Every year for almost 15 years, Hillsdale College theater students participate in the American College Theater Festival, where they attend workshops and compete for prizes and recognition from theater professionals.
This year was one of Hillsdale’s most successful.
“We’re part of the largest region in terms of school and students participating. Anywhere between 1500-2000 students attend the weeklong festival,” Professor of Theater George Angell said. “Lots of students compete, including plenty of graduate students from big schools.”
Yet junior Katherine Denton won the top award in directing, junior Dan Thelen won first place in stage design, the dramaturgy class won a special award for their work on Medea, and junior Kyra Moss advanced to the semi-final round of the Irene Ryan acting competition.
Directing
“This whole process helped me realize that [Eugene O’Neil] is amazing,” Denton said. She won the Society of Directors and Choreographers award for her direction of Peter Kistler, Leslie Reyes, and Stephan Godleski in Eugene O’Niel’s “Beyond the Horizon.”
“The characters are just fabulous and the script is just amazing and my actors were great. So I decided I would let them do the work,” she said. “Bare bones imagery. I wanted it as simple as I could get.”
Denton was the first Hillsdale student to compete in the competition, one of ACTF’s newest annual competitions, created specifically to highlight student directing. Thelen said Denton’s staging of the scene was notable for it’s simplicity as well as its attention to detail.
“Katherine’s scene came off very naturally and well constructed,” he said. “It was also well acted by the students who were in it. She was the only one who included sound cues, which really added to the scene.”
One of the directing decisions that most impressed the judges was the use of a 30-second sound cue of a baby crying after a fight between the parents.
“The fight was furious. It almost gets physically violent,” Denton said. “And I gave them just thirty seconds of this baby crying. It gave both the characters and the audience time to register the full implications of what just happened and to see that they ruined their entire lives together.”
Stage Design
Dan Thelen and the masks created for The Tower Player’s production of “Medea defeated” over 75 other realized student designs including a highly ornate costume piece for Helen of Troy, giant trash-heaps constructed to move as a single unit, and a set of leather Commedia del Arte masks.
“They were gorgeous,” said Denton. “We were like ‘ours are so primitive!’ But we beat those guys. We were more original.”
Thelen, Denton, and junior Katherine Shilka all worked together to construct the masks, Thelen said. “I was the one who went in to present them, which is why I got the award, but it was the three of us. It is a privilege to represent the hard work of several students.”
“Dan was the perfect person to present,” Denton said. “Dan, being Dan, put his heart and soul into it and we’re very, very happy.”
As a prize, Thelen’s registration fee will be paid to attend the USITT convention in Miluake.
“It’s not normally a student event and the masks will be put on special display there. Theater professionals from all over the country will see them,” Angell said.
Acting
Junior Kyra Moss is one of three Hillsdale students to ever reach the semi-final round of the Irene Ryan Acting Competition since Hillsdale began attending ACTF nearly 15 years ago, Angell said.
“And all of our semi-finalists were within the last six years,” Angell said. “She joins a very select group of people.”
Out of the 280 competitors, nearly 90 percent were dropped before the semi-final round, Angell said. Of the 42 students who competed in semi-finals, only 18 made it to the final round.
“I just wanted to be able to perform it well and to learn from it,” Moss said. “We were shocked that [advancing to semi-finals] happened for us. You don’t see a lot of students from the small schools.”
In the first round, Moss competed with a scene from the comedy “Maiden’s Prayer,” accompanied by acting partner Peter Kistler. The two also performed a scene from “Proof” in the second round.
“I’m just so happy that I had Peter,” she said. “He worked really hard and I am very grateful. I definitely felt that Peter and I were prepared and we worked really hard.”
Moss was nominated for the Irene Ryan Acting Competition for her portrayal of Simple in “The Merry Wives of Windsor.”
“She took a character who had the fewest lines in the script and made him into this lovable, quirky, hilarious goofball of a character that everyone was talking about,” Thelen said. “You don’t normally see a person with that ‘small’ of a role get nominated for the acting competition.”
Dramaturgy
Every year, the theater department enters shows into the competition that are then viewed by respondents who come from outside of the college, share their insights, and nominate actors for the Irene Ryan acting competition. They can also request the region to bestow awards for particular merit, Angell said.
One such special award was given to Hillsdale’s Dramaturgy Class, represented by Anne Peterson, for their work on “Medea,” Angell said.
“So many great things happened this year,” Moss said. “In everything. Directing, stage design, dramaturgy . . . there were just so many great things.”
vcooney@hillsdale.edu
