Women in Theatre at Centre

Fig. 3. Newspaper photograph of Centre College’s production of “You Can’t Take it With You” in 1958.^[9]

This photo comes from a collection in the Centre Rare Books room. It depicts the Centre students performing this play.^[9] The third from the left was a white student playing Donald using black face.^[10] While performing in blackface is not acceptable and offensive by today’s standards, it was a common practice for actors after the Civil War and into the early 1900s in order to perpetuate “negative stereotypes about African Americans.” By the 1930s, the practice was declining in popularity, which makes its use at Centre in 1958 quite concerning.^[11]

In 1980, we can see the addition of the Regional Arts Center, now called the Norton Center for the Arts, which was completed in 1973.^[12] Its construction was significant because it created a whole new place on campus for performance art. In addition, it opened new opportunities for the students at Centre to work on professional road shows that performed at the Regional Arts Center. While national theatrical networks came to include Danville for the first time, faculty for the Dramatic Arts Program remained all men and the Regional Arts Center employed both men and women. However, it is important to note that the women that worked in the Regional Arts Center held jobs such as Secretary, Typist, and Box Office manager, where the men held more powerful positions. The emergence of a formalized Dramatic Arts Program operating alongside the Centre Players Club allowed for two opportunities to appear, bifurcating the theatre program into the Dramatic Arts Program, which featured male leadership, and the Centre Players Club. For this student-run organization, what had been a club run by men in the 1940s was by the 1980s a women-dominated group. Unlike the 1947 organization, all positions in the 1980 executive committee were held by women.^[13] This shows that while men continued to dominate the formalized structures and programs, the Club started to change by becoming a space for women to have more power. While it was only a student run organization, it was still a space for women to have the autonomy to choose what they were going to perform and how they wanted to perform it.

By the year 2000, the Dramatic Arts Program faculty had expanded to four members. The Norton Center for the Arts had expanded to seven staff members. However, most of the change that we see this year does not especially come from the Dramatic Arts Program but the Centre Players Club. When the Drama Arts Program received more administrative support and the number of faculty increased, it could give additional faculty support and mentorship to the Centre Players Club. While the faculty were all men, they benefited from a field in which graduate and professional training was more inclusive and equitable. The resources they could provide for the Centre Players Club offered more gender inclusive performances. At the same time, because the Club faced fewer restrictions in terms of curriculum and the seasonal cycle of plays, the Club could produce three unconventional and progressive events. For example, one of these events was a performance of Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues,” which was directed by a student at the time named Katie Wilson. The cast consisted of seven women and one man. They performed a series of vignettes from the famous off-Broadway show to “increase awareness about violence against women.” In the 2000 yearbook, editors reported that “this piece was perhaps the most intimate, socially progressive theatrical experiences that Centre has ever had.”^[14]

     In addition to a performance of the “Vagina Monologues,” the “Centre Players Club experimented with a new genre, the Midnight Cabaret.”^[14]In this event members of the Centre Player Club “performed some risqué dance numbers, soft porn parodies of our own shows, musical numbers, and flirtatious games."^[14] The Midnight Cabaret was a gender gamechanger because it allowed student performers to not only engage in scripted plays but it also allowed the Club to experiment with new types of performances and perform shows that brought attention to real life issues. This experimentation was noteworthy, and members claimed ownership of they sought to challenge gender norms, saying that “of course, that’s our job.”^[14] The third event of the 2000 Centre Players schedule was a fundraiser for “The Traveling Toybox.” This show was “an original traveling, philanthropic children’s theatre created by Julee Baber.” The students created a set, costumes, and props and performed “two shows to area children’s homes, hospital pediatric units, and children’s organizations free of charge."^[14] With this wide range of performances, it is clear that the theatre Club was truly holding a mirror up to society and challenging people to see the range of emotions. By doing this, it encourages conversation about what happened in the performances and expands Centre College’s and the Danville community’s experiences with new types of theatre.

In 2019, the number of Dramatic Arts faculty dropped slightly, but the arrival of the first woman faculty member, Dr. Jennifer Goff, to join the Dramatic Arts Program in a tenure-track position changed its gender composition. Dr. Goff’s scholarship “focuses on the work of contemporary comic women playwrights.”^[15] This was a significant change because it created a new gender dynamic within the Dramatic Arts Program, aligning it as a source of change alongside the student-run Centre Players Club. However, the Centre Players Club continued to operate as a space for all gender identities to have control and power over what performances or events that they wanted to hold that year. At the 2019 elections Diana Smith became President, Olivia Wilkinson became Vice President, Laney Taylor became Treasure, Sophie Grindon became Secretary, and Katie Barnes became Public Relations.^[16] What’s most compelling is that the 2019 performance schedule, which the Dramatic Arts Program created but with much support from the Centre Players Club, included a number of plays that tackled issues of sexual violence and gender visibility. One show, “I Have Something To Say”, featured a series of monologues written and performed by the students while the play, “John Proctor is the Villain” by Kimberly Belflower, deals with sexual assault,^[17] the final show was “James and the Giant Peach”^[18] by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul with the title role, James, being played by a female student. These performances demonstrated that the Dramatic Arts Program was willing to push for shows that deal with difficult topics in order to help encourage conversation about the social issues that people face today.

Through the examination of the four areas of the gender of the playwright, gender breakdown of faculty and staff, gender breakdown of the casts, and the development of the Centre Players Club alongside the Dramatic Arts Program, I have shown how theatre at Centre College has evolved to foster an environment of inclusion and to promote conversation about difficult social issues that we are facing today. It is important that we continue to grow our understanding of each other and ourselves. Through theatre we can explore other people’s experiences and by learning about these experiences, learn more about ourselves.