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Interview with Geoffrey Proehl, 21 December 2015

 Item — Box: 1, item: 53

Scope and Contents

Geoffrey Proehl is a professor of Theater at the University of Puget Sound.

What's recorded here is not so much an interview as Geoff's long thoughtful monolog which binds together what he has done in the Theater program and his choice of plays to direct and teach, including Twelfth Night, Chekhov's Seagull, and Angels in America, with his own more private intuitions of life and death. Characteristically, he finds the moments in the play where the action turns on the characters' desperate efforts to relate to each other with words — moments when they succeed, and moments when they fail. Recent years have seen the push to expand beyond the specifically Western tradition (the Greeks, Shakespeare, Ibsen) to something more like World Drama, incorporating plays from Asian, African, African Diaspora, Latin American and indigenous traditions, and there has been money to bring in a number of theater practitioners, dancers, playwrights (Suzan-Lori Parks) and others. In the last half hour Geoff talks about the Theater Program's amicable divorce from Communications a few years ago, when the two programs found themselves heading in different directions, and then about what Theater offers to the student in the context of the Liberal Arts education as a whole. (F.R.S.)

Dates

  • Creation: 21 December 2015

Conditions Governing Access

Collection is open to researchers by appointment.

Extent

From the Collection: 0.25 Cubic Feet

Language of Materials

From the Collection: English

Repository Details

Part of the University of Puget Sound, Archives & Special Collections Repository

Contact:
Collins Memorial Library
1500 N. Warner Street #1021
Tacoma 98416-1021 United States us