pippin, light speaks to the mood of the moment. For example, the moment when King Charles is killed, there's a very intense light from behind—you see it, but you also really feel that moment a little bit more intensely. Light helps the audience to both see and feel.

There's an enormous amount of one-on-one interaction and mentoring between students and faculty at Dartmouth—and it's not just on the productions that this happens. For instance, we offer an internship program that allows students to work at Northern Stage for a quarter. I think a lot of people are initially drawn to theater because of the community, and that community actually extends into the postgraduate world. That’s a critical element of theater at Dartmouth.

Theater is literally a microcosm for the liberal arts. I'm a lighting designer, but really what I do is I help tell stories. Every time I work on a play, I'm focused on what that story is, and the lighting follows. A liberal arts approach is essential to theater because storytelling is based in collaboration. In a really good collaboration, the ideas grow on one another, become amplified and heightened. One of the most exciting moments in theater for me is when other designers start coming in with their ideas, because it pushes me. The liberal arts are key to studying theater. I've always been convinced of that.