Growing Up On Stage

Growing up on Stage Marquette’s performing arts department has established itself over the past 60 years.

By Sara J. Martinez Photographs by Walter S. Sheffer, Courtesy Marquette University Archives

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or the first 70 years after Marquette University was dedicated in 1881, the performing arts program was hardly recognizable. One man changed all that.

Remembered as the man who made a name for Marquette’s theater, the Rev. John J. Walsh came to Marquette in 1951. Walsh had just graduated from Yale University’s theater program as the first and only Jesuit priest to do so, and he brought with him a wave of innovation that would transform Marquette’s theater program over the next 15 years.

Before this time, Marquette had no semblance of a theater program outside of the Marquette Players — a group of students who gathered to create university productions. While the specification did not yet exist, those who wanted to study theater generally had a major in the School of Speech.

Walsh was classically trained in theater and dance and was able to inspire a mass of young adults and children in the Milwaukee area during his career at Marquette. There was no theater in which to perform, so Walsh and the Players made do with community resources such as the theater at Alverno College or the Pabst Theater.

Students performed in “Teatro Maria” in Bellermine Hall behind Gesu Church, what is now the Parish Center, in a small theater built entirely by the theater company.

Walsh says in an interview with former Player, Jim Peck, in a program shown locally in Milwaukee on PBS affiliate Channel 10 WMVS titled “Two Hammers and a Saw: The Theater Legacy of Father Walsh,” that when Backstage he first arrived at Marquette and asked where the theater was, he was led up to the attic of the Speech The Rev. John J. Walsh, director of Marquette’s theater program from 1951 to 1965, applies makeup building. There were two hammers and a saw on to Stewart Moss before a photoshoot. Colette Kerrey the floor of the room, and Walsh realized that he looks on. would need to build it himself.

16 • Marquette Journal, February 2010

Marquette Journal, February 2010 • 17

Marquette’s performing arts department has established itself over the past 60 years.

By Sara J. Martinez Photographs by Walter S. Sheffer, Courtesy Marquette University Archives

F

or the first 70 years after Marquette University was dedicated in 1881, the performing arts program was hardly recognizable. One man changed all that.

Remembered as the man who made a name for Marquette’s theater, the Rev. John J. Walsh came to Marquette in 1951. Walsh had just graduated from Yale University’s theater program as the first and only Jesuit priest to do so, and he brought with him a wave of innovation that would transform Marquette’s theater program over the next 15 years.

Before this time, Marquette had no semblance of a theater program outside of the Marquette Players — a group of students who gathered to create university productions. While the specification did not yet exist, those who wanted to study theater generally had a major in the School of Speech.

Walsh was classically trained in theater and dance and was able to inspire a mass of young adults and children in the Milwaukee area during his career at Marquette. There was no theater in which to perform, so Walsh and the Players made do with community resources such as the theater at Alverno College or the Pabst Theater.

Students performed in “Teatro Maria” in Bellermine Hall behind Gesu Church, what is now the Parish Center, in a small theater built entirely by the theater company.

Walsh says in an interview with former Player, Jim Peck, in a program shown locally in Milwaukee on PBS affiliate Channel 10 WMVS titled “Two Hammers and a Saw: The Theater Legacy of Father Walsh,” that when Backstage he first arrived at Marquette and asked where the theater was, he was led up to the attic of the Speech The Rev. John J. Walsh, director of Marquette’s theater program from 1951 to 1965, applies makeup building. There were two hammers and a saw on to Stewart Moss before a photoshoot. Colette Kerrey the floor of the room, and Walsh realized that he looks on. would need to build it himself.

16 • Marquette Journal, February 2010

Growing up on Stage

Marquette Journal, February 2010 • 17

And so Walsh and the Marquette Players built Teatro Maria from the ground up.

Because the theater was so small, Peck describes how the dance room doubled as backstage for the actors, the green room was also the makeup room, and the costume shop shared roles with the dressing room. Tech work took place in the “twin coffins of claustrophobia that were the light and sound booths,” Peck says in the documentary.

When full, the theater held 120 people. The unusual stage had three sides with wagons that rolled in front of the stage if needed. As the program’s reputation and popularity grew, the Players would need more space.

The Players would close down Wisconsin Avenue to perform in front of Church of the Gesu. Actors performed atop large wagons, resembling early medieval street theater, old-fashioned mystery plays and nativity stories. At one point, they even had a live donkey that would perform amidst all of the other actors in front of the church.

The Greek-style stage setting allowed for the players to perform in the manner of medieval traveling theater troupes, and provided the perfect outlet for cyclical pieces such as “Ludus Coventriae.”

scenes, with him explaining the spiritual meaning of the playwrights,” says Dominique Noth, who was a part of the players from 1960 to 1965 during his time as a student at Marquette.

He continued his relationship with the theater program long after his graduation, teaching at Marquette in the 1970s and sending some of his children through the theater program.

Joan Schwartz, another former Player, entered Marquette as a freshman in 1951, the same year Walsh arrived at the university to take charge of the theater program. As a Player for her four undergraduate years, Schwartz, then known as Joan Jackson, developed such an attachment to the program that she decided she couldn’t leave the company.

“It was a privilege and a pleasure to be in his company and to work with him, so one wanted to be in that aura as much as possible,” Schwartz says. “It was a great fulfillment of the talent that I had, and I have not worked with anyone since.”

Later, Schwartz taught various classes including speech, drama, acting, history of theater, oral interpretation and English for the next 10 years, her Marquette career directly coinciding with that of Walsh’s. At the time she also did some work with the Milwaukee Players and tried to work on TV, but she felt nothing could

be explained. It took his students four years to figure out what he meant.

“It takes a good long time to really, really get rid of yourself because acting is a process of transformation. You decide, really, you must not be ‘Jim Peck,’ anymore,” Walsh says, using his interviewer and former student as an example. “You have to be Romeo. I can see you trying to be Romeo, but Jim Peck always comes through.”

Walsh says it was a painstaking process to teach actors how to truly be another person, not to be themselves acting as another person.

“It’s only when the transformation becomes a part of you that you’re a great actor. Otherwise, you’re just a personality actor,” he says, saying that famous actors such as Cary Grant and Clark Gable were just “personality actors.”

Walsh taught his students a way to transform themselves that he always joked would take “seven years” to perfect.

But “he didn’t produce snobs, he produced working professionals,” Peck says of Walsh’s tactics. And many of his students have seen great success in the performing arts industry.

During the Walsh era, speech students at Marquette were part of the Players because they wanted to perform as a career, Noth says. Many

“It takes a good long time to really, really get rid of yourself because acting is a process of transformation.”

Walsh says the use of the donkey for the Players’ production of “Ludus Coventriae” was a turning point for the group.

“It made our reputation. It was the only thing that got us off the ground here in Milwaukee,” he says in the documentary. “Everybody remembered the donkey.”

The donkey was kept in the engineering school during rehearsals, two blocks away from where the performance would take place at Church of the Gesu. According to Walsh, when the Players were looking for a place to temporarily house the donkey, an engineering professor said, “We’ll put it in the basement. One more jackass won’t make this place any different.”

The night of the performance, however, nobody wanted to deal with the untrained donkey, Walsh says in the documentary. But once they finished the struggle of dragging the animal two blocks over to Gesu, it was worth it. The donkey performed just as well as the Players, and the show was one to remember.

The production gained such popularity that it was picked up by a television station for national broadcast. Students were cast and the play was re-choreographed and filmed at the WISN Channel 12 Studios. It aired nationally on CBS’s “Look Up and Live” in four 30-minute installments.

The production featured all music and dancing with a voiceover narration, and it was a huge step in earning national recognition for the Marquette Players.

“Walsh himself hosted national TV shows where some of Broadway’s top actors would do 18 • Marquette Journal, February 2010

compare to working with Walsh.

“It was like a family. It was a dedicated group of individuals, inspired by Father Walsh,” Schwartz says, emotionally recalling her years as a Player and teacher at Marquette.

Recalling memories brings tears to her eyes, as Schwartz describes the genius, charisma and brilliance she feels Walsh brought to the theater in the ’50s and ’60s. When Walsh left the program in 1965, so did Schwartz.

“He had such a personal influence upon so many people’s lives by his great kindness, understanding and interest,” she says. “He was a very fatherly figure in some ways, concerned personally with the lives of his students. He was a warm and influential role model for many people.”

Walsh’s success came from his unrelenting yet welcomed pressure upon students, Schwartz says. He demanded the best that they could give, settling for nothing less, and as such, students felt fulfilled that they had given a performance to the best of their abilities.

went on to have distinguished theatrical careers, such as Tony award-nominated Helen Carey, who performed in one of Walsh’s productions of “Saint Joan.”

Highly esteemed choreographer John Neumeier, who is the artistic director of the Hamburg Ballet, is a product of Walsh’s program at Marquette. Actors Peter Bonerz, Stewart Moss and Charles Siebert are also Marquette alumni from the Walsh era, as are directors Richard Colla and Michael Schultz, as well as pioneer in visual art, Fred Barzyk.

In the documentary, Moss emphasizes that he came to Marquette for Walsh, to learn to be an actor under the direction of the Jesuit.

Colla recalls a time when Walsh yelled at the students, “If you’re not ready to commit to this thing, then get the hell out of here!”

Values on commitment and dedication were deeply instilled in all of Walsh’s students.

“Father Walsh told us how difficult it was going to be and what the commitment was to be, and what he expected of us,” Colla says.

Learning to Act Walsh is famous for always saying, “It’s going to take me seven years to teach you not to act,” according to the documentary.

When Peck asks Walsh what he means by that, he says it was an exaggeration, but it really did take him all four years to teach his students what they needed to know about “not” acting.

The point is that there’s an art in honestly talking and listening to another person, Walsh says in the documentary, and it couldn’t really

Leaving a Legacy Nowadays, students aren’t coming to Marquette specifically for theater, and those who do frequently do not pursue performing arts as a full-time career. Noth says the difference between students of the Walsh era and today is the type of ethic used in the 1960s productions.

The focus on theater arts as a career when performance was not yet recognized as an art form was sometimes frowned upon, Noth says, and the theater program at Marquette has moved

Acting Out Stewart Moss as “Mack the Knife” in the Rev. John J. Walsh’s production of “The Threepenny Opera.” The show ran from July 11 through Aug. 10, 1958.

Marquette Journal, February 2010 • 19

“Annie Get Your Gun” away from this. “(The program) can’t get away with some of the stuff they used to do back then,” Noth says.

“Walsh had a profound influence as a Jesuit.

There were things you could not get away with as a teacher that Walsh got away with as a Jesuit.”

Even during his time at Yale University, as the only Jesuit ever allowed to attend the Yale Drama School, Walsh won acting awards without ever having been in a public production. According to Jesuit rules, the priests could not be in productions, but Walsh had a reputation just from his presence in the classroom in 1950.

Walsh’s talent and charisma played major roles in the development of the Marquette Players, Noth says. Whenever the program needed money, the experienced dance teacher Walsh would go down to Chicago and teach a few classes for wealthy patrons.

“We’d need a tape recorder, and he’d come back with a tape recorder,” Noth says. During a trip to Europe, Walsh was even able to convince a company to donate costumes to Marquette. He had a way with the theater, and he made Marquette into a Milwaukee power.

Having performed in so many of the Walshera productions and maintaining a close rela20 • Marquette Journal, February 2010

tionship with the university ever since, Noth has seen a long evolution of the theater program.

The evolution is possibly in the academic philosophy, he says.

“It’s moved away from notable, cutting-edge motivational theater,” Noth says. “Walsh’s extraordinarily good acting classes were completely based on the script and a whole range of character acting, big on dance and musicals.”

In recent productions, Noth says the Marquette theater program has chosen safer plays and musicals that will obviously be popular within the community.

The problem there, however, is that the company is not producing the hits that made it so famous in the ’50s and ’60s. The 1963-’64 production of “Oliver Twist,” for example, totaled 78 performances by the time the curtain fell, according to Milwaukee historian Thomas Jablonsky’s book, “Milwaukee’s Jesuit University: Marquette 1881-1981.” Noth says that at the time, “Oliver” held a record for longest-running community theater production.

Schwartz says that there will never be another coming of theater in Milwaukee that could compare to the Walsh era. He brought memorable innovations to Milwaukee theater, Schwartz says, such as the theater in the round at Teatro

Nerisse Trombetta and Peter Bonerz in the 1958 production. The Marquette University Players also performed the show at the Pabst Theater in 1955.

Maria and the outdoor production of Ludus Coventriae.

According to Schwartz, programs under prior theater department heads, such as Ruth Klein from 1926 until 1946 and Joseph W. Miller from 1946 to 1950, never reached the proportions the program did under Walsh’s direction.

“He inspired a love of theater in the people he worked with,” Schwartz says. “He brought out the best in you.”

Today: The Ravel Years Current theater faculty, however, believe the program is doing a fine job grooming young professionals as they prepare to enter the industry.

One main focus of the performing arts program today is to solidify the department’s accreditation with the National Association of Schools of Theatre. One main benefit of accreditation is to grant tenure track to department faculty. Stephen Hudson-Mairet, professor in the department of performing arts, says that tenure for the performing arts department has only recently been approved at the university level, and

“Seventeen” Colette Kerrey and John Neumaier in the 1958 production. Neumaier has been director and chief choreographer of the Hamburg Ballet since 1973.

the department is hoping to be granted associate membership with NAST this month after it was deferred one year.

Earning accreditation won’t necessarily affect the daily lives of students, Hudson-Mairet says, but it adds to the validity of the program.

“I truly believe we do good work. I truly believe we have a quality program here,” he says.

He doesn’t want his time at Marquette or as performing arts chair to be remembered as “all about him,” he says. It’s about the students.

While he does not discredit the “Walsh Era” at Marquette, Hudson-Mairet says the methods Walsh is famous for really don’t work with the style of teaching the department stresses today.

For example, even the audition process has been revised for the Walsh scholarship that is given to a junior theater major each year. The department brought in Walsh-era actor Peter Bonerz this past year as a judge for the auditions, and Hudson-Mairet says Bonerz effectively understood that these are young students and they are growing.

Bonerz spent a lot of time working with the students, and Hudson-Mairet says the audition

will be more workshop-based to make it more valuable for students.

“I think that you can get some fantastic work out of students who understand professionalism, who understand they need to work hard but who understand they still need to grow,” HudsonMairet says. “If this experience here is the pinnacle of your career, you’re in trouble. I think for certain members of that Walsh community, this was the pinnacle of their performing arts careers.”

Hudson-Mairet emphasizes that his term as department chair came off of a powerful artistic director, adjunct associate professor Phylis Ravel.

He says he doesn’t think history has yet recognized that the performing arts department had a rejuvenation when Ravel arrived. There is a group of young professionals currently working in the industry (such as actors Danny Pudi, Nick D’Agosto and John Bobek) who came out of the theater program under Ravel.

“There is quite a number of really high-end performers and technicians out there who were here when she was,” he says. “They might not look back on it as ‘the Ravel Years,’ but they might.”

Even so, Hudson-Mairet isn’t interested in

carving his name into the program. It’s all about the students and what they can learn.

“I want (students) to be having a really solid educational experience that involves the whole faculty,” he says. When the faculty members each take greater ownership in the lives of their students, they are better able to help them develop throughout their careers at Marquette.

Hudson-Mairet cites “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” director Maureen Kilmurry as an example of a faculty member who does great work and truly cares about the students. She only works at Marquette part-time, but she is invested in helping students with the practical experience they need to develop.

Many students coming into the program at Marquette think they’re going to act professionally, Hudson-Mairet says, but the program at Marquette promotes itself for providing a wellrounded education.

He says students come to Marquette for a solid acting program and a great B.A. experience where they are able to participate in multiple areas as well as appreciate Marquette’s emphasis on social justice and community. mj

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