Eight Saint Michael's College Students Rub Elbows With Equity Pros As Saint Michael's Playhouse Interns

Working side-by-side rubbing elbows with pros in a professional theater plunges college students headfirst into just what it means to build and stage a professional theater production in two weeks time.

Broadway and Off-Broadway veterans perform, direct and design the Saint Michael’s Playhouse, now in its 62nd year on the campus of Saint Michael’s College, but 13 student interns get to work backstage right along with the pros. The Saint Michael’s Playhouse, Burlington’s professional summer theater, said to be the only Actor’s Equity (union professional) theater sponsored on a college campus in the country, provides an intense, incubator setting in which students can learn from professionals.

“Students work alongside and are mentored by professional theater artists from Broadway, Off-Broadway, and regional theaters along with theater educators from prestigious theater programs around the country,” said Chuck Tobin, producing artistic director of the Saint Michael’s Playhouse.

The student interns work night and day six days a week from June 1st to August 8th at The Playhouse. Competitively chosen for these grueling opportunities, the aspiring theater students gladly put in the time and effort for the chance to learn from the pros.

The eight Saint Michael’s student interns and the five from other universities are assigned to various areas of production: arts administration and management, scenic design and construction, costume design and construction, lighting, sound, and stage management. Several are acting in The Playhouse Junior (children’s) shows. Students rotate among the various departments or concentrate on one area for a more in-depth experience. Typically students will have completed a previous summer in the rotation schedule before being able to concentrate in one area for the full theater season.

Students are universally amazed at the concentration and hard work they witness from the Equity professionals they work with and learn from. They see immediately that it takes a different kind of focus to build, rehearse and mount a full-scale production in two weeks, and then to create a new show while performing the first show, in the following two weeks. The difference between their college theater experiences and the professional level work comes quite clear. And they bring their new skills back to their college theater programs.

For more information about the Saint Michael's Playhouse, see the website: www.saintmichaelsplayhouse.org.

Saint Michael’s College, www.smcvt.edu, founded in 1904 by the Society of St. Edmund and headed by President John J. Neuhauser, is identified by the Princeton Review as one of the nation’s Best 368 Colleges. A liberal arts, residential, Catholic college, Saint Michael’s is located just outside of Burlington, Vermont, one of America’s top college towns, and less than two hours from Montreal. As one of only 270 institutions nationwide with a prestigious Phi Beta Kappa chapter on campus, Saint Michael’s has 2,000 full-time undergraduate students, some 500 graduate students and 200 international students. In recent years Saint Michael’s students and professors have received Rhodes, Woodrow Wilson, Guggenheim, Fulbright, National Science Foundation and other grants, and Saint Michael’s professors have been named Vermont Professor of the Year in four of the last eight years. The college is currently listed as one of the nation’s Best Liberal Arts Colleges in the 2009 U.S. News & World Report rankings.

Photo by Buff Lindau