I was due to start grad school in theatre in the summer of 1969 at Indiana State University. I had been accepted into their summer stock company as an actor/director without even an audition, and they had given me one of three graduate assistantships. This was a pretty big deal, since most company members were paid $25.00 a week for eight weeks, and graduate assistants were paid five times that. Unfortunately I ended up a few credits short of graduation, and I couldn't accept a graduate assistantship when I hadn't graduated. So I prepared to borrow a ton of money and stay the summer at Michigan State University in order to finish up my last few credits. When the Artistic Director at Indiana State found out about it, though, he arranged for credits from the first half of the summer to be undergraduate credits to be transferred to Michigan State, and for an undergraduate scholarship in the same amount to be credited to my account. I later found out why--they had cast me in leading roles in a commedia dell'arte production and a Shakespeare, plus a couple of other roles, and they didn't have anybody to replace me. So I ended up at Indiana State after all.
Part of our compensation was free room and board in the Hulman Center in downtown Terre Haute. Not coincidentally this was also where the theatre was. We were given by the university a floor of the former dormitory, plus a ballroom and all adjacent rooms for the theatre. We set up an arena theatre, with which I'd had lots of experience, in the ballroom. My job was to hang the lighting instruments and execute the lighting designs prepared by the faculty designers. I also was allowed to design lighting for one of the productions. They had obviously read my resume very carefully; I had done all of these things as an undergraduate and in other summer stock playhouses. As a student, though, I also had to enroll in several courses connected to the summer theatre. So I signed up for six semester hours of theatre practicum and seminars in theatre management and directing. The seminars met once a week with various faculty members and also included practical assignments. For mine I wrote press releases for the newspapers and directed a production of Edward Albee's The Zoo Story. The latter was one of the best productions I ever directed, in part because my two-person cast were both professionals, and in part because I was anxious to impress my colleagues and professors. Several company members singled out our production as the best of the summer.
I have written elsewhere about the events of that summer; suffice it to say here that I played Iago in Othello Truffaldino in The Servant of Two Masters, both to high acclaim, as well as directing a production. At the end of the summer the Artistic Director offered me a full assistantship for the coming academic year, but I had already accepted a position at Kent State University for 1969-70. I chose Kent State because it had a Ph.D. program I could transfer into after completing my M.A. and because I had friends who had recommended the program highly. So I arrived in Kent, Ohio, in September of 1969, found a place to live, and settled in to graduate school in earnest.
I had transferred 9 quarter hours of graduate credit from Indiana State so I had a head-start on my M.A., which required 45 hours. The first term I enrolled in theatre history, theory and criticism, and oral interpretation. I also auditioned for the touring repertory theatre company, one of the major draws of the program, and was cast in the two productions, The Three Cuckolds and Colours in the Dark. The former was another commedia dell'arte farce and the former the American premiere of a recent Canadian drama. Another member of the company was John de Lancie, later well-known for playing Q on Star Trek: The Next Generation. At least two of us ended up as university professors; a third later became the artistic director of a children's theatre company; and at least two others became professional actors. It was a pretty good group of folks.
During that term I had to begin applying for Ph.D. programs in theatre. It seemed rather early to me, but since I was planning to complete my M.A. in one year rather than the usual two I had no choice. It was actually a blessing in disguise, since I had five graduate courses with only A grades, and letters of recommendation from three universities and three summer stock companies. I also had excellent GRE scores, since I had always been good at taking standardized tests. I was apparently a hot commodity, and acceptances and offers of scholarships, fellowships, and assistantships began to flow in.
In the end I had offers from Kent State, Bowling Green, Georgia, Florida, Florida State, Iowa, Utah, and Pittsburg. Left to my own devices I probably would have gone to Florida State, since they offered the best fellowship and I liked their program the best. As it happened, my college roommate Joe Alfred ended up doing his Ph.D. there, in French literature. He was a year behind me, having taken two years for his M.A., so we wouldn't have been exact contemporaries. His wife Carol served on the Gainesville Eight jury while they were there. The best university was probably Pittsburg, but their offer came in too late. Besides, my then-fiance was also applying to Ph.D. programs, and we had to find a school where we both had offers and where we both liked the program. That turned out to be Bowling Green, so we decided to accept their offers and move there for the start of the 1970-71 academic year.
Meanwhile I still had the rest of 1969-70 to get through. In the second term I took the second theatre history course in the sequence I had started; Intro to Grad Studies; and Speech and Society, to fulfill the requirement of three courses outside of theatre. I also earned some credits for the touring repertory theatre company. In Intro to Grad Study I settled in on as thesis topic and drafted a prospectus. I would write about "The Teaching Aspect of the Kent State University Theatre Touring Repertory Company, 1968-70." Since I was touring with the group I would kill two birds with one stone, and get a thesis out of it. In the third term I took the final course in the theatre history sequence; theatre management; and Restoration Drama in the English Department. I planned to complete my thesis during the summer, which meant turning down an offer I had received to write press releases for the summer stock company the department was running. It was just as well, since I had turned down their offer of a Ph.D. assistantship for the fall. I have written elsewhere of the May 4 disturbances on the Kent State campus, and have no need to reiterate anything here, but I was able to complete my thesis earlier than expected.
One of the reasons we chose Bowling Green for our doctoral work was that we both liked the program and the faculty, Carol in English and me in theatre. I jumped right in, taking a theatre history seminar, a theory and criticism survey, and a directing seminar in my first term. I continued in this same vein for two years, ending up with major concentrations in theatre history and directing and a minor concentration in dramatic theory and criticism. I took survey courses and seminars in Greek theatre history, Elizabethan theatre history, eighteenth and nineteenth century English theatre history, French and Italian Renaissance theatre history, and contemporary theatre history. I also took directing courses in expressionism, Moliere, Shakespeare, Greek, readers' theatre, and teaching acting. I studied dramatic theory and criticism with a survey from Aristotle to the present, seminars in forms of tragedy and comedy, aesthetics, and contemporary theory. I rounded out my coursework with my one required course in technical theatre and design in lighting design. Throughout my program I taught the undergraduate course in oral interpretation.
After two years of course work I had to take my comprehensive examinations in order to admitted into candidacy for the Ph.D. I had twelve hours of exams in theatre history, twelve hours in directing, eight hours in dramatic theory and criticism, and four hours in design and technical theatre. Earlier in my program I had passed an exam in Spanish, with a dictionary allowed. I passed the comprehensive exam with flying colors and was ready to present my dissertation prospectus. This was relatively easy to do, since I had prepared it some months earlier in order to apply for a fellowship for my dissertation year. I had already received and accepted an offer for a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship, so I was pretty sure my prospectus was acceptable. So it proved to be, and I was admitted into candidacy in June of 1972. All that was left was the completion of my dissertation. The School of Speech Director took me aside and told me in no uncertain terms that I would complete that dissertation or I would answer to him; it was the first Woodrow Wilson Fellowship the University had received and it would be too embarrassing if I did not finish.
Before starting work on the dissertation in earnest I accepted an opportunity to direct a production in the department's summer stock theatre. Each year two doctoral students with experience and expertise in directing were offered this opportunity, and it had proven useful in finding teaching jobs after graduation. I had already directed a children's play, Alice in Wonderland, in the mainstage season, and the chance to direct Never Too Late was just too good to pass up. Even though it meant losing three months of dissertation research I jumped at the chance.
In the Fall of 1972, then, I began work on my dissertation. It was frustratingly slow work, and it wasn't until January of 1973 that I had anything on paper to show my advisor. He wanted to see second draft, but in handwritten form. So I brought him a bundle of note cards, which was not what he had in mind. A month later I had a draft of a chapter, and every month after that another chapter. At that rate the whole thing was done in draft form in June, and another draft with his notes and corrections added in went to the committee in July. There was a public defense, but honestly I don't remember much about it. All I know for sure is that it passed and I had just two weeks to get it professionally typed (this was before personal computers) and submitted to the graduate school in multiple copies. Somehow that got done (on the Woodrow Wilson Foundation's dime) and I received the Ph.D. in August, 1973.
Fast forward to 1988. I had cycled through a variety of teaching jobs and was no longer happy in academic life. I had just resigned as Chair of a Ph.D.-granting department at Southern Illinois University, and I was trying to decide what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I decided I wanted to make myself portable and become a lawyer. So I applied for admission to the SIU School of Law and spent the next four years teaching full-time while going to law school part-time. I must admit to neglecting my teaching duties somewhat, much to the chagrin of my department, but I was determined to have the entire law school experience. That included writing and editing for law review, a national moot court team, and representing one of the law review companies in selling law review courses (for which I received a free course). I received the J.D. degree in 1993 and after passing the bar exam was admitted to the practice of law later that year. I did that until I retired 14 years later.
All together, then, I spent eight years in four different graduate schools and received three degrees. I wish there had been some way to add an M.D. in there, but I had to earn a living along the way. Now that I'm retired, of course, I have the time but I no longer have the energy. I could have enrolled in the joint J.D.-M.D. degree program at SIU, but then I wouldn't have been able to continue teaching and I would have had to take out massive loans. It also would have taken another year or two. I thought about it but decided in the end I didn't want to do it. I suppose I could have done it when I first retired in 2009, but by then it wasn't as important any more, and besides we wanted to travel. So it looks like my graduate school daze are over with.
