Gregg Stull

Professor of Theatre

The theatre department is constantly striving to break the mold. The latest example of this is the innovative seminar “Ideas in Performance.” Students choose a topic that they want to research in depth and then create a final project that integrates their research with their journey throughout the semester. Each student writes an online blog throughout the class, and chooses among several authoring tools to publish their final projects in the form of digital stories.

The new uses of technology are only the beginning of this cutting-edge course. The class is built around a week in New York City where students see more than 10 plays, both on and off Broadway from all different genres, ranging from “The Seagull” to “Spring Awakening.” Each student builds separate itineraries and researches different aspects of theatre through interviews with actors, stage managers, producers, and others, while also exploring the major theatre research collections in New York. The idea behind the course is to empower students to consider the specifics of today’s theatrical environment while helping create a gateway for their transition from school to the real world of theatre.

Jenna Doolittle, Peter Larson, and Jon Reynolds were three students who took the course when it was last offered. All of them had praise for different aspects of their experience. Larson said that “digital mediums made the immense amount of work more manageable and more fun.” Another bonus of the nontraditional projects, Reynolds said, was that “all these things are like time capsules, and it’s really cool to look back on, and it’s a great thing to leave behind.”

Doolittle summed up her experience by saying that “for most of us, it was a life-changing experience. We were able to realize that our dreams are not too far away.”

Their teacher, Professor of Theatre Gregg Stull, said that seeing the journey his students make is one of the most rewarding aspects of his job. “It is not enough for students to only read what others have written. They need to create new knowledge. The tools and technology we have implemented have connected our students to each other and to our field.” He explained that “Ideas in Performance” steps outside of the ordinary by focusing not on the classroom, but what happens after it.