Both students and faculty of the theatre department show excitement over the upcoming completion of the Doudna Fine Arts Center.

“I look forward to moving on campus again,” Jerry Eisenhour, a member of the theatre department faculty, said. “It will be less of a trek for students. Also, there used to be non-majors who would participate in shows on and off screen, now there are not that many because they don’t know we’re here.”

Eisenhour has been teaching in the theatre department for over 3 years and remembers the transitional period from the old fine arts building to the current Village Theatre, where the department currently holds performances and classes.

It was a mess, Eisenhour said. He said the move was more than just classrooms. Offices, costume shops, props, lumber, everything that goes into making a working theatre.

The transition took a while to set up the building, because when they moved in 2001, the Village Theatre was not yet completed, including the stage, which did not have any audience seats.

“The students were very understanding,” Eisenhour said. “One acting class I had to hold in the costume shop; the stage was full – filled box to box. We said that because of that, we were doing intimate scenes that day and it actually worked.”

Eisenhour said that the best and worst aspect of the current situation is that it has its own identity apart from campus.

Eisenhour said he is not looking forward to the move back to campus, but he feels the move will help the department reacquaint themselves with the student body.

Sentiments in the department are split on the transition from the Village Theatre to the new Doudna Fine Arts Building. Professor and costume designer Karen Eisenhour has been teaching at Eastern for 14 years and is looking forward to the move.

However, she said she feels that the transition into Doudna will need a lot of organization and flexibility.

“It’s going to be interesting to set up and adapt to new space,” Karen Eisenhour said. “Organization is the key.”

She said she has been planning how to move out of the current facility and into the new one since the initial move.

Karen Eisenhour said the main challenge the department has faced was learning to be flexible when Doudna progress was set back due to stalled government funds.

“It was supposed to be done inside three years,” said Jerry Eisenhour said. “Are we getting tired of waiting? I don’t know. You have to go with reality. That’s all we have to go off of.”

Students’ reaction to Doudna

Faculty members are not the only ones who learned to be flexible during the department’s hiatus from campus.

Currently, the Village Theatre is only equipped for shows presented in a theatre-in-the-round style, where a stage is in the middle and the audience surrounds. However, many upper class theatre students began their academic careers at Eastern with the impression that they would have access to a larger and better facility before 2008.

Doudna, when completed, will have a theatre wing, which has been designed by architects whose sole purpose was designing the theatre, unlike the Village Theatre which was originally built as a grocery store and later converted.

Doudna will provide the department with a wider variety of presentation styles. It will offer a three-sided trust, which is a three-sided stage that extends into the audience and offers more audience-actor contact, and a proscenium option, which faces the audience from one side of the room.

Students like sophomore Lizzy Powers, and freshman Katy Kruzic said the biggest upset about having a “theatre in an old grocery store” is not the facility itself but rather the distance it is away from campus.

Kruzic said that the distance to classes for her is 20 minutes by bus, 22 minutes by foot, and two minutes if she drives.

“Its easier to car pool,” she said.

Kruzic said advisers usually schedule classes to help ease transportation issues.

“Teachers are understanding [if a student is late] so if you can explain why you are it’s usually okay,” she said.

Freshman Tim Tholl said it is upsetting when he has to travel all the way across town to class, but with Doudna opening soon it is like a light at the end of a tunnel.

He said he does not mind making the walk or drive over now because soon it will be over.

Powers said everyone in her department seems excited.

“We have had to work with what we had and experience from that. Now we get to experience new forms of theatre.”

The next theatre department will produce “As You Like It”, by William Shakespeare this October.

Bailey Murphy, a senior theater major, reads her lines for her part as Rosalind in the Village Theatre’s upcoming performance of William Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” Wednesday evening in the Village Theatre.

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