Photo: The Evergreen State College’s Communications Building, Shayna Clayton
by Miette Deschenes
In spring of 2018, the Experimental Theater, Costume Shop, and Scene Shop were shut down, and several faculty and staff lost their jobs, due to a budget cut in the performing arts department. Now, with only one full-time theater faculty remaining, students mostly have to rely on themselves and each other to study theater and performing arts. It’s been nearly two years since those budget cuts were implemented, and many students still don’t know why they happened or how much damage they caused to the theater community.
“It felt like the school abandoned us for no reason,” said Emily Greenhalgh, a senior who came to Evergreen in 2016 to study theater, in an interview with the Cooper Point Journal. “They claim to be a liberal arts college, but I am every year seeing the arts disappearing, and it hurts to see.”
Greenhalgh is one of the coordinators of Riot to Follow, one of two student theater groups on campus. As one of the coordinators, she handles promotion and advertisement, recruiting student volunteers, and keeping projects organized. She is also directing Riot to Follow’s production of A…My Name is Alice this spring.
According to Ian Suchon, coordinator for the other student group Perennial Players, there was no announcement about the budget cuts. Students were hearing rumors that the entire Communications Building would be shut down, or that they wouldn’t be able to continue pursuing their major. While the budget cuts were not as extreme as rumored, they still had a terrible impact on the theater community.
“We are down to essentially the bare bones of the theater community here,” Greenhalgh told the Cooper Point Journal. “We’re forced to [perform] in a small classroom that was previously used for rehearsals and teaching … We used to rely on the costumes in shop but then it got shut down. So now we have a space in the basement of the College Activities Building [CAB] with bedsheets over three racks of clothes we could get from the Costume Shop and filing cabinets full of props and wigs.”
These are just some of the effects the budget cut has had on the theater community. According to David McAvity, vice provost for Academic Budget and Planning, in 2018 Evergreen was faced with a 10 percent budget cut—about $5 million—due to the continually dropping enrollment. McAvity told the Cooper Point Journal that the administration decided what to cut based on levels of student interest and average expenses per student. This made the theater department an easy target since it’s one of the most expensive programs to operate.
“One of the reasons [performing arts] are expensive is because they require staff to support them and their studios and labs to maintain,” McAvity said. “And so when we looked at expense per student … the performing arts is way, way more expensive than anybody else. And that’s reflected in the fact that there are fewer and fewer students in the area.”
McAvity explained that the college gauges student interest in a few different ways. The first, for current students, is to look at the enrollment levels in current programs. They also look at what students say they are interested in on their college applications. They are additionally consulting focus groups of high school and transfer students to determine what program areas to focus on in the future. According to this research, general interest in studying theater and performing arts seems to be declining.
According to McAvity, roughly 67 percent of the school’s budget is faculty salaries, which is why they made the decision to lay off several faculty and staff from the theater department. There is currently one remaining full-time theater faculty, Walter Grodznik. There are several other faculty who sometimes teach theater or performing arts, but after Grodznik retires, options will be a lot more limited.
“[Theater is] something that students can still take as part of a broader liberal arts education,” Academic Dean Larry Geri told the Cooper Point Journal, “but it won’t be as robust as it was in the past when we had more faculty offering programs pretty much every year and the capacity to do advanced work. It’s going to be a lot more limited than it was in the past.”
According to Greenhalgh, before the budget cuts, the theater program was flourishing. She took a variety of acting classes and performed in productions with live bands, nice costumes, and full set pieces. Additionally, students had a lot of creative freedom and a supportive relationship with faculty and staff.
“It was one of the best musical theater experiences I’ve ever had,” she said, “because we had so much support. We had the Scene Shop, we had the Costume Shop, we had the total support of everyone here in the [Communications Building].”
The budget cuts were implemented in Greenhalgh’s sophomore year. Since then, she says that the theater community has changed drastically. Many students left and transferred to other schools. “It was a really hard experience watching all of my friends leave,” she said. “[I decided] to stay because I thought that maybe if a couple of us stayed and stuck it out that they would notice us more and over the next few years, we would get something. And that didn’t happen, unfortunately.”
“It kind of sucks to do theater at Evergreen now, just because it’s a lot harder,” Suchon told the CPJ. “Problems arise because of the lack of support for [our] programs.”
What remains of the theater community is small. There are two student groups, Riot to Follow and Perennial Players. They rely on word-of-mouth and community engagement to stay active. One way to support them is to get involved by volunteering to help build props and sets or assist backstage. Otherwise, the best way to help is to spread the word and get people to attend performances.
“There has been a lot of times in history,” said Greenhalgh, “when theater has been cut or censored, or the authority is trying to push it down as hard as possible. That is always when we do our best work, because we are fighting to keep it alive … And this is usually when people start paying attention the most.”
