"Harvard Undergraduate Theater is Incredibly Diverse and Active"
New HRDC President Dan Cozzens Discusses Opportunities and Challenges for Students in Drama
Jack Megan, Director of the Office for the Arts, recently interviewed Dan Cozzens '03, the newly elected President of the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club (HRDC). The HRDC is a student-run resource organization for all types of theater activity at Harvard including running Common Casting, the biannual open call for actors and technicians interested in participating in undergraduate theater productions. Dan and Jack discussed the excitement generated by Harvard's active theater community and the challenges that this level of activity poses.
JM: Dan, can you tell us a little bit about your own theater background? How did you first become involved in the world of drama? DC:
I spent a lot of time as a kid acting in little plays that my brother and sister and I made up to perform with other kids in the neighborhood for our families and friends. Our mother had always been enthusiastic about theater and doing plays with us, but the drive to pursue it came from us. I think we were excited by creating different worlds for ourselves and telling good stories to the people watching us.
I followed this up later on, acting in as many shows as I could, both in high school and outside of school, at a local community theater and elsewhere. I pursued acting most of all, but I would lend a hand whenever I was needed for run crew or build or anything like that. Here at Harvard, I dove into common casting, and came up with one small role freshman fall. I got involved in more shows later that year, and after several shows in the Loeb, I decided to run for a position on the Harvard Radcliffe Dramatic Club board in the fall of 2000. Since then, I’ve been acting around campus and working behind the scenes on the board. I’m directing a show for the first time this spring.
JM:What excites you about undergraduate theater at Harvard? DC:
Harvard undergraduate theater is incredibly diverse and active. There are many different theatrical spaces on campus that are constantly filled with shows, and the shows themselves range from experimental in the extreme, like this fall’s Paint Show in the Kronauer Space, to the loved and traditional Gilbert and Sullivan in the Agassiz.
Students from all concentrations participate in theater here, as much or as little as they would like. This brings hugely different perspectives to the collaborative work we do in theater, and the work is strengthened because of this. When the work from all sides of an involved process (directing, technical, and acting) culminates in a show that is technically sweet, artistic, and powerfully moving, everyone involved and everyone watching sees why theater here can be so exciting.
JM: Is there a flip side to that abundance and diversity? Are there specific challenges that come to mind as you assume the leadership of HRDC? DC:
Theater at Harvard is mostly about students going it alone. The farther students doing plays get from the Loeb and the Agassiz, the fewer the systems in place to help them out. This situation is fine in some cases, where students want to do shows on their own, but in others it is not ideal. There are many people working overtime to make theater here relatively easy, artistic, and a pleasure to do, but there could be more. Because theater here is so diverse in terms of the number and kind of people involved, shows being done, and spaces being used for performance, it’s difficult to create a ‘central administration’ to increase common knowledge about theater and how it’s done, and to increase the level of production of theater on campus.
JM: Is there more that Harvard can be doing to address these challenges? Is there room for a more active role for Harvard to play in undergraduate theater? DC:
There definitely is. The students involved in theater and shows at Harvard could use more instruction, education, and advice. There is so much enthusiasm here for doing shows and for doing good work, but there should be more people in place to guide and train that enthusiasm. The professionals currently in place are spread so thin that they must focus on simply making student shows happen. They have little time to devote to making those shows happen skillfully and well so that the students working on them actually learn more about the art. More professionals could teach more classes for students here. They could also advise and be involved in more of the actual productions going up on campus. There is great work being done to increase the number of courses offered through Dramatic Arts, but we should find a way to increase extracurricular professional involvement.
JM: The upcoming season spring theater season at Harvard is an incredibly full one, with major works by Shakespeare, Sondheim's "Sweeney Todd," and well over a dozen other productions. Does an ambitious season like this present unusual challenges? DC:
Harvard theater seasons are always amazingly diverse, but this season has presented the community with a somewhat unusual challenge. There are many technically ambitious shows happening, and in the past couple weeks we have been confronted by incomplete technical crews for several of the shows going up on campus. This is not a problem that we haven’t faced before, and it is not a problem that we can’t solve, but it speaks to a wider lack of support for technical theater here on campus.
There are few members of the undergraduate community who are able to fill essential staff positions like technical director and master carpenter. Because of this lack, technically able students are almost always overworked. Being technically responsible for any show is usually hectic, stressful, and rarely enjoyable, and the students who take on this kind of position often burn themselves out, refusing to do theater again after a particularly bad semester.
Clearly, this situation needs to change. We could do fewer shows each semester, which is something we have tried in the Experimental Theater the past few semesters, with some small success. Limiting the total number of shows on campus too greatly, however, could stifle one of the strengths of our community. We must get more people involved with and excited about technical theater here on campus. To do so, we must make the technical process creative and enjoyable, not rushed and hasty.
In technical theater, as in all other areas of theater here, professional instruction, feedback, and help on our productions would heighten the level of creative work being done and would make the students doing the work more satisfied with that work and more willing to do that work again.
