A borrowed sawhorse that was broken, and replaced, without the director knowing what had happened. A dead character wheeled off on a dolly, to applause, during a scene change. A rented backdrop coming down during a change and winding up in a pile on the floor backstage during the show.
Those were just a few of the memories—most humorous, others more serious—evoked on May 2 for current and past directors of Bluffton University’s May Day theatrical productions, which date to 1915.
The occasion was a May Day symposium marking the century of such productions, which have been mainly musicals since the 1970s. And it offered further evidence that just about anything can, and does, happen during the course of putting on a show.
Joining current faculty members and directors Melissa Friesen and Crystal Sellers Battle on the panel were emeriti faculty Gene Caskey and Stephen Jacoby, each of whom directed a number of shows beginning in the ‘60s; Christine Purves, who predated Caskey and Jacoby; and Jane Kaufman, a director from 1999-2002.
Gene Caskey
“A lot of things happen backstage that, hopefully, no one is aware of,” said Caskey, who told the story about the piled-up backdrop during the 1990 production of “Kiss Me Kate.”
In 1978, Caskey was a walk-on in “The Annuity,” walking across the stage during the overture and disappearing into a church. “It worked fine for two nights,” he said, but as he went onstage the final night, he could tell the church door was locked. Trying to figure out what he should do as he approached it, he knocked a couple times to no avail, then crossed himself and walked around the church and off the stage.
An emotional Caskey also related a moving moment from “Godspell,” in 1975. The musical was presented on the floor of Founders and, one night, as the crucified body of Jesus was carried up the stairs, through the audience, a man “stood up in respect to what was happening,” Caskey said.
Every production tells a story that actors must learn and internalize, so they can communicate it to an audience whose members will, ideally, also internalize it, he explained. At that moment in “Godspell,” he realized that objective had been met, he said.
Stephen Jacoby
Jacoby directed 23 shows during his 40 years at Bluffton, from 1966-2006. One of them, “Into the Woods,” in 1994, was so musically challenging that he was considering cutting part of one song. But a cast member said “Let’s try it one more time—and they nailed it,” he recalled admiringly.
He also noted a performance cut short by a tornado warning and, in 1971, his infant daughter crying on cue in “Fiddler on the Roof.” The latter production was the first of “Fiddler” by an amateur company in Ohio, Indiana or Michigan, Caskey added. “My job was to come up with 87 costumes,” which were later rented to a Jewish community group near Detroit, he said.
Christine Purves
Among Purves’s productions was “John Brown’s Body,” in 1961. She said the cast told her that directions to go through a curtain were impossible because the curtain was against a wall. So she recruited a student to go outside and put a ladder up to a window, where cast members exited instead, before returning to a door by running around the building.
Jane Kaufman
Kaufman called her years of directing at Bluffton “four of the happiest years of my life.” She credited the creation of quilts by local women—for “Quilters” in 2001—with helping make that show “a phenomenal experience” in particular. Their compiled quilt still hangs outside Bluffton’s academic affairs office in College Hall.
Melissa Friesen - Crystal Sellers Battle
In addition to sharing some of their more memorable moments from recent years—including the dead dentist character wheeled off to applause in 2007’s “Little Shop of Horrors”—Friesen and Sellers Battle outlined their process for selecting each year’s musical.
The following spring’s show is chosen each fall, after the directors have seen first-year students in classes. With no theatre major at Bluffton, students are coming from across disciplines, Friesen pointed out. And because the production must connect with the audience, she and Friesen try to pick something they feel will work at Bluffton, Sellers Battle said.
But regardless of the musical, she added, her relationship with Friesen helps the process from beginning to end. “One of the highlights is doing these shows with one of my best friends,” she said.
The symposium drew an audience that filled the Musselman Library Reading Room and included alumni who had performed in May Day productions going back to the 1940s. The event also included a display on May Day theatrical history created by Carrie Phillips, archives and special collections librarian.
Photo cutline: The cast of Bluffton’s 2015 May Day musical, “The Musical of Musicals: The Musical!” performed the show’s opening number to open the May 2 symposium on 100 years of May Day theatricals on campus.
