Student directors learn, grow by staging scenes from famous plays

Anna Paradis ’26 and Sarah Calvin ’25 in a (Christmas-themed) scene from “Steel Magnolias” directed by Ainsley Cook ’24.

Students in Professor Peter Harrigan’s “Directing” class (Theatre 309) this Wednesday evening had a chance to present scenes from well-known plays on the McCarthy Theatre mainstage in order to show what they have learned.

Harrigan, a 1983 Saint Michael’s theater graduate, explained how it works. “When I teach the course, students choose a modern or contemporary play that interests them and spend the whole semester researching it. This involves a one-hour class presentation, a comprehensive analysis paper, and ultimately directing a 5–7-minute scene from the play, with other students acting. I think it is the only final exam on campus that requires an audience!”

The professor said he had had six students in the course this semester. “They chose a wide variety of plays to study,” he said, “from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (Tom Stoppard – 1966) to The Legend of Georgia McBride (Matthew Lopez – 2014), held joint auditions, coordinated furniture, props, costumes, lighting, sound, schedules, and publicity to produce the evening of scenes. The night went swimmingly!

McKenzie “Kenzie” Rowbotham ’24 is a theatre and music major with Spanish and criminology minors who also is the campus Drama Club president and a Resident Assistant. She directed a scene from the play Deathtrap by Ira Levin for Harrigan’s class.

James Pacheco ’24 and Liam Ravan ’26 in a scene from “Deathtrap” directed by Kenzie Rowbotham ’24

“Coming into this class, I had very little experience with directing, and so I was very excited to start working,” Rowbotham said. “At first, I let my actors play around with what they wanted to do. We read through the entire script and started to talk about what their characters’ motivations were for the scene. Then, once I was able to get some set pieces and props for them, the fun began. “

Initially, she said, she threw out some ideas as to what they may want to do movement-wise and encouraged them to follow their instincts. “I didn’t want to have a rigid set of movements because I felt that their input was important not only to the process, but to them understanding their characters and using their experiences to motivate them,” the student-director said. “Then, we started to use those impulses to roughly ‘block’ the scene.

After vacation, she said, Harrigan came to one of her group’s rehearsals “and gave me some great notes about how to improve our scene, and by the time we were at tech, it had really come together.”

“My actors were amazing throughout this entire process, and I cannot stress enough how delightful it was to work with them through this process,” she said. “Sitting in the auditorium last night was amazing. Everything came together wonderfully, and I honestly felt like a proud mother at her child’s first dance recital. A huge thank-you to Peter, Liam, and James for helping me in making this all come together!”

Other student-directed scenes came from the plays Steel Magnolias by Robert Harling, A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams, and Almost, Maine by John Cariani,