Gordon MacRae as King Arthur and Patricia Raube ’82 as Guinevere in Camelot, October 1981. Photographs: Lee Pellegrini

The Robsham Theater Arts Center celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. Named for E. Paul Robsham Jr., who died in an automobile accident in 1983 following his freshman year, the 32,000-square-foot facility houses a 591-seat main theater, the 200-seat black-box Bonn Studio Theater, and a large lobby exhibition space. The first show opened October 30, 1981, a production of Camelot featuring musical film star Gordon MacRae (Carousel, Oklahoma) as King Arthur. Since then, the main stage has hosted some 120 plays. Stuart J. Hecht, associate professor of drama and director of 21 of those productions, joined the theater department in 1986. He calls Robsham a laboratory, “like Higgins Hall is to the chemistry department, a place for us to educate students and put them in situations where they can test out their knowledge.” In an interview with BCM, he recounted some memorable experiments:

1989 Mother Courage and Her Children

The play is set in the middle of the 17th century, during the Thirty Years’ War. In the second-to-last scene, Mother Courage, who is trying to feed off the war—she’s got this little wagon of wares, and she follows the army—has gone into a town, leaving her mute daughter Kattrin with the wagon. Soldiers prepare to invade and massacre the villagers, and Kattrin sees them. She gets a drum—I had her grab a pot and a spoon—and clangs away to warn the townspeople. The soldiers threaten her, and she bangs even louder, and the clamor builds and it builds until the soldiers produce a musket. Then the lieutenant yells “fire,” the musket goes BANG, she crumples, and the drumming stops. It’s a heartbreaking scene.

At our first performance, everything was going to plan. They brought the musket forward—we had found a reenactment piece—the lieutenant yelled “fire,” and the gun quietly went “click.” The actor playing the lieutenant improvised: “Well, we were just warning you. Now we really mean it.” Being a good actress, Kattrin kept pounding away, getting louder and louder, and the gun again went “click.” Cast members who were in the wings signaled to her, and all of a sudden she dropped the pot, grabbed her chest, and collapsed, as if suffering cardiac arrest from fright. It turned out we had kept the powder in a place that was moist, and the humidity prevented it from igniting.

1991 Brigadoon

There was a student in the program whose parents had a petting zoo on Cape Cod, so Doc [Professor J. Paul Marcou] got him to bring a goat to the theater. Now, where are you going to keep a goat in a theater? Shep [Barnett, associate director of the Robsham Theater] set up some barriers in the scene shop, almost a cage. The problem was, the goat had to stay there for three or four days, and it would “baa . . . baa . . . baa,” and you could hear it throughout the building. So students would be working on their sensitive, internal pieces in acting classes—“Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him . . .” and “baa!” When the show finally opened, with a real audience, the goat wouldn’t go onstage. They never got it on the stage.

1992 Midsummer Night’s Dream

In the very last scene—the wedding of Hippolyta and Theseus—the idea was that Theseus would make his entrance and the party guests would make a fuss—bravo, bravo. This would buy time for a costume change by Hippolyta, who would come onstage in a gorgeous gown. But instead of Hippolyta, out came Demetrius. Then Lysander appeared. The actors were trying to improvise, and one turned to the student playing Philistrate: “Well, Philistrate, verily, what do you think? Come here and join us.” And he said, “Uh, no.” After a while, Hippolyta emerged in her gown. It turned out our wonderful costume designer had designed beyond our resources and literally had to sew Hippolyta into her dress. The episode lasted maybe three minutes, but onstage 15 seconds is forever.

1997 Buried Child

This play takes place on a farm in downstate Illinois. We decided the previous year that we would produce it just before Thanksgiving. It’s a good time to do the show, except for one little thing—Shelly, a character in the play, has to shuck corn. Where can you get real corn in November? So in August we went out and bought three bushels of corn, which we stored in the home freezer of Laura Brainard, who worked in Student Affairs with my wife. When rehearsals started, Laura would bring two or three days’ worth of corn to my office. We didn’t have refrigeration, so I kept it on the floor. We did that for about 10 days. And I started to realize that you could smell the corn. First, it was in adjacent offices. Then it was further and further down the central hallway. And then came the bugs. The show worked beautifully, but my office smelled of corn for two and a half years. We did get rid of the bugs eventually.

Robsham’s 30th anniversary show, Into the Woods; Samantha Goober ’15 (center) was Cinderella.

1999 Into the Woods (Cinderella)

I often film productions, and one night as I was filming the Cinderella portion of Stephen Sondheim’s Into the Woods, I noticed that Cinderella still had both her shoes on after the ball. The actress realized it almost immediately—you saw a look cross her face. She was singing her song convincingly (“On the Steps of the Palace”), and she dropped herself down just a bit, so that her dress went to the ground. Somehow she retrieved the shoe, brought it up behind her back, and held it there—even switched hands at one point to gesture. That was a moment. If I hadn’t known better, I wouldn’t have seen it. The audience certainly didn’t.

1999 Into the Woods (the witch’s curse)

This is a crazy show, because there are maybe five or six different stories going on simultaneously. It’s like a traffic jam on stage, and you’re always trying to keep track of who’s where, when. There’s a point when the baker is arguing with Little Red Riding Hood, and the witch is supposed to jump onstage and yell at him and rush off. At the Friday night performance, the actress who was playing the witch, who had hit her mark every single time during eight weeks of rehearsal, decided to check her makeup, and she missed her cue. Because the tech people knew it was time for her to come on stage, they automatically turned her mike on, just as she turned to the person next to her at the makeup table and shrieked F#*K, S#*T, F#*K!

I happened to be in the audience behind Fr. Joseph Appleyard [the Jesuit vice president for University Mission and Ministry] and a colleague of his when this came over the speakers, and the two of them turned and looked at one another. After the show Fr. Appleyard came up to me, and he was very generous and kind with his comments, and I said, “I’m sorry that we had that little incident.” He said, “Oh, I just figured it was Sondheim.”

2006 Macbeth

I was directing Shakespeare’s “Scottish play”—the title of which you’re not supposed to mention in a theater unless you’re working on it—and there is a moment in Act Four in which Macbeth decides to murder the family of his rival, MacDuff. Shakespeare creates a horrendous scene—murderers sent by Macbeth rape MacDuff’s wife and kill his son, a sweet child. We found a young local boy named Noah to play the part of the son, and we staged an elaborate bit where the son runs from one murderer to the other, and he’s flipped over one attacker’s shoulder, and then he’s stabbed with a dagger and cries out to his mother. It’s very tragic. The only problem was we couldn’t get Noah to stop smiling. He was getting to be with these big BC guys, getting to scream and yell and run around. I said to him, “Noah, you have to stop smiling,” and he said, “But Dr. Hecht, I’m having so much fun.” And he kept on smiling. Just before the first show, I tried once more, explaining the value of pathos, and he got it. From that point on, he almost had tears running down his face.

Stuart J. Hecht teaches courses on directing, playwriting, dramatic literature, and theater history. He is editor-in-chief of the New England Theatre Journal. Hecht was interviewed for BCM by Bill McDonald, a senior editor in the Office of Marketing Communications.