Word: bailey
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...controversy: Victoria B. Bailey, last year's president of the Dramat and a four-year member of its executive board, recalls a bleaker era. During her freshman year, the Dramat had one slot in the Ex and two performances on the main stage. For main stage performances, the Dramat was allotted one week's rehearsal time. "We would go in on Friday to a bare stage and start one week later," Bailey says. The other weeks of the fall and spring season went to the drama school. For weeks at a time, she remembers, "we couldn't see any sign...
Negotiating the calender for stage time at the University theater each April was always a nightmare, Bailey says. Representatives of the Dramat waged a yearly struggle with graduate school administrators in an effort to extend stage slots. "Some years Brustein just handed down a calendar without ever asking us for our approval. One year they assigned us our spring vacation as performance time. Another time it was Thanksgiving weekend. And they always considered our reading and exam periods prime weeks for us to perform...
Clashes between the drama school and the Dramat have eased, or at least mellowed, in the last two years. Bailey remembers her freshman year--when both the Dramat and the graduate school always kept their separate corners of the University Theater building locked. By her senior year, the locks were gone. "It was just one hassle after another, she says. "Every disagreement escalated into a violent issue. Who left the trash can in the lobby was grounds for a major battle...
Both deButts and Bailey attribute the improvements in part to the unflagging campaign of the Dramat and in part to the cooperation of the associate dean--Jonathan Miller this year and his predecessor, Howard Stein--as well as Dramat supporters within the graduate school. "There were a lot of people in the drama school who worked hard for us," Bailey says. "Brustein was not one of them...
...Bailey agrees that Brustein is a man with a vision. But that vision often blinds Brustein to--or offers him an excuse to ignore--the little realities of the day-to-day theater world. Those realities include more democratic scheduling, realistic rehearsal and stage time and, beyond that, simple fair play with the bare minimum of backroom politics...