New Cabell Hall room 119 dramatically switches functions within two hours on Monday evenings. At 5 p.m., students discussing Rudyard Kipling and H.G. Wells fill the room. By 7 p.m., the desks have been shoved into the hallway and singing, musical instruments and dancing crowd the space. First Year Players, including the orchestra, actors and cluster of upperclassmen leaders, crunch into room 119 every Monday and Tuesday.
The small classroom, ill-suited for the FYP practice, is the result of an alleged lack of performance space for student groups on Grounds.
"No place we practice at all resembles the place we're going to be performing," First Year Players Co-Director Jeff Luppino-Esposito said. As a result, the directors do not even know if the actors will all fit on stage once they get to the performance area.
It is not only practice spaces that create woes for these performance groups, however. Currently, the Student Activities Building and the Chemistry Building auditorium function as the main performance venues for student groups. Yet, neither of these areas was created for performances. The SAB has a warehouse feel with its exposed pipes and cement floors, and the Chemistry auditorium lacks stage room and has other blockades.
"I don't think the SAB was ever meant for student theater," said third-year College student Ashley Kinney, Spectrum Theatre's artistic director and director of this semester's "She Loves Me."\nLuppino-Esposito considers the SAB's seating to be worst aspect of the space because it is all on one plane.
"75 percent of the audience members can't see what's happening," Luppino-Esposito said. He pointed to FYP's interpretation of "Sweeney Todd" last year, a play in which the most important part of the story occurs on the ground, yet no one past the third row could see the action.
Though the Chemistry auditorium - the other main venue for student theater performance - has raised seating, the auditorium features an unmovable desk in the middle of the "stage" and has no lighting facilities, Luppino-Esposito said. Moreover, it is very hard to fit a pit band for musicals in the auditorium and there is no room to create a setting for the show, Kinney said.
A short time frame for preparation adds to the difficulties groups face. Usually, groups have two weeks or less to create all they need to put on the performance. The players install everything from the stage to the lighting, as the SAB comes with neither. And while Luppino-Esposito noted that "there's something magical about ... building it from the ground up," the facility itself is not very conducive to performances.
Kinney explained that matinee performances - often more highly attended than other times - in particular find problems with the space. Because of fire code restrictions, windows cannot be blacked out, and thus the afternoon light brightens the entire building, making audiences uncomfortable. It also prevents the group from suspending disbelief - a phenomenon that is critical in theater performance, Kinney noted.
Fire code restrictions also threaten the play's ability to even take place. Luppino-Esposito noted that the performance of "Damn Yankees" incurred fire code violations because the set designers put pictures on the walls, and because the stairs up to the stage lacked a handrail. The fire department threatened to shut the performance down if the violations were not corrected immediately.
Scheduling a performance is also extremely difficult in the SAB. Reservations must be made a semester in advance and when Spectrum tried to schedule time for "She Loves Me," no space was available, Kinney said. She added that SAB scheduling also prevented Spectrum from having Saturday night performances - usually the best attended - twice within the past year, once because The Source double-booked the arena.
The University's drama department has beautiful facilities, found in both the Culbreth and Helms Theatres, yet these facilities are usually not open to student groups because the department needs the space for both practice and performance.
University Drama Department Chair Tom Bloom considers the lack of space to be an "issue," and noted that "there never seems to be enough [space]" for everyone who needs it.
Most high schools, middle schools and even elementary schools have at least a small auditorium with a raised stage.
"It's pretty sad for a top public [university] to not have" spaces available for student groups, Luppino-Esposito said.
"There are 40 fields where you can play frisbee, but nowhere to act," Luppino-Esposito continued, adding that he feels a student theater space would "draw in intelligent, artistic students" to the University.
This shift in the University's culture is already occurring, Luppino-Esposito added, and a better theater space would allow students a greater opportunity to fulfill their theatrical aspirations.\n"The face of the University is changing," he said. "The typical U.Va. student is changing their interests."
As a result, Luppino-Esposito recently started a thread on Student Council's new Speak Up U.Va. Web site. His idea to create a better student theater space has the second most votes on the site now.
Student Arts Committee Co-Chair Jenny Smith stated in an e-mail that Student Council is looking for ways to solve this problem, yet "the process to implement such an idea is complex and involves people at all levels of the University." Ideally, Council wants to eventually add a 500-seat auditorium, Co-Chair Charles Dyer said.
As of now, the Committee has begun speaking to University administrators and is trying to find a short-term solution to the problem, because constructing a brand new building would take years. The upcoming renovation of Newcomb Hall may be a possible solution, but there are currently no plans to add a new student theater space during the construction.
Although Luppino-Esposito and Kinney have high hopes for Council's work, they do not believe anything can be done at the moment. For now, theater groups will do their best with the spaces that the University gives them. But, as Luppino-Esposito said, "Really, anything would be better"
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