Department History

Theatre at UAB began in the 1970-71 school year with no budget and no permanent home.  From that humble beginning the UAB Department of Theatre has grown into a nationally-recognized program, producing more than 200 main-season shows and graduating students who have gone on to work professionally in every aspect of theatrical production.

If any one person can be called the Founder of our program, that would have to be Ward Haarbauer -- so for the Department's 40th Anniversary we asked him to share his recollections of the Department's earliest years...

no-exit1970_01
NO EXIT in 1970 -- performed off-campus with UAB students

FORTY YEARS OF THEATRE!

MEMORIES OF THE FIRST DECADE

by D. Ward Haarbauer, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus of Theatre

Forty years! What a long time and what a short time! And so many people who, during that time, have taken Theatre at UAB from its tiny but honorable beginnings to the remarkable program it is today.

The 1970 beginning was on the stage at what was then Clark Memorial Theater, home of Town and Gown. Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, performed arena style with a cast of four, started it all, inviting people to “Go to Hell on Hallowe’en”. For three successive nights enough people took the chance and filled the house.

The next three productions appeared in three different locations— Lysistrata played in the Ballet House (now Honors House), The Brick and the Rose and Krapp’s Last Tape in the Engineering Building Auditorium (now gone), and The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus in Bell Auditorium (now partially renovated after a long period of deterioration). Despite the constant changes of venue, student and community audiences found the shows somehow.

LYSISTRATA - our first production on campus
LYSISTRATA in 1971 -- first production on campus
By this time two important things had happened. The Student Entertainment Committee had become sufficiently impressed that they allocated the first UAB production funding--$500. For many years the only guaranteed funding came from that committee, and Theatre was grateful. Without those students’ commitment, the first few of the forty years would have been even more difficult. But the university had also realized the need for a permanent facility and turned over Bell Auditorium, christened Bell Theatre, to the new Department of Performing Arts.

With the space came six lighting instruments, no dimmers, historic graffiti on the seats including the ones without backs, no platforms in the orchestra pit, and no dressing rooms. This last was remedied by an uneasy and long-lasting agreement with the basketball teams to share what space there was. The presence of basketball finally justified a dressing room renovation, which helped Theatre immensely but didn’t entirely do away with the unease.

The presence of basketball also brought regular performances by the Pep Band at the games in the very adjacent gym across the hall from the theatre. There were never complaints that theatre productions were influencing the scores of the games, but generations of students and faculty felt like they were being cheered on as they tried to recreate Chekhov’s Russia and outscored during Lorca’s Yerma. Theatre people grumbled that they had played basketball last night and lost.

Bell Theatre is surely one of the few theatres in the country that lost its street. Seventh Avenue South was closed in front of Bell to make way for a green area and an enlarged parking lot. This put our hard-won marquee sign so far from an active street that its value deteriorated, but the extra parking was welcome, even that long ago.

We met a city Fire Marshal who insisted that we run conduit to every lighting instrument, scoffing at the idea that we needed to move them to different locations for every production. We were very relieved that the UAB fire marshal laughed as loudly as we did.

Winnie-the-Pooh
We learned you can't please everyone.
Winnie-the-Pooh set a record that I believe still holds. It was the only show ever to have an audience member ask for his money back. The occasion was a disillusioned father who was unhappy because his son didn’t get to see somebody in a bear suit. He got his money, of course, and left with his small boy who probably grew up without much challenge to his imagination.

Once a student rushed into the department office across the hall and breathlessly demanded, “Where’s the second floor?” The secretary replied without a pause, “Upstairs.” The boy rushed out, and presumably up.

In White America used one of the first fully racially integrated theatre casts in Birmingham. Frankly, there was very little notice paid.

We did, though, get considerable notice from two later posters. One had photographs of nude ladies dancing, and the other a comic drawing of a bespectacled and umbrellaed, well, academic reaching for a bare portion of a pulchritudinous lady’s frontal anatomy. When the university heard the complaints, the Vice President was concerned—until he found that the photograph was by Edweard Muybridge, one of the great early photographers, who used a camera to create motion studies of human and animal bodies, and that the drawing was done not by our poster designer but by Pablo Picasso. He dismissed the complaints, smiling.

After our production of an experimental Dracula script, the boy who played Count Dracula and the girl who played Lucy graduated, got married, and moved to Salt Lake City where he would earn an MFA in Theatre at the University of Utah. We said to ourselves that you’d best be thoughtful about whom you allow to bite you.

A practicing dentist planning to retire came back for a Theatre degree. He had earned his dentistry degree during WW II in a program that bypassed undergraduate degrees in order to get trained dentists into the military as quickly as possible. Now he wanted that undergraduate degree. He was a senior adult, but he fulfilled every requirement not only willingly but happily, including Stage Combat. When he graduated, he closed his practice and worked professionally in Birmingham theatre for years as a designer and scenic artist, until his death. For me this is one of the happiest stories in the history of theatre at UAB.

In 1981 the department chair—that would be me--made a run for it two blocks south to become Associate Dean of the School of Arts and Humanities, and the first decade of theatre on the UAB campus concluded.

Dr. Ward Haarbauer as Prospero in our 2007 production of THE TEMPEST
Dr. Haarbauer as Prospero in our 2007 production of THE TEMPEST
Other chairs, other faculty, and other students took over the next 30 years. During that first decade, the numbers of students were not large, but when they left they went in fascinating directions. They included many professional actors and directors and designers, a lawyer and a judge, that retired dentist, a girl who toured professionally for years to dinner theatres all over America and then retired to run a county arts council in North Carolina, staff for several arts councils in Alabama, the current Chair of the Arts and Culture Commission in Reno NV, the executive director of an opera company in Colorado, and faculty in elementary, secondary, and higher education inside and outside of our state. They also included several senior adults who earned their degrees simply because they wanted to learn and then went home to become regular theatre supporters and occasional participants because of what they learned and no doubt tellers to grandchildren of stories of what happened while they were learning it. I have been proud of every one of them.