Talent stretched too thin in campus theater curtain

Rice has entered that period that comes once a semester, roughly a month long, when we all remember why there should be less theater on campus. And that is the theater people talking.

Most of the year it sounds like a feather in Rice’s cap that you can see twelve different shows within the space of about three weeks. Musicals and Shakespeare and Ionesco galore.

Then comes crunch time. By having nearly every college do two shows a year, technical crews become stretched to the breaking point. And we all suddenly realize why having producers double as costume makers is a very bad idea. Then the ability to go straight from Much Ado About Nothing to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead loses a lot of its appeal.

The truth is that the flourishing cornucopia of theater on campus is propped up by technical people who are worn down to the bone. And many shows have to sift through the student body roughs in the hopes of finding hidden diamonds to fill the casts.

And the audiences are not in much better shape. If they are like many on campus, they have to juggle in three different shows per weekend, each starring a friend who will be hurt if they do not attend. And, in the meantime, they would also really like to see Urinetown and what that English director at Baker has come up with. But there is only so much time students can devote to hopping from one transformed college commons to the next.

So I propose a revolutionary idea. Why doesn’t Rice have fewer productions and — hear me out — be able to devote more resources and talent to them? Wouldn’t it be better to have four high quality shows than to barely be able to put 12 on the stage? Hey, I would negotiate as high as six, and we would still have enough tech people to go around without killing themselves.

It would be amazing to actually be able to unite all those actors who star or steal the show in the individual productions and let them all work together for once. Can you imagine what we could produce if we could pool our efforts?

Believe me, there would still be plenty of places for new theater people to get their feet wet and plenty of shows to delight theater-goers. The productions would just actually be worth everyone’s time.

I don’t mean to imply that any of the shows that I have worked on or seen this semester have been bad. But if you look closely at the technical crews, you will see either the dark circles revealing that they have not slept in a week, or the manic gleam that serves as the only warning that they are about to go mad. People are always going to be stretched a little thin on the final few weeks of a performance, but we’re wearing out our tech people way too much.

And we cannot help it. After all, costumes have to get done, and the producers can sew. Lights need to be hung, and our designer knows how. Sets need to be built, and the Archi who designed it can figure it out. The assistant director can stage manage and someone needs to do it.

But it is not working. So I propose a solution. It will not solve the problem overnight, but it is a step in the right direction.

For starters, all the colleges should limit themselves to one production a year — either in the fall or spring. I encourage those who have both to keep their fall show for the time being, as it is the far less theater-heavy semester.

The next step is infinitely harder. Colleges should get it out of their heads that they have to do a show, especially if no one has one that they particularly want to do. If a college does not have a qualified director — or will not hire one — who has been dying to put on a certain show, it does not need to go out looking for one. Believe me, there is plenty of other theater going on around campus.

It should be easy to get involved in Rice theater. But should not be something that students do unless they are passionate about it. Right now, besides being passionate, you have to be crazy to do theater on campus. After all, resources are stretched so thin that you will probably have to do more work than you can handle in order to reach opening night. It is not the dream environment that we think. It is killing our tech people from the inside out, and all of the productions are suffering because of it.

Katy Mulvaney is a Baker College sophomore.

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