Theatre

It’s no secret that I’m an enthusiastic thespian. I talk (read: complain) about rehearsal far more than I talk about anything else, and I complain (read: brag) about all the hours that I spend in the theatre building to most everyone. So it should come as a surprise to no one that when I’m at work in Archives, and I have completed all of my tasks, I flip through the card catalog, searching under all possible terms for information about the theatre department. Most recently I came across some very exciting photos of our building right after its construction in 1966. I marveled at how much the same certain things looked but even more at how different others looked. Most astonishing were the pictures of rooms and places that I could not identify, like a huge and mysterious tech booth, the location of which I could not fathom:

If actors were actually astronauts...

The theatre was remodeled in 2000, so the Stieren house and stage look strikingly different.

The space that we misleadingly refer to as “The Café Theatre” was clearly an actual café at one time:

We're all pretty upset we lost this classiness.

One change that has been enormously positive has been in how we use our lobby. I think any Trinity student knows that when you want to find a theatre student, the first place to look is in the lobby of the Ruth Taylor building, but this wasn’t always the case. Our lobby used to look like this:

Foyer 1966

Apparently, the department was very strictly against students lollygagging about in “The Foyer,” and instead students could use a green room off the Stieren (that no longer exists). Personally I could not imagine our building without at least three or four students diligently doing homework (read: gossiping unashamedly) in our space. Still, though almost fifty years have passed since these pictures were taken, I don’t feel so distant from them. It’s the faces that all seem the same. The spirit hasn’t changed at all.

TUPS Meeting

--Kate Cuellar '15, Special Collections and Archives Student Assitant