When senior Sarah Nolting submitted a paper in her theatre class last fall, she didn’t expect to receive a prestigious award for it months later.
Her professor, Chairman and Professor of Theatre James Brandon, entered the piece into the competition for the Undergraduate Theatre Scholar Award, a national award through the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. The center typically holds the annual American College Theater Festival, where the winner of the award is recognized. This year’s event was canceled due to coronavirus, but Nolting still received $500 as the reward.
Nolting’s winning paper was titled “Religion in Theatre: The Book of Job as Israelite Drama.”
“I talked about the way that the book of Job is very similar to ancient theater because the Isrealite tradition is an oral tradition. One could consider Job to be a play, with different people and speakers to play roles, which some modern productions still do,” Nolting said.
Nolting originally wrote the paper for Brandon’s theatre class, from which he takes the best papers to submit to various competitions. Her paper fit in with the theme of the Undergraduate Theatre Scholar Award, which encompasses theatre history or theatre tech. According to Nolting, the program’s goal is to do “new things with old works or old things with new works.”
Brandon said one thing that was valuable about the competition is receiving input from outside sources.
“I submit to a few different places around the country. We’ve had good success in getting our students to have work presented outside of Hillsdale and getting feedback that’s not just from me or another Hillsdale professor,” Brandon said. “And its always good to have somebody else that is an expert in academic theatre read these papers blindly. They don’t know the author and that’s huge because it means we’re not only getting selected consistently, we’re getting selected consistently and anonymously, the way it should be.”
Nolting credited her success to being a student at Hillsdale, which has produced winners in this competition for four of the past five years.
“We hold ourselves to a higher standard of writing and research than most schools, and our department is one that really cares about theatre history,” Nolting said. “Any theatre major is required to take two years of theatre history to graduate.”
Emma Trist, a Hillsdale alumna, is a close friend of Nolting.
“I have known Sarah the past four years and she never ceases to amaze me with her huge range of talents,” Trist said. “I am not in the least surprised that she has added ‘theatre history scholar’ to her repertoire. Sarah was very dedicated to her research topic. She went so far as to personally contact individuals who were a part of the creative team behind these unique modern-day performances of Job.”
This work, along with involvement in many plays and classes in the department, has led to good career prospects for Nolting.
“I would like to do theatre in my life and a major part of my dream has to do with theatre history and education,” she said. “I’d like to be involved with a company that focuses on theatre history and I think it speaks to my love of the subject.”
