Barry Spacks – Interview

How long have you taught?

I started teaching in 1952, at Indiana University. So I’ve been teaching for 55 years.

In CCS specifically?

I was off from teaching for six years, studying Buddhism at a Buddhist center in northern California. I came back in ‘96, and I think I’ve been teaching here for about nine years.

What prompted you to teach in CCS?

First off, the vitality and intelligence of the students. That reputation follows them all over campus. I was asked to do a mini course first. I did a couple of those while I was mainly still teaching in English. So I got an immediate close up taste of that quality. I think it’s really true what CCS claims, that it offers an undergraduate education that has the style of a graduate school education, and one of the characteristics of that of course is that you come much closer to being a colleague with your students rather than a schoolmaster…I really like that. The last thing I want to be is some sort of great authority figure. I want to release energies, I think that’s what I’m there for. It’s possible in CCS to be in a room full of folks in which there’s no fear on the part of the student, “Oh, what grade am I going to get?” No kind of class difference between the professor and the students. We’re all readers together, writers together, strivers together.

What is the difference between the students in the English Department and the Literature Department?

I was teaching a lot of large lecture courses there [in the English Department] and that was part of what made me feel a little bit starved for the immediate action of close up contact with students. I used to go up and down the aisles with my lavaliere and microphone and tried to get folks to do a little bit of discussion even though there were 300 in the room, tried to loosen up the lecture format…Folks in L&S have been trained to listen a lot more than folks in CCS who have been trained to respond and to come out with their style. There is obviously much more of a formal discipline involved in the English-Lit classes…the emphasis is less on direct creativity and more on study.

What do you think CCS students should ultimately get out of their education with the department? What skills should they leave college with?

It seems to me that all education in the arts and humanities has to do with developing maturity. Students these days are concerned a lot more with the bottom line than they were in my days as an undergraduate. We kind of took for granted that the rest of our lives would go swimmingly. People don’t have that luxury anymore so one can’t say “Oh, they should just concentrate on their studies, this is the most wonderful four years in their lives” without worrying too much about how there’s a payoff. I think in CCS there’s still this sense that the payoff is going to be in terms of taking on powers, intellectual, emotional, and in effect the word maturity sums it up. What we should talk about is a general education, basically getting what the Greeks used to call a Paideia, the sense of things, the sense of the way a particular culture works. And that’s what I think CCS students should look forward to, is that sense of the general education.

Interview – Monstrous Little Productions

Pam Capalad, Naomi Solomon, and Chelsea Sutton are Literature Majors in the College of Creative Studies who, in fall 2004, began their own theater company called Monstrous Little Productions. While they are graduating this June, their student run company has created an outlet for students who many not otherwise get theater experience for three years. A few of their productions include Madwoman of Chaillot, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, And Then There Were None, Twelve Angry Men, and Alice in Wonderland. Their current production, 99 Impossible Things, written by Chelsea Sutton, will be performed in June. All plays Monstrous Little Productions puts on are free and on-campus, so students have easy access to theater.

What is each of your jobs’ in the production company?
Naomi: Well, Chelsea and I sort of take turns directing. We co-directed a couple times. We all label ourselves producers, which basically means we get all the stuff done that needs to get done for the play to come off. Just in general, I work on getting donations and handling the money, Chelsea does set design and lights, and Pam does lights.

Why did you begin the theater company?

Pam: Robyn Bell!

N: It’s true!

P: Me and Naomi were in A Midsummer Night’s Dream freshman year, and we all put on the play, and we wanted to do more! The next quarter Graham Talley put on The Importance of Being Earnest, and Robyn Bell stopped me in the hall and said “Hey, you should keep doing this.” And I stopped Naomi in our room and said “Hey, Robyn Bell says we should keep doing this.” Robyn Bell’s a pretty inspiring person.

N: So it kind of had a lot of weight with us.

P: Yeah, she thought we were capable of it. So, we e-mailed the Drama Department, talked to them, Robyn Bell started talking to them, and they really didn’t want to have anything to do with us. So we figured the best way to do it was to start a club on campus, get Robyn as our advisor, and just see what happened. The first play we did under the name of Monstrous Little was in fall, 2004, and they were short plays by Steve Martin called WASP and Picasso at the Lapin Agile.

N: The first production we did that was just us, without directors, and not in the Old Little Theater was Madwoman of Chaillot.

P: When we were doing the David Ives one acts, All In The Timing, we also didn’t perform in the Old Little Theater. There was a mix up between us and the musical theater class, so we had to scramble for a room. We ended up performing in Room 136 in the CCS Building.

Chelsea: It was very much like Little Women in the attic doing plays. A lot of people really liked it.

P: Yeah, because the whole play was about breaking the fourth wall.

C: Besides those two, all the other plays we’ve done have been performed in the Old Little Theater.

N: And even there we had problems. One time, our lights went out just when on stage somebody died. The light board went out. But audience members were like, “Oh my God, how’d you do that?!” We said our guy accidentally unplugged the light board…but aren’t we brilliant?! Then we ad libbed in the play, and it worked out really well.

P: In Alice and Wonderland, a chair broke onstage.

N: But at a really dramatic moment.

P: And everyone asked “How did you get that chair to break?!” Basically, we’re amazing improvisers.

C: We do all sorts of plays. We don’t limit ourselves to a specific genre.

N: I mean, there’s always the usual theater problems. Always on closing night, almost like a tradition, lines are changed. Sometimes more than they should be. I guess that was only one question!

P: We interview ourselves!

What’s the hardest part about putting on a production? Funding, casting, talent?

C: It depends on what you’re doing. If you’re the director or the actor. From a director’s point of view, it’s getting everyone to come to rehearsal. There’s something about a rational human being when they get into a play if they’re an actor. Their IQ drops, and their ego elevates.

P: I think they just get more talkative.

C: The concept of a schedule loses all meaning.

N: It’s one of the side effects of being completely unofficial, and usually nobody gets units for our plays.

P: I think during Alice in Wonderland we had an easier time with scheduling. I don’t like to think it’s because people were getting units for it, but most likely. Getting money is hard too. And getting people to come. Picking the play! You need to consider how popular it is. If it’s a play people will recognize and think, “I want to go,” or if it’s completely unknown, how to sort of publicize it.

N: The toss up with that is if it’s a really known play, some people are attached to it. We’ve done several interpretations of plays. We changed the ending of the play version of And Then There Were None, to make it the same ending as the book version, because we thought the play version totally cheated the heroine of being a heroine basically. We gave her back what we thought she deserved. There were some people who, in the end they liked it, but when they heard what we were doing initially did not like it. I think it’s one of the best productions we’ve done. I think it went really well for such a complicated play.

P: We reinterpreted Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, and we experienced some backlash against it.

C: If there’s a dialogue about it, that’s fine. You’re not going to please everyone.

P: Every play there’s always a new different problem. We have a high retention rate. The crowd we get for auditions is very interesting. There are always girls who you can tell acted in high school.

N: One of the nice things about having a growing theater company in CCS is the dialogue between them. People from the Paperback Theater Company came to our auditions to say hi and to tell us if there was anybody we can’t cast, they could use extras. I wish there could be a non-musical theater company next year. As of now, it looks like we won’t continue next year.

C: Another reason we started the company was to allow non Drama Majors to perform. The Drama Department people kind of have their own culture.

P: And we wanted to provide something for people that aren’t in drama. And also, it’s a point of pride for us to do stuff on limited resources and to deal with problems in unconventional ways.

C: In high school I only did acting. But when I got here, I realized somebody needs to direct, somebody needs to find the couch that’s used in Scene Three.

P: It’s interesting to have a hand in all that.

C: No one’s gonna do it for us. The final result I am always really proud of.

P: Me too.

Is it supported by CCS? Or any other departments?

C: Robyn Bell has always been supportive, but she hasn’t necessarily gone out and found money for us.

N: But she totally lobbies and advocates for us. She’s the one who advocated having Alice and Wonderland as a class. She’s always been a big supporter in the background, and of course never takes credit for anything. And the Office of Student Life has always been very good to us. They make it relatively easy for us. They give us 200 – 500 dollars a quarter, and our plays cost 400 dollars on average, maybe a little less. Turns out making the programs is what costs the most money.

P: It has been interesting not having a department to back us though. Just all of us being Lit. Majors, it’s been interesting to dip in the Music Department and going to other emphases in the college and seeing what they can do for us.

N: And also how we can co-exist peacefully!

P: And Leslie Campbell has always been super nice to us.

ALL: Oh Leslie!

P: She’s always so nice to do us, and does as much as she’s able to do. Especially with scheduling.

C: Emily Parsons has also been really good about scheduling in the Old Little Theater.

N: We require a lot of hands on activity from our actors. With sets. And we network through them.

C: Some of the plays we’ve done don’t even require sets.

Do you want to pursue theater after college?

P: No. Chelsea probably. It was fun to do in college, but it’s not something I can see myself actively pursuing as a career. Having been an actor for the past four years has really helped for what I’m going to do after college. I have a job teaching kids about money and I have to basically be on all the time, and be comfortable on stage, comfortable improvising, and comfortable talking loudly.

C: You’re in charge. So it’s the experience that comes with that.

P: And I could put it on my resume. We ran this. And the satisfaction of having a play at the end. The sense of accomplishment. Look what we did!

N: And to meet people we wouldn’t encounter otherwise. Because it’s a small community […] You have to move into the community more, to publicize, and get businesses to give you things. It helped me get to know Santa Barbara a little better in a lot of ways.

P: I probably won’t do anything directly related to theater, but I know I’ll benefit from it.

N: Same here.

C: I kind of want to do theater. I’ve been doing a lot of playwriting. I’m been involved in the playwriting department since sophomore year. I’ve always wanted to be a writer, and I’ve found my voice playwriting. I’ve always loved theater. I did a lot of theater in high school […] I’m doing it on my own, understanding every part of what goes into theater makes you a better director, and makes you a better writer.

Interview: Ryan Kerr, CCS Music Major

What made you interested in pursuing a Music Major at CCS?

Well, I got into composition my senior year of high school. CCS just seemed like the best program for me. In terms of my personal experience, my high school was a very small high school. 600 students. It was an engineering high school on a college campus, so it was very advanced. They really pushed us to do more; it was very much the CCS philosophy. I remember coming here my junior year on our northern California college tours and they talked about CCS and, I remember my friend Jennifer saw my face light up when they were talking about CCS and right away she said, “Oh, I know where Ryan wants to go.” And, just kind of the intense atmosphere of CCS, the way they really make you go for things. The way they encourage you to go for things you wouldn’t normally be able to do at a college, that’s what I like. Over in the Music Department, it’s so structured. I mean it’s a great program, but I want to get my Masters in Musical Theater Writing, so the professors in CCS are really letting me focus on that. Every once in a while, there’s a class on making a musical. There’s just random classes like that in CCS where every once in a while they come up.

So the kind of music you’re mainly interested in is musical theater?

Yes. I mean, I do some of the more avant-garde stuff. But that’s not my thing. Every once in a while I get an idea, and I’ll just do something random. Like I’m writing a piece for the Storke Tower.

The Storke Tower?

The Storke Tower. The bells. The crazy stuff they play every weekend. Seriously, no one’s written for it since the seventies and I said it’s about time. But I write primarily for musical theater, and that’s why I’m so involved with Shrunken Head [an on- campus musical theater group], because it’s really intimate with my major, my studies.

Is Shrunken Head Productions your only experience with musical theater? And the CCS musical “Lovestruck?”

I did theater in high school. In college, I’ve done Shrunken Head. I’m in the pit orchestra right now for a musical in the New Plays Festival. And I was involved in the CCS musical last year.

Did you write for the New Plays Festival?

No, a friend of mine, Bobby Halvorson, another CCS composer, wrote the music for Tomorrowland, a musical at the New Plays Festival. The music’s very fun. It’s post-grunge. Very interesting. This is the kind of stuff I love about CCS. The professors don’t give you a structured curriculum. “I want to write a rock musical.” “Okay, go for it.” But the New Plays festival is through the Theater Department.

What has been your overall experience here at UCSB? And getting involved with musical theater?

It’s very difficult because the Music Department is very against musical theater. Not just that they don’t do it. They’re against musical theater. The voice teachers, a lot of people, the department in general, is just against it. The DA Department stopped doing musicals a few years ago, and that’s why Gina Intersimone and CJ Hayes [two CCS Literature alumni], started Shrunken Head Productions back in winter ’05. We do a musical every quarter, so it’s very intense. It’s interesting, because although we don’t have a lot of departmental support, we pull from a lot of places because there’s a lot of student talent that’s interested. It’s easy for us to get musicians and actors and singers. We have to do a bit of hunting, but you guys always come out of the woodwork and were always like, “Oh, we like you!”

What is the hardest part? Funding, casting, talent?

Just the resources in general, because it’s always hard to get performance space because the Music Department and Theater Department are so possessive of their majors. And naturally, as a student organization it’s hard to get funding. I mean, there’s plenty of grants, but the way things work out it’s kind of hard for us to get them. It’s just kind of the resources in general. The human resources, no, are never a problem. We always have all the talent we need.

Who’s your favorite composer?

I have two. One of them is Jason Robert Brown [writer of The Last Five Years and Songs for a New World]. He’s just so amazing, such a creative lyricist, very intimate lyrics, and the music is always so gorgeous and interesting. For falling within a kind of mainstream idiom, it’s very compositionally advanced work. I’ve taken some of his sheet music into my composition lessons just to show my professor once in a while, “This is the sound I’m going for, I like the way he does this, and is there another way that I can kind of go about the same thing.” And she said, “Wow, this is really cool stuff. Bring this back sometime.”

Who’s the second one?

The other one is the crazy Japanese guy. Mana. My big thing is bringing good music to a wider audience and I mean, okay, Beatles are good, all that kind of stuff is good, but just in terms of compositional style it’s very simple, and formulaic at times. And Jason Robert Brown brings very advanced twentieth century techniques to his writing, and that’s what I really like about him. And Mana, it really sounds like what you’d get if you gave Bach an electric guitar, because he fuses rock with some of the most interesting Baroque classical styles. It’s that kind of fusion and bringing of sound to a mainstream audience that I really like.

What do you feel you get out of the music program specifically at CCS?
Freedom to do whatever I want, and encouragement and training to pursue that. Like I said it’s very structured in the Music Department and in CCS, if you want to focus your degree in musical theater, you can do that. There are a lot of people who want to focus in film scoring, and you can do that, because the professors know so much about it. I mean, you can definitely get that from the Music Department but in CCS, the professors know so much about it, that it’s so easy to get advice on the specifics on everything that you’re doing and there’s always resources on campus. Like the random classes in CCS music that pop up. Like right now there’s a class and it’s called, “From Whole Notes to Bank Notes,” and they basically walk you through every step in the process from getting your music prepared to a professional publishable format, to starting your own publishing company, and it’s just the little things like that that really give you the extra advantage over regular music students…Right now I’m taking a vernacular harmony class, which is harmonies specific to jazz and musical theater styles. The professor is so knowledgeable about that. I’m actually thinking of pursuing an independent study with him over the next few quarters just because he knows so much about jazz and musical theater and opera. And just the way that CCS makes these resources available to you. Just every one in awhile, “Here’s a fun class: string quartets.” You take something that you normally wouldn’t study in depth, and have a whole quarter on just string quartets, and techniques and composers and the repertoire and everything.

Any professors you specifically want to mention?

Well, all of them are really strong in their various eras. I’ve really only worked with Leslie Hogan. She’s my advisor and I’ve been taking composition lessons with her for the last two years. I’m planning to study with Jeremy Haladyna next year. They teach the creative studies composition and instruction. But then there’s also the professors over in the Music Department who are available to us to take lessons from. The one I am talking about, who teaches the vernacular harmony class that I’m taking, his name is Earl Stewart. He’s in the Black Studies Department, but he’s taught in the Berklee School of Music. These professors are all really on top of their game.

So post-college, what do you want to do?

I have my heart set on going to NYU because I’ve done my research, and they’re the only one that I can find that offers a masters in musical theater writing. To my knowledge, their the only one in the nation, maybe the only one in the world that offers a program like this, and that is exactly what I want to do. I have my heart set on going there, if that’s the last I ever do.

And then you want to write for musical theater?

I want to write for musical theater. I don’t even know how I got into that. I was in math/science schools for ten years and then said, “I want to be a Music Composition Major.” It was really interesting.

Were your parents fine with it?

Oh yeah. They were like, “You might want to minor in something else, just in case.”