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Written by Susan Griffith for Case Campus News
Eldred
Hall is best known for theater, but its original
intent upon opening was as a spiritual center of student life at the
old Adelbert College.
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Entrance to Eldred Hall |
Rev. Henry B. Eldred donated $15,000 in 1897 to have a YMCA built.
It became the student center with a snack bar, barber shop, and a meeting
room on the second floor for student clubs and classes. Eldred Hall
also is one of the few remaining buildings of Adelbert College.
It took only a year for theater to come to Eldred. In 1898, the Sock
and Buskin Club, a company of student actors, began to stage student-written
revues, popular and "quick hit" comedies, and Shakespearean plays. Flora Stone
Mather College at the time also had a new group of young female actors taking
to the stage as the Curtain Players.
By the 1920s, a community group of actors called the Eldred Players
joined the drama clubs in providing theater for Cleveland.
Theater
remained an extracurricular activity until 1931, when Barclay Leathem,
an English professor with his law degree from Western Reserve University,
founded the Department of Drama & Theater. The department originally
offered theater courses at the graduate level and established the University
Players. It would take several more years before theater would be offered
to undergraduates.
Over the intervening years until his retirement in 1971, Leathem shaped
the course for theater's future at Case. He also became a leader in
the field of theater education. Among his contributions was to establish
one of the first college courses on television.
"He was one of the giants of theater education in America," said Charles
Lawrence, former technical director in the Department of Theater who
researched Eldred's past through the University Archives.
Lawrence said Leathem brought avant-garde theater to Case with his
first production of August Strindberg's Spook Sonata in 1939, after
a new stage was added to Eldred with a $35,000 gift from the Rockefeller
Foundation in 1938.
Leathem established working relationships with local theaters, including The
Cleveland Play House and Karamu House. He also was an advisor to Cleveland's
first television station, WEWS, in 1948.
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The north side
of Eldred Hall |
A 1936 Flora Stone Mather graduate, Nadine Miles, left Cleveland and
went on to star on Broadway. She returned to Cleveland to join Leathem
in the department and became one of Cleveland's and Case's main artistic
forces in theater, directing such productions as Sartre's The Fly and
T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral. She retired in 1972.
Leathem
brought dance to Case through Kathryn Karipides,
who at the time had a national dance company. Leathem also established
a summer theater group called the Barn Players, which
performed at Squire Valleevue Farm. Farm performances ended with the
rationing of gasoline during World War II. The tradition of strong
theater programs established by Leathem continued under the leadership
of John Orlock, who with Peter Hackett from The Cleveland Play House
designed a new professional actor training program in 1995.
Graduate students are recruited through national auditions for the
three-year Master of Fine Arts program in theater. They receive three
years of stage experience at both Case and The Cleveland Play House.
They also receive financial support through stipends through the College
of Arts and Sciences. |
