Oral history interview with Herman Middleton, 1990 [text/print transcript]

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UNCG CENTENNIAL ORAL HISTORY PROJECT COLLECTION
INTERVIEWEE: Herman Middleton
INTERVIEWER: Anne Phillips
DATE: February 19, 1990
[Begin Side A]
AP: Tell me about yourself, Dr. Middleton.
HM: Okay.
AP: This morning we'll test the recorder.
HM: What should I say? I'm Herman Middleton.
AP: That's fine.
HM: Soon to retire and become an emeritus professor. Hurray, hurray, hurray.
AP: Let's test for the volume. Would you say something?
HM: Oh, sure, I'm Herman Middleton, soon to be professor emeritus at UNCG [The University of North Carolina at Greensboro]. I've been here thirty-four years.
AP: Well, you told me when we first met here this morning that you did a taped interview earlier. Would you tell me about the interview and tell me about what has been written about the drama department, please.
HM: Yes, shortly after we opened Taylor Building in 1963, we made a tape of Raymond Taylor, who came here in 1921 to coordinate the drama activities on campus. He was part of the Department of English. And since this is—was then a female institution and remained so for many years. One of the local men who acted with us was W. C. "Mutt" Burton, and he acted for fifty years here. So Mutt was included in the interview and so was Katherine Taylor [Class of 1928, dean of women, dean of students, dean of student services, director of Elliott Hall], who taught on campus for almost forty years in the Department of English and then later in the Department of Drama, so that they are taped. And we also had three additions of the Alumni News [college newspaper] which have articles relative to the department and its development on campus. There's one of January 1964, the spring of 1967 and the spring of 1973. And, of course, those issues are around with photographs. 2
AP: That's through the Alumni News?
HM: In the Alumni News.
AP: And I know that you wrote articles in those and also talked about Dr. Burton's work [Editor’s note: Mr. Burton did not have a doctorate.], taped that interview.
HM: No, I did not tape the interview. It was the editor of the Alumni News who taped the interviews, and Mutt was a townsperson, and Raymond Taylor was the faculty member who came in 1921, at the invitation of Dr. Julius Foust [chancellor]—
AP: I see.
HM: —to coordinate drama activities on campus. And at that time, like in most places, the courses that were developed were in the Department of English because Raymond was in the Department of English, and they had some drama courses, some speech courses, things like history of the theater, and on campus there were three literary societies. And the literary societies each did a play each year, and Dr. Foust thought that their work merited bringing a specialist in, and Raymond was right out of Yale University [New Haven, Connecticut], so he came in and coordinated the activities of the plays that they produced. And it was soon determined that there ought to be a campus organization, so he formed what he called the Playlikers. And it existed for many, many years.
AP: I see. So that was some of the beginning. Tell me a bit more about the societies, the speech societies.
HM: Well, the—these were not speech societies, they were literary societies, and they were interested in everything that was written. And since scripts are written, they would write scripts, and they would produce scripts. The ones that they'd written—they would also produce scripts that playwrights had written. And one of those three societies was called the Masqueraders. And Raymond formed the Playlikers, which was a separate organization from those three societies because he found a nucleus of girls who were interested, sincerely interested in play production. And since play production was only one of the activities at each of the societies, the societies would do plays and Playlikers would also do plays.
But as styles changed and customs changed, those literary societies sort of went along the boards, and, of course, Raymond was removed from theater in 1950, but he had a long hitch here, you see, from '21 to 1950. And when the successors to Raymond came in and the Department of Drama was formed—all of this after Raymond was no longer active in theater work—we took that name when I came. I took the name Masqueraders for the student drama organization, and it existed until three years ago when we brought a chapter of Alpha Psi Omega on campus, which is a national fraternity rather than a local fraternity. But the Masqueraders, as a literary society and then as a drama group, a student drama group, existed for a long, long time.
AP: That's good to know that history. 3
HM: And Raymond left the theater in 1950, and in—he was succeeded by Giles Playfair, who was a British actor who was here for one year, a kind of interim appointment, and then Michael Casey came and he was here from '53 to '55. And then I came in 1956. And the Department of Drama was formed in 1954. So you see we had drama activities on campus for a long time before we had a Department of Drama. And the Department of Drama became the Department of Drama and Speech in 1961 because we brought the speech activities from the English Department into the Department of Drama and Speech, and we brought communication disorders activities in the School of Education into the Department of Drama and Speech. And we changed the name of the department to the Department of Drama and Speech. We established three divisions, one in theater, one in speech communication, and one in communication disorders and audiology. And so then we became a consolidated department, and that's what we are today. We added the broadcast cinema division later on. And now we have four divisions in the department. But when I came here in 1956, the department was very young. It was only a couple of years old, and we had eight majors and two faculty members in the department. And today in 1990, we are the largest department on campus, and we have some nine hundred majors in the four divisions that I just named. So we've grown.
AP: Yes, that's quite a number. Well, tell me about your own background and your own involvement—well, a little bit about your growing up, schooling, and how you got to Woman's College [of the University of North Carolina] in the first place.
HM: I'm a native of Florida—Sanford, Florida, which is about fifteen miles north of Orlando. And, of course, I was there in the pre-Disney [Disney World theme park] days when it was a beautiful, untourist-infected section of Florida and—was going to school. I did my freshman year at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, which is between Sanford and Orlando. Then World War II [1939-45 global conflict] intervened, so I went in the [United States] Navy for three years, and after the Navy and after that freshman year of experience, I really became interested in theater while I was at Rollins College because we had a very fine arts program there then, and they still do. So I decided when I got out of the Navy that I wanted to major in theater. So, if you wanted to be interested in theater in those days, you went to the mecca of theater, which was New York City. So I entered Columbia University, and I did my bachelor's and master's degrees at Columbia. Then I started teaching at a little Presbyterian school in eastern Tennessee.
AP: That was a change from New York City.
HM: [laughs] One year. It really was, but one took the job where there was a job.
AP: Yes.
HM: And this was the only job that I was offered, so I was really glad to take it since I had a wife and child in those days. But then I was there only one year—this is called Maryville College, and it's in Maryville, Tennessee. Then I went to the University of Delaware [Newark, Delaware]. I was at Delaware five years. There I was the designer technical director and had charge of all the scenery, costumes, lights, properties and the staging of 4
the plays. And then I came here in 1956 as the head of the Department of Drama, which, as I say, consisted of two people and eight majors.
AP: Yes. Well, tell me a bit about the school then when you came here. How did it—how did you feel about your being here, and what was it like when you arrived? This was Woman's College. So what did it seem like to you?
HM: Well, as I remember, the enrollment was around two thousand young ladies. And of course in those days, we were all—we only offered undergraduate training. There were a few graduate programs in education. And I wanted to come to Woman's College because I knew that the arts were traditionally strongest on female campuses. And I knew that the people who attended and those who worked at and the alumni who loved Woman's College thought of it in the same breath with such great institutions as Radcliffe [College, Cambridge, Massachusetts].
And at Columbia, we had Columbia College for men, and we also had a college for women, so then I was sort of used to the concept of men's college, women's college, even though those were part of a great university. Columbia had 40,000 students when I went there as a student. It was a huge and great university. In any case, I saw that Woman's College loved the arts, the administration here was genuinely in favor of seeing the development of a theater program, and since we were in a transition period with a chancellor who'd just been dismissed by the Board of Trustees and my—there were a number of resignations when he was asked to resign, including the head of the Department of Drama, so Michael Casey had resigned. The School of Home Economics dean had resigned and that sort of thing, and there was great unrest on campus. But I felt like that it would all subside.
I was much assured when President [of the Consolidated University of North Carolina System] William Friday came over from Chapel Hill [North Carolina] for my interview, and we could talk about these things because they were interested in getting somebody in for the long haul. And I was really interested in finding a place that I could sink some roots, since at this point this was my third teaching position. And I had just done all of my residency for my PhD, so that the PhD was coming, and I felt like I was prepared to be an administrator. I had studied administration, and I wanted to be an administrator, and I wanted to get in a situation that had a lot of opportunities for growth. And in those days, there were no regular theater programs of any sort in Greensboro. None of the other colleges had seasonal plays. The community theater was operating, but in a relatively sporadic manner. So I just thought there was a nice future here, and I obviously found it because I’ve stayed and have been very happy here.
AP: That's interesting that you came here in the midst of some turmoil—
HM: Yes.
AP: —or at the end of it. Did you find the faculty greatly divided? You said there were some resignations.
HM: Oh yes. There were faculty was divided, the students were divided. I had a very different 5
attitude about what a theater department ought to be and what a university theater program ought to be than my predecessor, Mike Casey. And I used to get anonymous letters from students that would blast my—the productions that I directed because they were so awful and this kind of thing.
AP: I see.
HM: But all of that disappeared within a generation of students.
AP: How would you characterize differences between your style or your philosophy— differences between you and Dr. Casey? [Editor’s note: Michael Casey did not have a doctorate.]
HM: Yes. Well, Michael Casey had just returned from a year of study in England when he became head of the theater program here, and the chancellor, the one that was asked to resign, established the Department of Drama on his own initiative. It was not a faculty vote. Nobody would confess who did it, among other things. So that there were some rough edges to the man and the time. But Michael looked upon himself as an artist-in-residence type. He was an actor. Therefore he said, "I'm only interested in the most talented students on campus, the twelve or fifteen most talented students. And I'll get them together, and we'll take courses together—very small concept, very small program—and we'll rehearse a play and when we get the play ready, we'll open. And I'll play the major male lead as well as direct."
So he announced that he would do Oedipus Rex, and he would play Oedipus, and he would do Hamlet and play Hamlet. And the result was that for the two years that he was here he usually did two plays a year. Not enough to call a season. There were no records when I came except of the plays that had been done in the two previous years. No, the single previous year, and they did a production of [Luigi] Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author and had played to a total of two hundred people in Aycock Auditorium in two nights, and then they did another play. I think as I remember, I think it was A Midsummer Night's Dream. But there wasn't anything wrong with his philosophy or not, I'm not saying that at all. It's just that my philosophy happened to coincide with the one that Raymond Taylor had from 1921 to 1950, in which he felt that, yes, the theater program ought to be for those who are well talented and who want to learn to be actors and that sort of thing, but it also ought to be a living museum of all the great plays produced in competent productions for the entire campus and the town. And that plays ought to be regularly presented in a season. And all the years that Raymond was here, after he got the theater Playlikers established, shortly after he arrived in 1921, they produced at least four major full-length productions a year.
So when Raymond was succeeded by these other two men, they just had a different attitude relative to production. And when I came I had the same—it just happened to be a coincidence that I believed the way Raymond did, and I became friendly with Raymond. We had lots of nice talks, and I always thought of what I developed here as being built upon the foundation that Raymond started. This is why I thought it was so important to name the new building, when we got our new building for theater, after Raymond. 6
AP: That must have been a comfort and encouragement and really quite a support when you came here to think about what you wanted to do—you were able to build on that base.
HM: Yes. And the philosophies that were established then are still intact today. We've become much, much more professional in our theater activities. And, of course, since I have a PhD in speech, I've always been interested in communication disorders. I have a MA and a PhD minor in communication disorders, and I've studied in the communication studies area widely, so that it always seemed to be a kind of normal thing to take these two courses out of the College of Education and move them into drama and speech and develop a whole unit there that's devoted to the problems associated with communication disorders and audiology and education of the deaf. And these, of course, are now very, very large programs and housed over in the new Ferguson Building, which the third floor of Ferguson Building was built especially for that program. The first floor was built for communication studies, and we also have some three hundred majors in communication studies at this point. But I felt like it was good for the campus and for our department and for the College of Arts and Sciences under which we've always operated to develop a consolidated department. And I still believe that and the people that we have in the department are of that same philosophy after all these years. They are a great strength in keeping all of these together.
We developed broadcast cinema division last of all. It came along around 1974. And we did that because there was an excellent program in this area at [University of North Carolina at] Chapel Hill, so that we left it until last to develop. When we developed communication disorders, for instance, on this campus, there was no communication disorders on any campus of the entire university system, so that we felt that it was very important to develop that. And there was no unit of the university system paying much attention to communication studies when we developed that division in our department either. So we not only had a local view, but we felt like we were helping the university serve the state better through the way that we developed these programs. In theater, for instance, we started the MFA in theater, and it was the first MFA in theater in the state. There are now MFAs in theater at the [North Carolina] School of the Arts [Winston Salem, North Carolina] and at the University in Chapel Hill, but we had the first one by a number of years.
AP: Yes, yes. That was groundbreaking.
HM: Yes.
AP: That was a good thing. And you must have been proud and happy that you could accomplish that; it was a good thing. About what year approximately?
HM: Well, the Taylor Building opened in 1961; I think I said '62 a little earlier. And we had the BA major in drama in 1954, the communication studies BA in 1962; that same year we started the communication disorders BA degree, and in 1967 we started acting and design BFAs. In 1974 we started the broadcast cinema BA, and the MFA in acting and directing and in design and production was begun in 1969. But we also now have MA degrees in communication studies and an MS degree in communication disorders, and we 7
have a MFA in broadcast cinema, so that we have a whole complement of graduate students. Of those nine hundred majors, two hundred of them are graduate students.
AP: I see. Yes. That leaves quite a range of activity. Quite a bit going on, I bet, you direct—did you attract mostly North Carolina students? When you came here, tell me a bit about the makeup of student body as a whole and the students you had in theater and drama.
HM: Yes. When I came, of course, the majority of the students were North Carolinians. But because of the reputation of the Woman's College, it drew a great many students from off-campus. I mean, out-of-state. The—and the thought has always been there that the university exists for North Carolinians, but that it's going to become enormously provincial unless it also has students here from other places. So that we have always drawn students from other states, and I think that's especially true of the arts because with education, with home economics, and with the performing arts, this is what Woman's College was noted for when I came, and also the fine arts. I said performing arts, but I also should include the fine arts because those departments were well established and grew relatively quickly. I directed the first musical on campus in 1957. That was the production of Oklahoma. And we established plays for children in 1959. I directed King Midas and the Golden Touch. And then we established an opera program. And the first opera on campus was [Ralph] Vaughan Williams' [English composer of symphonies, chamber music, opera, choral music, film scores] As Right as to Receive, which I directed in 1957. And see, all these programs have just taken off. Today we have an opera director in the School of Music, and with cooperation between the—our department and the School of Music—we do musicals and we do an opera every year. And these are very significant productions. Our little children's play has developed into the North Carolina Theater for Young People, which not only tours North Carolina, but goes from—has a professional company that goes from Virginia to Florida every season, and it is anticipated that this company will expand to a full-time operation. So that from little seeds, large programs have developed.
AP: That is quite a bit. Well, the—so the students then, the student body, especially in drama, would be diverse, maybe more diverse than other departments?
HM: I think so. Today I don't know what percentage of our students come from out of state, but almost all of our graduate students in theater come from out of state, and a major portion of them at the undergraduate level.
AP: Well, you were saying that you developed plays here, but then you did take the play, some plays, on the road and overseas. Could you tell me a little bit about that, some of those activities?
HM: Well, our emphasis from the beginning has not just been to have a large theater program. The size of what the Department of Communication and Theater, which is what we call it today, developed —just happened—and many of us think in the best interests of the department, the college, and the university. There must have been a need for it, otherwise it would not have gotten so big. But all along we have not been interested in being big. 8
We have been interested in being good. Therefore we have constantly done things and, of course, the university insists that we do publish and that we direct plays, and that they come before boards of publication for review, and that the plays come before review panels. So we look around for programs that we can be a part of in which we can test ourselves against other theater groups. And the American Theater Association in the early fifties right after World War II started a program with the [United States] Department of Defense and with USO [United Service Organizations], which involved sending a dozen college and university theater companies overseas to perform for American GIs [servicemen and women] who were still overseas.
And competition was heavy because they only sent twelve a year. In 1959 we were selected to send a production of Clare Booth's [Luce] comedy called The Women overseas to the Far East, and we traveled over 25,000 miles. We flew into Tokyo, and we performed in Japan, we performed in—all over Korea and Okinawa, down to the Philippines, in Hawaii, and then came back. And we went over for eight weeks. But they liked us so much they held us over for ten, and that was very exciting. Then in 1962, our production of The Pajama Game was selected to go to the North Atlantic, and we performed in Thule, Greenland, which is five hundred miles below the North Pole, and elsewhere in Greenland and Iceland, in the eastern section of Canada, particularly Labrador. And in 1966 we made another trip, this time with Li’l Abner, to Europe, where we performed mainly in Germany, West Germany, and France. And as a part of these tours, you could have what they called a delay en route which was somewhat of an educational-type vacation, so—like in Europe we took two weeks before we came back to the campus and went to Amsterdam [The Netherlands] and across to England and up into Shakespeare country and saw British plays and that sort of thing. But it was a real experience for our students to have that kind of activity.
AP: That was really wonderful and just fine for people to do the travel and also to perform overseas. How did the young women think about it? Now that was before coed times.
HM: That was before coed times. You see The Women is an all-female cast, so that we had no trouble with The Women. But with Pajama Game and Li’l Abner, we had to take men with us. And what I did in both cases was to go to the University in Chapel Hill, and I found men there in their theater department and in their music department who were interested in making the tours. So—and we also had some men in Greensboro who went on those tours because when we were female, the male parts in our plays here were always played by men, and sometimes these were faculty members, but most of the time they were students from other campuses.
AP: Such as?
HM: In the city, like Guilford College and—particularly—and we would announce open tryouts for any men in the community, so that we normally had no trouble finding males to play the male parts.
AP: Those were important tours for the students and for the department.
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HM: Oh, they were.
AP: And for the audiences, I would say. What was your reception in the Far East and in Europe?
HM: Oh, the reception was always—was enormous. And well, we took good productions. The students really enjoyed what they were doing. They realized that we should do the plays overseas, but the nice part of it was that we entertained GIs, and a number of people from the countries would come to see the plays also, although they were always done on American military bases. They would come and see the plays and enjoy them, but during the day we were free to see whatever was in the area that we were playing in. So we had a lot of free time, and we also had one night a week that was free, so that when we were in Paris, we went to the Comedie Francaise. We went to the Paris Opera, and by day our students were all over such marvelous places as Le Louvre [art museum], and this occurred wherever we were. When we were in Munich [Germany], we went to the Munich Opera. We went out to the summer palace, and we looked upon this as an educational-type tour because we were going on college time. We granted full academic credit for these tours, and we took off during the regular semester for the last two. The first tour was done in the summertime, but since they held us over in the Far East, we were two weeks late getting back for school. But they were marvelous educational opportunities, and, as such, we carefully prepared for them so that the students knew what they were going to encounter, they knew what to look for in the cities that we were going to be staying, and they had some requirements when they were overseas. For instance, I required them to go to either the Comedie Francaise or the Paris Opera the first night we had free in Paris.
AP: What did most of them choose? [laughs]
HM: As a matter of fact, it was pretty equally divided.
AP: Oh.
HM: Because the opera was doing [La] Traviata, as I remember, which is a good old war horse that most people know about at least, and the Comedie Francaise was doing Moliere's Tartuffe, which all the theater students knew. The thing that they were all of a mind on was that after attending these performances, we all met at the Lido, which is one of the famous show clubs in Paris, and everybody went to the Lido to see the show.
AP: Well, that was quite an experience.
HM: It was a marvelous night for them and me.
AP: A big time. Were most of those North Carolina young women or men and women?
HM: I just don't remember now. But I would think that not more than half of them would be North Carolina students because we were so filled with out-of-state students. 10
AP: Yes. So, tell me—speaking of men and women, tell me a bit more about the changeover from an all-women's school to a coed situation. How did you feel about it? How did other faculty members feel about the change?
HM: Well, that's one question that I asked President Friday during my interview was, “What are the chances of Woman's College ever becoming coed?” And he said—he told me that he thought that it was inevitable that it would become coed, so I was not at all surprised. And I think that was 1964 when we became coed, and I came here in '56. So I really looked forward to it, and, of course, it made a major difference in the work in theater that I was concerned with because most plays have more male parts than female parts, as a matter of fact. And at that point the community theater was being revived, and each college was developing a whole series of plays for its own self, so our source of men was somewhat drying up, shall we say, or vanishing—
AP: [laughs] Somewhat diminishing?
HM: —so something had to happen, you know. So we really looked forward to it.
AP: In your department. What about throughout the university? Or do you feel able to comment on the coming of men to this campus?
HM: Well, I've always been very close to the alumnae, or at least I tried to be close to the alumnae of the university because the alumnae have helped. When I was department head, they helped in the development of all these programs I've been talking about. For instance, when we started touring the children's plays in the state, which was the very first year that we did our first production of King Midas, we toured, and the alumnae helped us get bookings throughout the state. And in terms of building audiences, one cannot have a very active theater production program without having audiences for the students to play to, and they should not play just to their peers. They should play for a varied audience to check out how well they're doing this, you see. They also need the audience to help pay the bills for producing theater, which is so very expensive. So I knew that we needed to organize an organization that could be a support group for the theater, and I organized something that we called the Angels. And it was formed in 1960. And I asked Emily Harris Preyer [Class of 1939, honorary degree 1977] if she would be chairman of the first Angel advisory committee. And she said, yes she would and, as a matter of fact, Emily stayed chairman of the Angel advisory committee for ten years until 1970. And then another alumni of this institution, Marian Adams Smith [Class of 1949], became director of our Angels, and this was a support group which is still in existence which develops interest in the theater. They not only raise funds for scholarships and other things in the theater, but they encourage audiences to come to the theater, to buy season memberships and Angel memberships. The Angels pay a little more for their tickets—
AP: I see.
HM: —than season members do.
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AP: Maybe they have a little more clout, a little more power.
HM: And I stole that name Angel. Of course, angels are long associated with commercial theater. When they produce a play in New York they call the backers the angels because they back the play, putting up the money. But in educational theater I really stole the title from the University of Miami [Florida] because I had a good friend who was head of the program there, and their Angels were also a support group, but he had Archangels; he had Gold Angels and Silver Angels and plain Angels, depending on who gave what.
AP: I see.
HM: We've done that. We just have Angels.
AP: You didn't do a hierarchy of angels. [laughs]
HM: No, no. And they gave whatever they would like to give with a minimum, but our theater is always indebted to Emily Harris Preyer for being willing to start all of this and for being such a loyal support all these years, and for all the alumni who have helped us. For instance, the editor of the Greensboro—the social editor of the Greensboro Daily News was an alumni of this institution, [Editor’s note: Martha Johnson Long did not graduate from the UNCG.] and she became very active in supporting the theater. So that we have found support in great store from the Alumni Association and hold them in high regard.
But there was an awful lot of unrest on campus when I came because of the chancellor's being asked to leave. And there was a great deal of unrest when we became male because there were a lot of alumni and a lot of current students who did not want to see this happen, but I just think the transition—that transition was handled well by the administration.
AP: Yes.
HM: And I think we're a much stronger institution now. We've had enormous growth since we became coed, and we're a very different institution. But that doesn't mean we have to forget our roots. Our department is a very different department now because when I decided I wanted to go back to full-time teaching, (The paperwork had become so severe.) we bought John Lee Jellicorse in in 1974 as the new [drama and speech] department head. And then in 1987, we brought Robert Hansen in as a new department head, so that with each of these department heads, the department changes somewhat, the division gets modified in varying ways, but essentially our basic philosophy has been of a consolidated department—that there's strength in all of the communication and theater arts. And we've continued to develop that way. We have been asking that we be made a School because of the nature of our work and extensiveness of our program.
And sometimes we get the things we ask for, and sometimes we don't get the things we ask for. Last night I was looking through one of those articles in Alumni News that I—that we mentioned at the beginning of this tape, and I discovered that in 1967, we were talking about a PhD degree in communication disorders. Well, that degree got kicked around, and for many, many years, and it was just this year—here we are in 1990, 12
in the spring of 1990, that the administration officially decided there will be no PhD in communication disorders, and they had their reasons for it. There are some of us who don't agree, but then some things that you get and some things that you don't get. I do hope that we'll get the School of Communication and Theater, but that has yet to be acted on. One thing that we have in the works right now that's enormously exciting is the MFA in theater because our MFA in theater has been enormously successful. We have drawn students not only from this country, but from other countries. We've had students from Nationalist China, Australia, New Zealand, France, just all over. And the university is reviewing our MFA in theater and considering upgrading it in a major way, so that it becomes one of the fine theater departments in the nation. And we hope that that will come to pass.
AP: That would be an exciting time.
HM: It would be.
AP: And there's a great deal to build on, as you're suggesting, and you have been here and started those changes and been responsible for so much of that, so that’s good.
HM: Well, I haven't been in a driver's seat since 1974, so a lot has happened in these last fifteen years. But the important thing is that the faculty believes in the consolidated concept, and all of the department heads have, so that we've been building in one direction. And that's why I think we've been successful with—we've had good administration, but we've also had a fine faculty that believes—
[End Side A—Begin Side B]
—Asian studies division. And dean was brought in to develop forensics on campus, particularly debate. And he developed a nationally challenging debate team, and we had this debate team for twelve or fourteen years. And then because of financial necessities, it was abolished, so that some things have come and gone. We tried when Ralph Kearns was a part of the theater department some twenty years ago and around 1970, to start a reader’s theater group, and Ralph had such a group. We offered a little one-semester-hour course in it even, and we did some public performances of reader's theater, but then when Ralph left it sort of went down and vanished, but now we have Sandy Forman [Sandra Hopper Forman, Class of 1966, MFA 1971] in the communication disorders division, who has developed a reader's theater within the last ten years. And this reader's theater is enormously significant. They have just done a reader's theater developed around the writings of Ernest Hemingway [American author and journalist]. And they performed it here. They also performed it in Florida at West Florida University [University of West Florida, Pensacola, Florida] under their sponsorship, and now it's going to be performed at the University of Idaho [Moscow, Idaho] later this spring, and it's going to be the opening production at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Museum in Boston [Massachusetts] later this spring because the presidential library there has a Hemingway 13
room. It's the only presidential library that is not devoted totally to one president, but Mrs. [Jacqueline] Kennedy decided that there ought to be a Hemingway section. And they're doing an international conference, and they have invited our reader's theater under the direction of Sandy Forman to come present this reader's theater presentation on Hemingway as the—on the night of the opening of the event, so we're real thrilled about that.
AP: That is quite something, quite an honor.
HM: It really is.
AP: Wonder what her interest was in Hemingway, or I don't know how to track that down. Do you know?
HM: Well, Sandy is a marvelous person, and I'm enormously prejudiced because she came here to do a BA degree in theater many years ago, and then she got—after she graduated, she's enormously talented. She could literally be successful in anything she wanted to do, but after she graduated, she got married, had three children and then decided to come back to school to do an MFA in acting and directing, which is what she did. And then years later, she was added to our communication studies department where she specializes in speech for performance and in oral interpretation of literature and in reader's theater, so that she looks around for topics to develop her reader's theater presentations around that she's interested in and that the students might be interested in. And she did one on [Federico García] Lorca [Spanish poet, author and theatre director], which was enormously successful, and now she's done the one on Hemingway, which was even more successful.
AP: Oh, that's really quite a wonderful thing, an interesting sidelight.
HM: Another way that we have tested our theater program against other theater programs was through the American College Theater Festival. This is a national organization that develops a theater festival nationally each year, and it's now about twenty-five years old. In its very first year of operation, they did state festivals, and we were asked to host the North Carolina State Festival here, which we did. And then they went to regional festivals, so that there are ten regional festivals. They select the best to go perform in the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in Washington [DC], and we frequently enter our plays in the American College Theater Festival, where they are adjudicated by other college and by professional adjudicators. And sometimes we're invited to go to the regional festival to perform; sometimes we host the regional festival here. We have hosted three regional festivals on our campus. The latest one was only three years ago. And one time we have been asked to go to take a play to the Kennedy Center. In 1974 I directed a production of a Greek trilogy of tragedies. It's called the Oresteia, written by Aeschylus, and it's the only extant trilogy of Greek tragedies that we have. And I adapted these three tragedies into a one evening's performance, and we presented them here, presented them at the regional festival, which that year was at the University of Alabama [Montgomery, Alabama], and then we were asked to take them to Washington [DC] to do for the national festival. There were ten plays that were invited to go to Washington. I'm 14
happy to say that ours was the first one they selected.
AP: Oh, my. That's quite an honor.
HM: I thought so.
AP: Yes.
HM: And we performed in the Eisenhower Theater for two evenings and two matinees, and the university did a marvelous thing. Here again the Alumni Association became very active in this, and the Washington alumni gave a reception after the opening night performance in Washington at the Kennedy Center up on the terrace level. They gave this gorgeous cocktail party with oodles of hors d'oeuvres and invited all of the Washington alumni, all of our Washington politicians, and this was during the Watergate [political scandal that occurred in the United States in the 1970s as a result of the June 17, 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C., and the Nixon administration's attempted cover-up of its involvement] business, and we just had lots of important people coming to see our play and at the party afterwards. The chancellor and his wife were there, Chancellor [James] Ferguson and his lovely Frances. And it was just a glorious night for the University, but all due to the Alumni Association just saying, "We're going to do this."
AP: That was quite an event, and that's quite a place, a big time for all.
HM: Yes, yes.
AP: Well, tell me a bit about the administration. You mentioned Chancellor Ferguson. How have the administrations been through your years here? Perhaps some administrations have been in favor of theater more than others? Has that been true, or could you speculate?
HM: No, I think that—I don't think that any particular administration has been more in favor of theater than another. I think that when Mereb Mossman [sociology and anthropology faculty, dean of the college, dean of instruction, dean of faculty] was vice chancellor for academic affairs, and there was no chancellor when I came, I think that Mereb had it in her mind that this was going to be an area of the campus that would be developed. She was thinking theater, and she happened to hire me, who thought not only theater but theater and speech and—lovely lady, brilliant lady that she is—she allowed me to demonstrate to her the necessity for also including speech, and she was here for a long, long time, so that the philosophy just sort of got set. And in looking at administrations, I also think of the other administration. I can't think of who they were at this point.
AP: Dr. [Otis] Singletary, well, after—
HM: But, yes, Singletary was very much in favor of theater because it was during his tenure as chancellor that we brought the National Repertory Theater down. For five years 15
beginning in 1963, the National Repertory Theater was in residence every fall with artistic director, Eva La Gallienne [American actress, producer, director], and some three dozen actors and two or three plays that they performed here first and rehearsed here, then performed them, and then took them on national tour and did them in New York at the end of the tour thirty weeks later. But that could never have been possible without the support of Chancellor Singletary, but it was—
AP: And after his time, when Dr. [William Whatley] Pierson was here, after Dr. [Edward Kidder] Graham [Jr.], and Dr. Pierson came in, then Dr. [Gordon] Blackwell [all chancellors]—
HM: Yes. Well, Dr. Blackwell was the chancellor when the university succeeded in convincing the state legislature that we needed an instructional wing for drama onto Aycock Auditorium. And Blackwell got that for us. We now call it Taylor Building, and the only way it got through the [North Carolina] General Assembly was by calling it an instructional wing for Aycock Auditorium. I think that if we had told them we needed two theaters for the theater department that there would have been other higher priorities.
AP: Yes, that took some doing.
HM: But—as I remember that was his idea to call it an instructional wing on Aycock Auditorium. And it really is. It joins Aycock Auditorium purposefully at the first level and the second level, so it—anyway, it worked.
AP: So Dr. Blackwell helped to get that. Then Dr. Pierson came in, and then Dr. Singletary.
HM: You see, Pierson was only an acting chancellor because Dr. Blackwell left quite suddenly to go be President of Florida State University [Tallahassee, Florida], and Pierson had been the acting chancellor the year that Chancellor Graham was asked to resign, so that Pierson was a known quantity on campus and very much liked. And then, of course, Ferguson was a known quantity too because he was dean of the graduate school. And when Chancellor Singletary resigned then Jim Ferguson became chancellor and everybody loved Jim, and he was here for a long time. Sixteen years Jim was chancellor. And when he retired, then we found our present chancellor, who I find very supportive of the arts and the theater. I think that all our chancellors have been supportive. But the vice chancellor for academic affairs position has not changed hands as much as the chancellor's position has, and I also think we've found enormous support through the vice chancellors for academic affairs. After all, we are an academic program. We are here for the students, primarily. The reason that we do these tours, the reasons that we have audiences come see plays is not because we're in the entertainment industry. We are not. We are educators, and we're here for students, and we need audiences for students to play to, to test themselves, for us to have our colleagues come in and test those of us who are guiding the students. So that audiences are very much needed and, well, I guess for the last twenty years we've played to a hundred thousand people a year or more—
AP: That's great. 16
HM: —so that we have abundant audiences at all of our performances.
AP: That's quite a number. And you're right—the audiences would be quite vital for the students. I mean, it is a wonderful form of entertainment, but as you're saying, as you see the mission of the school is to educate first.
HM: Yes.
AP: So audiences would be important part of that philosophy.
HM: But as we have grown, we've never wanted to be big. That just was happenstance. We have always wanted to be good, and I would challenge most anybody with our divisions. Of course, I'm enormously prejudiced, but we have hands down the best division of communication disorders and audiology in the state. There just is not another one that begins to equal the nature of our work, and other places recognize this. We have the only—well, we have one of three programs in education of the deaf in which we teach people how to teach the deaf, and we're enormously proud of that.
And our communication studies department is not only excelling in this traditional field of oral interpretation and reader's theater that we were talking about a minute earlier, but they have developed a whole research program into public relations, and they are into communication among professionals. For instance, they have several ongoing programs with local hospitals. They've been extremely concerned with patient-doctor communication problems, nurse-patient communication problems. So that this field has enormously broadened from the debate and oral interp[retation] and the rhetoric study that is traditional to the field, and all of this has happened in the last twenty years.
AP: So there's a tremendous need for that sort of program, right? I would say in public health—
HM: And I like to think that our broadcast cinema division is supplying needs for our students. At this point we're limiting the number of majors in communication studies, in theater, and in broadcast cinema because we don't want them to get any bigger. We've got all we can handle. We want yet to get better, and our broadcast cinema division works very closely with area TV [television] stations. Indeed it draws part-time faculty from those—from the staff of those stations so that we have very close working relationships here. So that I think we're very strong in our four divisions. They've been developed over a long, long time, and the faculty and the students have met the competition of their peers. I don't like to think of it as competition, but we have to come to grips with how good are we, and therefore you have to examine yourself relative to others. Our department has a strong faculty, and the faculty not only writes books and works in the arts presentationally, but we've been very active in our state, regional, and national professional associations as officers, as founding members. And here again this is another indication that our people are growing professionally as the department grows professionally, and the two have to go together.
AP: Yes, all that's quite important. I get the feeling that you have liked very much your work 17
here. That you feel extremely positive about that.
HM: Yes.
AP: And that certainly comes through.
HM: Yes, there have been disappointments, but the happy things far outweigh the disappointment, and the prospect for our now finding suitable quarters for our department. The Ferguson Building helped. The Taylor Building helped, but unfortunately the Taylor Building was designed for sixty majors and ten faculty members and an undergraduate degree in theater. And in the five years it took to get the money and to plan the building and get it built, we had started offering graduate degrees, and we had become not only drama but communication studies and communication disorders, so we outgrew that building before it ever opened, and that's the situation we're in right now because theater still operates in that building, even though theater runs around 180, 200 majors, both graduate and undergraduate. And the building was built for sixty, so that it’s woefully inadequate even for theater these days, so that we need lots of facilities.
AP: Yes.
HM: And this will come down the road. The university realizes the need, and the university has to place us in proper perspective and our university gets placed in proper perspective by the central administration. You know how tight the dollar is these days in North Carolina.
AP: In some fashion it gets placed. Do—how has Woman's College fared in comparison to other state institutions? Of course, that changed after the university got so large, but—
HM: Yes.
AP: —how was Woman's College viewed, you know, when it was one of the three instead one of the sixteen? What do you think?
HM: I don't think our reputation has suffered because we're not one of the three, we're one of the sixteen now because Woman's College began as a fine institution. I mean, it made its reputation as a little female school. There wasn't a thing wrong with that, and everybody loved it because of that, and as we've become coed and as we have developed all these other graduate programs—now we're fielding nationally-ranked hockey teams. Well, you'd expect us to field a nationally-ranked hockey team because this place has always been nationally ranked. I mean it was not hearsay that when we were the Woman's College of the University of North Carolina that we were ranked along with those other fine schools like Radcliffe. I mean, we were that good. It wasn't just what we thought. And UNCG has always been quality oriented. It had a faculty, not just in our department, but all over and as faculties come and go, they are enormously dedicated while they're here. As administrations come and go, and this is natural in the field of education these days. I'm a fluke because I stayed here thirty-four years, and I think one of the last ones. I don't regret that a bit, but I only almost left one time, and that was because this other 18
institution was offering me a new building with oodles of facilities in it.
AP: That would be hard to resist.
HM: Yes, yes, and I was going to become a dean of a very large outfit, and I really questioned, "Do you want to become a dean or not?" And I think it all happened for the best. Their legislature didn't approach—didn't appropriate the money for that building—
AP: Oh, my.
HM: —so I said, "Please don't invite me to come until you get the money." And they didn't. And they didn't get the money, so I didn't get the invitation. At that point I don't think I would have gone because I had decided I don't want to be a dean. I don't want to be an administrator, and I want to go back to being a full-time teacher, so that's what I did.
AP: There's a difference. What about the best thing that's happened to you since you were here, and maybe the worst thing if you want to comment on that.
HM: Well—
AP: In either order.
HM: —I think the best thing that has happened to me personally since I have been here was the acknowledgement of the quality of the Oresteia and taking it to Washington. Hands down, that was the best. The largest disappointment that has happened to me since I've been here was the turning down of the PhD in communication disorders. It has to be that.
AP: Yes.
HM: But there are bound to be good things and bad things, and I have no bitterness or no chips on my shoulder or anything like that. I've thoroughly enjoyed this institution. I still do. When I retire September 1, I look forward to coming back. I intend to see all the plays and still going to go to the opera. I'm going to go to dance concerts and all those things like I've been doing for all these thirty-four years, but more at my leisure. And instead of seeing everything we do, I can select the things that I'd like to go to, you know.
AP: That you most enjoy?
HM: Right, right. And I look forward to that.
AP: So there has been a balance about that—pluses and minuses about your work.
HM: Oh, and the pluses far outweigh the disappointments. My yes, my yes.
AP: Well, this has been a good time, and do you have other comments, other bits of history that we should hear? Something that you want to add. 19
HM: Well, as you can see I've primarily talked about our department because I've been so very much involved. And even though I have not been a department head since 1973—well, it was '74 that John Lee Jellicorse took over. I've still been a very active part of the faculty, and Dr. Jellicorse, and now Dr. Hansen, have had to put up with the things that I say. [laughs]
AP: [laughs]
HM: That all comes with tenure. They can't get rid of me easily, you know—
AP: Of course.
HM: —and they aren't the kinds of people who'd want me to shut up. They're very good people. And I think our future looks very good. There's one thing that we haven't talked about, and that's Parkway Playhouse because that's one thing that Raymond Taylor began in 1966. Parkway Playhouse was a summer stock company. It is a summer stock company up at Burnsville in North Carolina, and when we—when Raymond started it, it was very rare for there to be a summer stock company operated by a college or a university, and the university got rid of it in 1980—1940—no, that isn't right. Raymond started it in 1947, and the university got rid of it in 1953 because it had become too expensive. The University of Miami in Florida took it over, and then they got out of it, and in 1966 the residents in Burnsville asked me, since I was department head, if we'd like to come back up, so we took Parkway Playhouse back over in 1966 and operated it through the summer of 1989. And we have just determined that we are no longer going to go back up to Parkway Playhouse. The playhouse and its facilities are in such disrepair that they are really unsafe, and our priorities now are going towards building the MFA program into one of major national importance, and one can't do everything, so we're going to confine our summer programs to work that we're doing on campus. And that's one thing that had not been mentioned, and Parkway Playhouse since 1966—that's a long history.
AP: That's a long time, and important for people in Burnsville—
HM: Oh my, yes.
AP: —and I would think they looked forward a great deal to that.
HM: Raymond Taylor told me one time that when they first established Parkway Playhouse at Burnsville there was only one paved road going into town. And now, of course, there are paved highways bypassing it. But when we took Parkway Playhouse over again in 1966, I asked Raymond if he would go up and direct the first production, so he directed a production of Our Town, which was one of his favorite plays, and he asked W. C. "Mutt" Burton to come play the stage manager. It was one of Mutt's favorite roles, and we've mentioned earlier how he acted at UNCG for fifty years. So that that was a nice opening—reopening—with us up at Parkway too. And the years at Parkway have just been fine years for our students and for the people at Burnsville. It's just that our priorities have changed. And the money crunch has gotten tighter because those buildings at 20
Burnsville are a part of the city school system. They are not part of university property. We have no control over them.
AP: I see. That was an important venture, an exercise, and you did it well, it seems.
HM: Our Children's Theater work here, too, has enormously grown. Maybe we ought to mention—
AP: Yes, I'd like to hear more about that.
HM: That first play, King Midas and the Golden Touch in 1959, did a little bit of a tour, and this tour became getting—well, it kept getting bigger and bigger, and finally we brought in a director of children's theater, and Ralph Kearns was here for two years. Then we brought Thomas Behm, and Tom has been here now about twenty years. And Tom has taken this program and really run with it. When—just before Ralph Kearns came, we combined the children's play that we did here with the university with one that was done locally by the Junior League of Greensboro. Then we booked in a professional production and had three plays that we did on a series, which we called Pixie Playhouse. And Pixie Playhouse used to do weekend performances, and we had at one time 8,000 children coming on weekends to see these plays holding season memberships.
The Greensboro and the county schools were enormously cooperative in that program, but when Tom came the whole nature of the program changed. And we now do all three plays ourselves, and he formed the North Carolina Theater for Young People, which is a professional organization made up of our students who've just graduated and other young professionals. And they do two of those plays now and tour for eighteen weeks. And this whole program has become much more important. And we do an MFA in child drama, which is one of the half dozen places in the nation that does an MFA in child drama, and Tom has brought national significance to that program. I only point that out as one of the major changes that got made along all these—thirty-four years that I've been here. I think another one was when we brought Andreas Nomikos to campus as director of design because here we brought an artist of an international reputation, and Andreas was here for over fifteen years, not only designing himself. He designed that Oresteia that we took to Washington, but also supervising the development of our MFA program and all those MFA design students who worked under him. And Andreas retired a couple of years ago, so that good people come and go.
AP: Yes, I should say.
HM: But hopefully they're being replaced—
AP: Yes, how were you able to—?
HM: —by good people.
AP: How were you able to lure him here, or was it—?
21
HM: Well, Andreas was working as one of the three scene designers with the opera program at the University of Indiana [Bloomington, Indiana], which is hands down the finest opera training program in the country. And I discovered that Andreas was interested in moving because he wanted to do something other than opera. Well, we had this beginning opera program here that needed a designer who was really interested in opera, and we also had a theater program that was going gung ho with all kinds of plays. So Andreas decided that he thought that he would fit in well here. And for that reason he made the change, to our great benefit, and I think Andreas would say to his benefit too because he thoroughly enjoyed living in Greensboro, and now that he's retired, he's made his permanent home here.
AP: That's an interesting bit of history, and a good bit of the history. Well, it's been good to chat.
HM: Thank you.
AP: And I've enjoyed it very much. Thank you.
[End of Interview]