New theater director aims for accessibility
Hoping to refocus the spotlight on the Theater Department, Christina Keefe took the stage as Theater Director at the beginning of this semester.
Keefe hopes to increase the visibility of the Theater Department on campus by putting on plays that students can relate to and getting more students involved in the productions.
“I want to grow the program in a way so that the students will know that you can work in this field, have fun, and easily double-major and make your parents happy so they so they don’t think you’re going out and starving,” she said. “You can get your business degree and do the other thing your passion tells you to do, and you can also carve that passion into something that is viable.”
Keefe said she hopes to touch as many students as possible with the acting bug. This semester, the Theater Department is offering many new classes including stage combat, voice and speech, and a class on acting for the camera.
Keefe said the residential college system at Rice presents a very unique dynamic for theater because Theater Department productions are not the only ones on campus.
“It’s a completely different deal to go, ‘Wow, my plays are competing against productions of Hair at Jones and Shakespeare at Baker,’” she said.
Still, Keefe said the message she wants to send students is that they can be involved both in theater at the colleges and with the Theater Department.
One way she hopes to do this is to have college theaters perform one scene from their production at Hamman Hall for one night so that students have the opportunity to work with the more advanced theater facilities the department has to offer. Keefe said she also hopes to attract more students to performances in Hamman Hall by putting on dynamic, off-beat shows instead of standard classics.
“I’m looking for shows people can relate to, shows that are vibrant, interesting and fun,” Keefe said.
This spring, the Rice Players are putting on a production of David Ives’s All in the Timing, a series of six short plays.
Keefe has a master’s degree in acting from University of Southern Carolina in Columbia and a bachelor’s degree in acting from New York University.
Before becoming theater director, Keefe taught in spring and fall 2007 at Rice. Previously, she taught at Lehigh University and Muhlenberg College from 2003 to 2006. She was assistant artistic director and artistic associate at the Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival from 2001 to 2003. Additionally, Keefe did dialect coaching dealing, something she still does in Houston, where she coaches private students with foreign accents on how to acquire a more neutral American accent.
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