BY SEAN MARKEY
The Norwich Record | Winter 2018
A place for focused effort, experimentation, exploration, and discovery. If anything in the Humanities fits the definition of a lab, it’s theater. “It’s a laboratory art,” says Assistant Professor of Theater Jeffry Casey. “You can take risks and try new things.” In November, Casey directed actors in the Norwich student theater troupe the Pegasus Players in a production of two short Harold Pinter plays, Party Time and New World Order. The works explore authoritarianism and torture while grappling with the theme of power. Casey, who joined the Norwich faculty in July, says producing theater at a university like Norwich is an opportunity to expose future military and civilian leaders to ideas through art. “Nothing is more important than [how] they think about power and what it means [to] have power and what it means to be complicit in injustice or justice.”
Casey, who also teaches classes on public speaking, writing, and literature, says he wants to push theater at Norwich into other arenas. He has already visited ESL classes and says theater students could support other campus programs in countless ways. “We live in a world of non-scarcity in some ways with so many products, particularly culture,” he says. “But theater is a scarce resource, and that makes it more valuable.”
