By Louis E. Guzmán, Staff Writer
Say what they will, you might as well bid goodbye to PPCC’s Theater Arts degree program. Beginning in the fall term, only four courses will be offered--courses that transfer as electives to the four-year state colleges and universities. The more spectacular, but less preferred technical courses will be dropped, right along with the productions that these normally make possible.
The hope that these hands-on courses might be picked up by University of Colorado, Colorado Springs, through an articulation arrangement is fast vanishing. If the courses now on the chopping block are not reinstated by the academic year 2008, PPCC will fall out of the ranks of high culture theater arts providers in east central Colorado.
Responding via e-mail to questions about the program’s future, PPCC Dean of Communications, Humanities and Technical Studies Dr. Deborah “Sunny” Schmitt extended hypothetical hopes that the complete demise of theater courses may indeed not occur. At the same time administrators list reasons why the degree’s technical offerings, as well as the theater productions, can no longer be sustained under current fiscal circumstances-- a claim that has not yet been publicly detailed by the college administration.
That the community college can benefit from the use of the auditorium, where theatrical productions occur, for other purposes, including revenue enhancement, is less emphasized by administrators. “Huge opportunity costs” are offered by Dean Schmitt as reasons for eliminating theater productions, essentially asserting that other uses for the space would result in higher monetary returns to the college than theater arts' activities provide.
Furthermore, Dean Schmitt says, “We are NOT a community theater … nor do we have a mandate to become one.”
Theater productions, since the late 1980s, have been essentially the end product of an extraordinary symbiosis between the college and the Masquerers, a small but active student organization dedicated to the art of theater. Although there are no records of productions prior to 2000, 12 plays are known to have been performed in the new century, according to Theatre Arts Department Chair Michael Stansbery. The spring semester’s production, now in rehearsal, may well be the last at PPCC.
It was during the early ‘80s, when Stansbery joined the PPCC faculty as permanent Theatre Arts director, that the idea of a continuing series of theater productions was conceived. In those days, the venue, now a theater, consisted of a three-chambered hall, with seating and not much more. Capable of being separated into three lecture halls or joined together into a large auditorium for special events, the space was a promising site for something more lively than a lecture hall.
Once assigned to the fledgling Theater Arts program, however, it gradually began acquiring the air of a theatrical performance venue. A cabinet- making shop with power tools was set up behind the stage spacing, and the walls progressively became encrusted with the paraphernalia that a true theater feeds on and is often scrounged from friends, back alleys and junk yards. Scrounging, in fact, has been honed to a high art there, yielding hand tools, prop materials, customary, and even space itself. A triangular bit of space is now the dressing room and paint locker all in one.
There are now shelves loaded with wood stock high on the back wall, joined by the sorts of props that any respectable theater must have, period tables and chairs, pieces of interior and exterior decoration, pillars to sustain ceilings and overhangs, doors that must be fitted to ever changing scenery, and gallons of paint no theater can do without. There is lighting rigged on the fly by the program director high over head, and the house lighting is maintained assiduously by the volunteer service of students and instructors. The seating out front always seems to need help to survive. Yet perfection remains illusive, there is no Green Room.
Earlier this decade a second faculty member, Walter Yuhrle, was added to the program staff. Now the course load is split between the two with set design courses and the production tasks as the director’s responsibilities, and the second faculty member teaches acting and speech. The duo has managed to accelerate productions of higher quality than before, and as a consequence earning a place in the local Theater Consortium that brings together several educational theater institutions in and around Colorado Springs.
There is a delicate, though successful, symbiotic funding and human relationship, as the Theatre Arts faculty puts it, between the college and what is known as productions. These are extra-curricular activities that allow students to practice the art they study. Productions do not offer course credit any more than conference play in college sports does.
Like sports, theater productions are in part funded by student fees, allocated by Student Government to student organizations. In the case of theater productions it is the Masquerers. The Masquerers receives funds from Student Government to cover approximately 50 percent of production costs. These are related to set materials and countless petty expenses related to staging productions. Grants from outside foundations cover another 25 percent to 30 of costs, leaving 20 percent to 25 percent to be covered by box-office revenue. At no time has the theater enterprise finished a season in the red, hence at no time has it been a financial burden to PPCC.
PPCC, apart from providing the space, utilities, limited faculty time and, of course, the institutional infrastructure for the degree program, contributes nothing in the way of raw materials or labor to productions.
Labor, in fact, is provided by the students of technical courses, the Masquer and community theater volunteers.
However, arduously, this symbiotic ecology has functioned successfully for more than a decade and has sustained the college’s image as a serious contributor to local culture. This is an important issue. A cursory review of the metropolitan performing arts reveals that of the 11 theater companies listed in the 2005 telephone directory, only two, perhaps three, are in operation less than a year after the directory was published. The theoretical meaning of this trend is interesting but unclear.
The Theater Consortium, as reported by Amanda Mountain, representative of UCCS’ contract Theatre Works company, extends up and down the Front Ranges and adjacent High Plains, servicing an extended community of perhaps three-quarters million people. It is lamentable, says Ms Mountain of UCCS’ Theatre Works, that Pikes Peak Community College may cease to be represented at the Consortium, as well as in the ranks of high culture makers in Colorado Springs’ growing urban community.
Tai Marker contributed to this story.
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