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By Emily Witsell
Macon, Georgia
English, French
As a tour guide, I give prospective students and their families all sorts of facts and figures, but I get the most astonished reactions when I tell people that Minneapolis-St. Paul has more theater seats per person than any city in the country except New York. Very few people expect to find a thriving theater scene in the Twin Cities, but it was a big drawing point for me in deciding to attend Macalester. I would have been even more convinced if I had known that the English Department sends class groups out to take advantage of the Twin Cities’ theater scene.
| About 2.3 million seats were sold by theaters in the Twin Cities in a recent year—nearly equal to the combined regular-season attendance for the three major professional sports teams, the Minnesota Twins, Vikings and Timberwolves. As Star Tribune theater critic Graydon Royce once wrote, “This is one of the rare U.S. metro areas where you could watch professional dinner theater one night, attend an accomplished regional theater the next, then finish off the week seeing a touring Broadway musical, light comedy in the suburbs and cutting-edge new work in a small experimental space downtown.” |
In my first semester at Macalester, I enrolled in an introductory English course about dramatic literature. The syllabus stated the typical course requirements, but what caught my eye was “theater performances to be scheduled later.” The professor had chosen plays that would be performed by local theater groups during the semester, and the English Department paid for tickets for three plays at different theaters. That is how I ended up at the prestigious Guthrie Theater (where Arthur Miller debuted his new play two years ago) to see a modern production of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors, complete with costumes and set pieces that seemed to be inspired by Dr. Seuss drawings. In class the next day, we talked about how much costumes and sets can affect the interpretation of a play.
Two years later, I revisited the Guthrie to watch Arthur Miller’s The Death of a Salesman with my Twentieth Century Drama class. The next day, my class—all six of us—discussed the differences between seeing a play onstage and reading the script. Many students expressed newfound appreciation for Miller’s work after seeing the characters brought to life and given personalized characteristics by the actors. When we went to see The Cherry Orchard a few weeks later, our discussion highlighted the use of the in-the-round setup of the stage, which I had never seen before. With both theater majors and English majors in the class, our points of view sometimes clashed, but the performances we saw together gave us a common starting point.
When I’m not enrolled in an English class that pays for me to see shows, I have little trouble getting my theater fix. Besides the performances sponsored by the Theater Department and those put on by the student-run and student-directed MacPlayers, the Russian Studies and French Departments offered discounted tickets and transportation to see plays by Chekhov and Molière.
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