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Name:             Dr. Robin C. Whittaker

Position:         Associate Professor and Drama Advisor, English Department

                          Artistic Producer and Faculty Advisor, Theatre St. Thomas

Institution:    St. Thomas University (Fredericton, NB, Canada)

 

Title of Project: The Trickster of Seville

Type of Project: Theatre production

Author(s): Tirso de Molina, English Translation by Roy Campbell

Your Role: Director, Producer

 

Participants (number and their status, i.e. BFA students)

Performers: 21 BA students at STU

Designers: 4 (+ myself): 1 staff, 1 contract, 1 recent BA Alumnus, 1 current BA student

Assistants: 1 Assistant Director (BA student at STU)

Other Collaborators: 4 stage crew (BA students at STU)

 

Development period: 1 month (on and off)

Rehearsal Period: 7 of 9 consecutive weekends

Performance Dates: Wednesday, November 16 to Saturday, November 19 (5 shows)

Performance Venue: Black Box Theatre, St. Thomas University

 

Purpose of Peer Review:

1. To gain peer feedback on my creative work at STU, with the option of being able to include this feedback in my promotion dossier. This is particularly relevant given that those colleagues who would be evaluating my dossier will not be artist-scholars.

2. To receive suggestions for improvement in my artistic work generally, particularly in the context of STU’s liberal arts mandate and cross-disciplinary interests.

3. To offer this production and my work on it as a ‘test case’ for the CATR ‘peer review’ seminar committee.

 

Brief Description of the Project (up to 200 words):

Theatre St. Thomas’s production of The Trickster of Seville introduces STU students, both involved in the show and as audience members, to a play from the Spanish Golden Age that holds clear relevance to today. Because the production is outside of course work, open auditions were held in late September for not only our students, but for members of the Fredericton community. We had a record number of auditioners this year (49) from which we were able to cast this show (19) and our winter show (10).

            This production is giving our students the opportunity to discussion the nexus of politics and sexual power in both historical and, as you can well imagine, contemporary contexts. Mainstream and social media alike maintain this conversation and our students have been quick to see the connections. The play provides a counterpoint to our winter show, No White Picket Fence, a new verbatim piece that presents the lives of women who have gone through foster care and now see themselves as living well. Along with de Molina’s Don Juan play (the first of its kind), our season explores sexual power and its consequences from both the male and female perspectives.

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Please define your research or artistic question(s), the type of inquiry, the anticipated process and your outcome goal (up to 500 words):

TST provides students with theatre production experience that compliments the course work of those enrolled in acting and directing courses in the English Department’s Drama Concentration. Since I took over TST’s leadership in 2014 I’ve sought to direct plays (5 so far) that dovetail with courses in programs offered across STU (e.g. PoliSci, Criminology, Social Work). Some of our students go on to conservatory acting programs after graduations, others are now starting to go on to graduate work in theatre studies, while others still see their experience as part of their broader liberal arts education.

            Within this liberal arts and training context, I programmed The Trickster of Seville to offer students insights into political history, geography and, frankly, to offer them the opportunity to embody the action-oriented comedy of the Spanish Golden Age. This is a style that plays well in our flexible, studio-style Black Box Theatre.

            As such, the production is less an answer to a research or artistic question as it is an experiential learning environment in which students explore a variety of goals and intentions with one another, guided by myself and our creative team.

            One result of the flexibility we have working extracurricularly on weekends is that there is some leeway for adapting the rehearsal process to the needs of the particular show, thus providing our students with experience in a variety of approaches. In this case, we have been able to rehearse the play chronologically, calling only those actors who are required in a given unit. This allows conversation about sociopolitical, historical, and of course textual elements of each unit before we put it on its feet. The goal is to provide a significant learning experience for the actors, assistant director, and stage management that focus on, but also goes beyond, the practice of theatre itself.