SCU Presents: A Change of Scenery
Actors Katie Castillo, Ashwin Raman, Alexander Jordan and Tate Burks stand illuminated by the atmospheric lighting of the Mayer Theater. Photo provided by Audrey Thomson
Every couple of years, Santa Clara University welcomes renowned media and arts figures to act as creative consultants for students through the Frank Sinatra Artist-in-Residence program.
Mark Duplass, Emmy-award winning producer and director of the cult-classic film “Creep,”visited from 2022-2023 and worked closely with students, providing feedback on their film and screenwriting adaptations. Before that, Tony-award winning actor BD Wong danced with students in the Music and Dance Facility, performing songs from his stage musical adaptation of “Mr. Holland’s Opus.”
In 2023, longtime theatre and dance professor Brian Thorstenson became Santa Clara University’s first internal faculty member to be named as the Frank Sinatra Chair in the Performing Arts. The University announced that “the Sinatra Residency will support a current faculty member and their creative collaboration with a visiting artist (or artists) over a two-year period.”
Having worked closely with SCU students throughout his career, Thorstenson has placed them in the spotlight and the writer’s room for an upcoming devised theater project titled: “Overhead, A Skylark Called.”
This will be Thorstenson’s fourth mainstage production at Santa Clara University, each of which have been prepared through a quarter-long course. Only this time, there’s a twist: By bringing students together with the San Francisco dance ensemble “Detour” through the Sinatra program, Thorstenson has organized an immersive production that calls upon audiences to move around campus alongside the cast and crew. “We have three different starting locations,” said actress and writer Katy Wolff ’25. “There’s a group of actors starting at Vari, a group of actors starting at the de Saisset Museum, and a group of actors starting at Dowd. All the groups move to the Mayer Theater with the audience coming with them.” With three different starting locations comes three different stories, all of which culminate into a common ending.
Thorstenson’s faculty status allows him to involve students in his productions much more than residencies of the past, and bring this new production format to life. “Having a professor be the artist-in-residence has been really great for theatre students because we get to work on such a big, hands-on project with him. Because it’s the Sinatra project, it’s a huge production getting a lot of promotion and funding, so it’s very exciting for us,” Wolff said.
Such a fresh idea also calls for a major change up in rehearsal and pre-production efforts. The play was written almost entirely by the students themselves in a winter quarter course taught by Thorstenson. “The class was all about making different things,” explained Wolff. “I look at the pictures of our original sticky notes and idea maps from the first day of class, and some things have made it into the final production which is really cool.” Once in a more finalized state, co-directors of Detour, Eric Garcia and Kat Gorospe Cole, joined Thorstenson to direct the production throughout the spring quarter. This quarter has been a return to more traditional tactics, with students diligently working hard in three hour rehearsals four times a week.
“Overhead, A Skylark Called” will run from May 9-18, with 8:00 p.m. performances Thursday to Saturday, and 2:00 p.m. matinee performances on each Sunday. “I think everyone should come and see this,” said Wolff. “We like to think of this as a prayer. It’s this idea of having hope, finding home and belonging—especially in kind of weird, uncertain times like this, where maybe we feel like community is being threatened, or home sort of is in flux—this idea of finding people who are sharing your passions and connecting with them, and offering this up as a hope for how we can continue and how we can shape our world going forward, especially as artists.”