Wake Forest Magazine, September 2004 - Past Issues - Wake ...

said. “We’ve had a number of interdisciplinary
classes developed, we’ve had
input on University affairs, we’ve had
faculty on the theme year committees.
We are really engaged in the important
work of the University.”
Brook Davis (’90), assistant professor
of theatre, described the theatre
faculty as very functional. “We work
together well. In theatre, you have to
live with people practically. You develop
a real close connection during a show
because you’re spending a lot of hours
together,” she said. “There’s a tremendous
respect here between the students
and the faculty. We handle problems
and function well together, and everyone
just does really good work. There’s
been a high standard set, and as a
result, it’s just kind of expected that
there’s a level of excellence that’s going
to happen.”
Davis, who was a theatre/psychology
double major at Wake Forest, said she
By Michael Huie (’84, MA ’93)
Harold Tedford (left) and Donald Wolfe
Tedford
and Dodding For me, Wake Forest University has always
and Wolfe…
meant family. That sense of family started in
oh my!
the theatre department and continues to this day.
I skipped a lot of the typical social outlets
when I was an undergraduate at Wake Forest. I wasn’t in a fraternity. I
didn’t belong to any campus clubs or play intramural sports. And I certainly
didn’t spend long hours huddled in the stacks of the library.
I was in the theatre.
The people you work with on a show become your brothers and sisters.
You develop a team mentality with those same people, and you
spend long hours huddled in your room learning lines or hammering
nails and painting flats in the scene shop. Being in the theatre means
being part of a family.
The people who oversee that family take on larger-than-life significance
in your everyday existence. I graduated in 1984 and finished my
MA at Wake Forest in 1993. That put me square in the middle of the
tenures of a theatrical triumvirate that is largely responsible for the
success of theatre on the campus.
Professors Emeriti Donald Wolfe, Harold Tedford, and James
Dodding ran the show in those days. I spent countless hours in their
classes, in their rehearsals, and even at their homes. Through the
almost quarter-century (egad!) that I have known them, they have
had more influence on my life than I can accurately articulate. They
were more than professors or mentors, they were role models.
Today, they are close friends and cherished confidants. They had a
profound impact on a young man from North Carolina with literally no
clue what he wanted to do with his life. They changed me for the better.
And there are hundreds more alums spread across the globe who
can say the same thing.
I came to Wake Forest in 1980 as, perhaps, the most clueless freshman
in the history of higher education. Like so many other foolish
frosh before me, I was determined to be a lawyer after college. The “D”
in my first politics class somehow changed my mind.
But that semester I took Wolfe’s “Introduction to Theatre” class. I
also was cast in a play on the MainStage. The show was Once in a
Lifetime, a pastiche of 1930s Hollywood and a co-production of Wake
Forest University Theatre and the Little Theatre of Winston-Salem. The
show is regarded by those who remember it as a disaster. I had only a
small role, but Wolfe made a point to say a kind word about my few
moments onstage. That small gesture meant a lot and kept me interested
in what was going on at Scales Fine Arts Center.
During my sophomore year Wolfe cast me in his production of The
Elephant Man. Undoubtedly, at some point, Wolfe chortled, in his own
inimitable style to his partner-in-crime, “Harold, we got us another one.”
The “Harold” in question is retired director of the theatre, Harold
C. Tedford. Jo Melziner may have designed the Ring Theatre and the
MainStage, but Harold Tedford made them what they are today. I
16 WAKE FOREST MAGAZINE