For the third year in a row, University of Tennessee theatre design graduate students have swept the top awards in the Southeastern Theatre Conference Design Competition.  

UT graduate students Catherine Girardi, Emily Strickland and Nathaniel Sinnott won first place in lighting, costume and set design.  Jeff Meyer took second place in the lighting competition and Brian Barker won third place in scene design.Graduate Student, Felia Davenport is one of only two costume designers selected nationally to exhibit in the juried exhibition, Young Designers’ Forum at the annual conference of the United States Institute for Theatre Technology in Phoenix and Jon Harper will exhibit in the lighting designers category.

Kevin Crowe has written a nice review in Metro Pulse  of our Studio Series production of King Lear, noting the challenges involved in actually staging this play.  Director Jed Diamond’s approach, and our MFA Performance Students’ portrayals made sense to him:

Maybe it is a fairy tale, in a sense, but it’s also vile and disgusting, not the stuff dreams are made of, with fat wads of spit flying from the actor’s mouths as they shout their iambic pentameter. When Zach Fine comes onstage as Lear during the first scene, sporting an odd mask (think Phantom of the Opera meets Midsummer Night’s Dream ), he’s about as far away from all the bloat and turgidity and Orsonian melodrama that has surrounded the role since, perhaps, 1956, back when Orson Welles showed us that slow pacing and grandiose pauses don’t always work. In short, this ain’t foppish Shakespeare, nor is it a lesson in literature.

It’s raw humanity, stripped of the weight of history and literary importance. These characters breathe–and sweat. The odor fills the theater when Poor Tom contorts his body, often curling his toes as his body gyrates to a bizarre rhythm. It’s madness, the syncopated beats of a mind misaligned. They’re freeing Lear from its academic bondage.

Onstage, there isn’t much to note. A few benches and a jointed stool, that’s about it. But it isn’t necessary to have anything more. Acting makes this play. The students in UT’s MFA Acting and Design program have been working on their Shakespeare chops since December. After hundreds of hours in rehearsal–and countless more hours spent learning the lines, the right inflections, how to be a madman and whatnot–they’ve pulled it off.

Perhaps those who have shyed away from the show because of the play’s reputation should take heed and invest a few hours in some remarkable theatre.  We wish more had been able to see comments like this sooner!

Please read the entire review! 

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While we “major media” in town haven’t devoted much attention to our Studio Series production of King Lear, UT’s student newspaper, The Daily Beacon, has published a review of the play.

Staff writer Samantha Senn discusses many of the aspects of the production and concludes:

While many students will do almost anything to avoid Shakespeare, this is a production nobody should miss. The actors bring life to the characters, making even the longest monologue exciting. Christopher Tramantana, who plays Edmond, Gloucester’s illegitimate son, takes care to emphasize the jokes that the audience may otherwise miss during his soliloquy about his parentage. Throughout the show, he turns the lines students labor over in literature classes into witty jokes and comments.

Junior Harrison Young, a theatre major, said that though a full-text Shakespeare play is risky, this production is worth seeing.

“For a Shakespeare play, it’s done well,” he said. “It layeth the smacketh down.”

The full review is available online.