John Schmor

Last Friday, I donned a hard hat and, accompanied by UO Theater Department Chair John Schmor, re-toured the building(s) (first blogged here) that will be the new UO theater space, aka the Miller Theater Complex.

Things I learned:

• There's a naming contest underway for the now-called "New Black Box Theater." The contest, open to theater students, comes with a $500 scholarship and a temporary name. Me: "Yeah, aren't you still looking for a donor?" Schmor, more diplomatically: "We want to hold the naming opportunity open for a future donor."

• Before the new steps to the new Robinson lobby got poured, theater faculty and students held a blessing ceremony and buried things (including wine and dog tags) in what Schmor described as something "Elizabethan theaters would do."

• The new laundry and dye room, off the costume shop and with excellent ventilation, almost wasn't built — it was unused space until someone noticed it. This weirdly reminded me of hiding spaces for Jews in Nazi-dominated Europe. (Who was measuring the crawl space, you know? Um, perhaps too many readings of Corrie ten Boom's Holocaust memoir The Hiding Place as an 11- and 12-year-old?)

• Something this big takes competitive giving. That is to say, though there was a grant from the ASUO and an alumni fundraising campaign, things kicked into high gear when, how to say this, one wealthy donor started giving, and her friends then felt obliged to give as well. Or maybe not obliged ... I imagine Schmor might say felt the opportunity to give. Another large donor jumped in to save the project at a crucial point.

• There's a guy in the Bay Area named Smokey whose job is restoring old theater seats. And he's doing all of the seats for the old Robinson Theatre.

• Schmor and Joseph Gilg want to know just exactly when the (horrific) Arena Theatre space came into being. Was it during a post-war renovation of Villard? It's a mystery. (And Arena will soon be turned back into classroom/practice space. With [I think Schmor used this word] happy colors on the wall instead of the black box, um, black.)

Photos follow the jump.

This review comes out on Thursday in print.

Photo of Hamlet (Patrick O'Driscoll) and Claudius (Kato Bass) by Gretchen Drew

A Gutsy Hamlet
Or Not to Be turns the horror inside out
by Suzi Steffen

God, that Will Shakespeare was hilarious, wasn’t he? Especially around death. The final scene of Hamlet? Side-splitting!

Bad puns aside ... actually, bad puns not aside: John Schmor’s adaptation Or Not to Be, a collaboration between the UO theater department and the Lord Leebrick Theatre, distills both Hamlet’s humor and the play’s strong stench of the graveyard into a first-generation hybrid that needs tweaking but provides some spectacular moments.

Read more here.