Work. Play. Change.

When Dr. Mark Ferguson ’94 returned to Wofford College in 2003 to become director of Wofford Theatre, just three years after it had celebrated its 30th anniversary, he knew he had a huge task before him – to uphold the legacy of the program’s founder, Dr. James R “Jim” Gross.

“I was very conscious of the history and the legacy, both as a student who had found the experience of Wofford Theatre Workshop transformative and as a person to whom a torch had been passed,” Ferguson says. “It was never explicit, but it seemed clear to me that the only way to honor the incredibly visionary work of Dr. Gross and what it had meant to all of the students he had impacted was to grow it.”

Grow it, he did. Celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, Wofford Theatre has become a full-fledged academic department with a revamped major and students receiving academic credit for participation in shows. “That was a game-changer and a significant cultural shift for Wofford,” Ferguson says. “It moved the theatre from an incredibly intense extracurricular activity to a serious academic department.”

Gross started the Wofford Theatre Workshop during Interim 1970, directing a production of Harold Pinter’s “The Birthday Party.” Originally staged in the Montgomery Room in Burwell on a shoestring budget, Wofford Theatre productions found a new home in 1981 as Gross inaugurated the Tony White Theater in the Campus Life Building with a production of “Twelfth Night.” In the spring of 2017, the department bid farewell to the black box space with a final production of “Twelfth Night,” directed by theatre professor Dan Day.

Productions now are staged in the Rosalind Sallenger Richardson Center for the Arts, which boasts two state-of-the-art performance spaces – the 300-seat Jerome Johnson Richardson Theatre and the Sallenger Sisters Black Box Theatre, the site Pulp Theatre, student-run productions during Interim.

For the anniversary show, Pulp Theatre presented Pulitzer Prize nominee Theresa Rebeck’s “Seminar” during Interim 2020. Co-directing the production were Savannah Talledo ’21 and Kelly Kennedy ’21, both from Spartanburg, S.C.

“I’m very honored that Savannah and I got to create a show that we were both passionate about directing,” says Kennedy, a theatre and environmental studies major. “Seeing it become part of Wofford’s history and legacy within the theatre department is a humbling and powerful experience.”

Talledo wanted to direct “Seminar” because she enjoys “the way Rebeck’s characters communicate with one another. There is something about her use of language that makes her characters feel real. We also wanted a show that Wofford students could relate to, make people laugh while also highlighting the importance of artists in today’s society.”

Set in modern-day New York City, the Broadway comedy centers on four aspiring novelists and their professor, an internationally acclaimed writer whose methods are far from orthodox. Over the course of a 10-week writing seminar, desires and tensions flare as allegiances are sacrificed at the altar of ambition.

“One of the biggest indicators of the success of the theatre program is the success of Pulp Theatre as well as the many independent student-directed shows that are now able to run because of the addition of new spaces in the center for the arts,” says Ferguson.

“All-student theatre at a college this size is incredible,” Ferguson adds. “Plays are chosen, cast, acted, directed, designed, marketed and run exclusively by students. It’s incredibly empowering for the students. They take enormous pride in their autonomy and their success.”

“Wofford Theatre, to me, is home,” Kennedy says. “It is a place on campus that I know I will always be accepted and cherished for my differences. It is a place where I can collaborate and share ideas with close friends and make things that I’m proud to share with the Wofford community and elsewhere.”

For Talledo, Wofford Theatre has offered a means of exploring herself and the world. “I have learned the importance of communication, storytelling and teamwork from so many different angles,” she says. “It has allowed me to be vulnerable and open to new ideas and ways of thinking.”

Following the example set by Gross, Wofford Theatre still produces “challenging, often non-mainstream shows, and we made explicit a thing that was maybe implicit for the beginning of the Wofford Theatre Workshop,” Ferguson says. “Theatre is too difficult, too expensive and too important to produce shows that do anything besides interrogate how we might better understand the nature and purpose of human existence. That overriding concern pervades every show we mount and every class we teach.

“It lives in a simple articulation of our guiding principle: Work. Play. Change,” he adds. “This idea was born as we tried to describe as succinctly as possible what we did in the theatre department. It’s intellectually and artistically rigorous and ambitious; it’s fun and can be quite funny; and we hope to inspire change in our audience and in the world while being awake to the changes located within the artists that offer up the gift of their ingenuity and labor.”

By Laura H. Corbin