Northwestern Student Theatre

Hey there!


First of all, I totally and completely agree about posting on facebook and other social media in celebration. It seems most appropriate to keep those posts (if there are ANY) to the actual FB pages of the board. I think all of the boards CAN be active about this. WAVE chose to no longer post on individual pages for any petitions in order to combat this. It might be worth seeing if all of the boards would consider doing this?

That said, I know what it's like to face rejection and I think that sometimes the best way to begin to cope with a lot of it (seeing as we will all deal with it in our time in theatre) is to learn how to celebrate the successes of your peers as much as possible - I say this outside of the potentially exclusive facebook culture that we can control. I think I can speak for many of the boards in saying that our decisions are always extremely difficult because there are so many talented people on this campus and I wouldn't want anyone to feel like they are a failure for not getting a slot!! The reason why we keep overproducing is because we want to give as many people opportunities as possible.


Finally, as a person whose apartment has hosted parties and posted pictures on facebook, I want to first of all apologize if any of it ever felt as exclusive and hurtful. It was certainly not our intention. Throwing parties in this community is often difficult because our apartments simply can't hold all of the people we care about or have worked with - if I had my way I would invite everyone!
I don't say this to excuse the photos or to disregard your emotions, but to make this feel less purposeful and/or calculated! And while it's true for me that taking photos and putting them on Facebook IS about preserving memories since that is where I keep many of my pictures with my friends, I am totally hearing where you are coming from and I will keep this in mind in the future.


Even if you weren't referring to our party, I want you to know that talking about what makes you feel left out helps us figure out what to change. So thank you for being honest.

Hi Sam, thanks for the response. I agree with what you're saying about transparency. It would help a lot to get a better sense of what boards are actually looking for. Those sort of ways to gain experience do help in terms of objectivity of petition.

What I meant by conversation though was not to help understand why one doesn't get chosen. I meant that more as an alternative petition format in general. During petitions it often feels as if you are getting questions lobbed at you and you don't really know how your answer is received. I suggested the idea of a conversation in order to allow for a more conducive atmosphere of "getting to know" the candidate. I think that would help create a better air of support in the actual petition room and would allow for an easier way of getting the necessary information from the candidate. Does that make sense?

In terms of your second message, what I mean to say by that is I've talked to numerous people who mention that they spent all weekend in petitions until awful hours of the night in order to make this all happen. I understand that this is to deal with the pure reality of getting everything ready in time, it just doesn't seem fair to board members and it contributes to the overstress that exists on campus. Like I said, I understand that a lot goes into it and it does help to understand the behind the scenes in such detail. I've never really had it spelled out for me like that and I do appreciate it.

The only reason I brought it up is because it is such a drain on the emotional sanity of everyone. I don't know what to do about it because I don't know enough about the process. It just seems to be so much time.

I'm also struggling to understand what you're suggesting in this point:

- Change the timeline of petitions? Board members stay up way too late working on these petitions. It's not fair to them, nor to the petitioners, to be dedicating this much time and effort towards picking directors. Maybe it should be spread out over a longer period of time, or, better yet, made shorter in general.

It seems in the rest of your post like you're wanting to give the petitioners MORE time to pitch themselves, but then here it sounds like you're asking for less time? From what I've heard, petitioners prefer their petitions that are longer. As an example, I know some boards did 15 minute director petitions this year, and some did 8-9ish.

Unfortunately, it's really hard to have petition times at anything other than really odd hours. Since producer and director petitions fall right in the middle of the quarter, loads of the people petitioning are in rehearsal processes, so it doesn't make sense to have hardly any petition times during the typical 6-11 rehearsal o'clock. That pretty much pigeonholes boards into running petitions 5-6 and 11-12 Monday through Friday. Since most boards try to have over 75% of their members at every petition, they usually only end up using about half of those times due to class conflicts and other meetings that happen in the 11-12 hour (production meetings, board meetings, acting class rehearsals, etc). If we go for the 15-minute slots, that averages about 20 slots during those five days. To compare, there were several boards this year with well over 40 people petitioning to direct. That would mean scheduling at least another 10 hours of petitions on Saturday, allowing for time to deliberate on Sunday. Saturday, unfortunately, is often even harder to schedule than weekdays, since board members (and petitioners!) are often IN SHOWS, building a show, seeing theatre they need to for class, going out of town, etc etc. With that in mind, it's hard to imagine a way to have time for more in-depth petitions while also allowing everyone who signs up to petition to actually do so.

The current petition season schedule is based on including everything that needs to get done for the next year's season all in spring quarter. Board petitions start pretty immediately, and then producers, then plays (for Vertigo), then directors, and then director/producer teams have just two weeks to peruse and select shows to pitch to boards, who then select their seasons. Each board's season then needs to go to StuCo exec to be confirmed, to make sure there is no overlap between boards (and to resolve any overlap if it exists). Seasons need to be selected in time to allow directors, producers, and auditioners prepare for early fall shows, which audition around June 1st-2nd, with callbacks later that week.

The only way to lengthen this process would be to either put board petitions at the end of spring (which I don't think anyone wants, on or off boards), or to push early fall auditions literally into finals week (which I don't think is allowed by the university, and even if it was, that would totally suck).

I go into such detail just to see if that kind of "behind the scenes" scheduling nitty gritty also can help the idea of transparency, and to clarify why petitions currently happen the way they do.

In response to some awesome and articulate points from Jake!

- Board members should not be allowed to direct or produce for their own board. A board cannot make an objective decision on another board member and it hurts even more to be rejected by your fellow board members. Besides, the point of a board seems to be to support the community in creating theatre. Choosing a member of your own board to direct/produce for you does not help the community, instead it cuts you off from the community.

I have had this thought before. Can boards be objective when they pick someone from their own board? I think it's incredibly important for the fragile sanity of your dear classmates to try to make this process as objective as possible.

- Change the timeline of petitions? Board members stay up way too late working on these petitions. It's not fair to them, nor to the petitioners, to be dedicating this much time and effort towards picking directors. Maybe it should be spread out over a longer period of time, or, better yet, made shorter in general.

I think it would be a great idea to do director petitions in two parts - first people would submit applications, and then a number of applicants would be chosen to do an interview portion. Think of the time we'd save! (tempus fugit yo) Then the petitions themselves could be longer, more low key, and more informative.

Yeah, that's actually a really good idea.