“Julia Rugg has joined WINGS for Kids Inc. as chief program officer. She is a former attorney. She has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Maryland Baltimore County and a law degree from the University of Maryland School of Law.”
“The Associated Black Charities annual gala, “African-Americans in Corporate Leadership,” recognized Catonsville resident Anita Jackson, economic development director for Baltimore Gas & Electric, during the June 11 event at Martin’s West.”
From the Daily Record:
“St. Joseph Medical Center Foundation has appointed two new directors: Ronni Monaghan is the director of development. She has more than a decade of service in Maryland nonprofits, including as director of the Maryland Association of Community Colleges and as a director of institutional research at Johns Hopkins University. Monaghan has a law degree from the University of Baltimore and a master’s degree in policy sciences from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.”
The path to preserving Maryland’s traditional arts and culture sometimes begins when a jazz musician walks through an unlocked door in UMBC’s Fine Arts building.
One of Baltimore’s master jazz musicians, Lafayette Gilchrist ’92, Africana studies, was taking a summer class before his freshman year when he discovered that the building’s piano rooms were left open in the evening. One night, he finally gave in to temptation.
“The very first piano I played was this nine foot Steinway grand piano,” recalls Gilchrist, who had taken no formal lessons before coming to UMBC. “People think I’m lying when I tell them this, but the piano was in a concert hall, all the lights were off and there was a spotlight on it,” he said. “I fell in love. The music moved directly from my body to the instrument and into the air.”
Gilchrist audited composition classes during his time at UMBC and he was even hired to play at campus events. His musical passion and skill also eventually led him to Maryland Traditions – a statewide program that supports efforts to find, share, preserve and sustain traditional arts and culture.
Over the past academic year, Maryland Traditions has forged an exploratory partnership with UMBC that has not only brought Gilchrist back to campus for a March 30 event centered on introducing the program’s artists to the UMBC community, but created classes and events throughout the year.
The university installed Elaine Eff, the program’s co-director, as a folklorist-in-residence in the American studies department. In that role, Eff has connected UMBC students with internship opportunities, created a film series for campus and co-taught a humanities scholars class on Maryland’s traditions with Nicole King, an assistant professor of American studies.
“Elaine is such a force,” observes King. “She’s bringing the energy of the public programming realm here to the university.”
One of Maryland Traditions’ cornerstones is a Master-Apprentice program in which Gilchrist has been working. He first served as an apprentice to jazz saxophonist Carl Grubbs, and now Gilchrist is a mentor himself – advising pianist Ethan Simon (son of The Wire’s creator David Simon.)
Making strong connections is a key to the collaboration’s success. King says that Eff’s connections are invaluable to an American studies department, which has aspirations (especially with the recent establishment of its Orser Center for the Study of Place, Community & Culture at UMBC) to become a center for Baltimore area community studies.
“If we have these relationships with outside organizations and people,” King adds, “we don’t have to re-invent the wheel every time we go to work with the community.”
Eff says that the benefits of UMBC’s own pre-existing networks can’t be overstated. The university’s reach has allowed her to recruit interns for Maryland Traditions, inspire students to turn an analytic eye honed in campus classrooms to their own communities, and tap into the cultural knowledge of UMBC’s ethnic student organizations.
Who knows? Eff may find the next Lafayette Gilchrist practicing in the Fine Arts building after hours. “Every accomplishment we have here has tremendous value in building towards the future,” she concludes.
— Chelsea Haddaway
Aspiring actors and videographers often yearn to be discovered. But three recent UMBC students and alumni aren’t waiting around for a big break. They’ve made their own success by collaborating on a comedy web series called Monday Wednesday Friday (www.facebookwastaken.com).
The skits are performed by former UMBC student Darrell Britt-Gibson (who also appeared as “O-Dogg” in HBO’s The Wire) and Joe King ’09, mechanical engineering, and produced by Tal Levitas ’08, political science and media and communications studies. Each episode is a freestanding story, but there are running themes to the sketches, with Britt-Gibson and King appearing as pilots, sportscasters, CIA agents and even wild animals.
“For the animal shoots, we had to be in make-up for twelve hours,” quips King.
The team for Monday Wednesday Friday is based largely in Los Angeles, the better to be close to the entertainment industry. The series started in January and recently wrapped up its third season of videos, but they are already drawing in other UMBC alumni to the process – including Adam Kurtz ’09, visual arts, who designed the show’s Tumblr website.
The Monday Wednesday Friday trio is also garnering kudos from even better-known UMBC alumni such as Ace of Cakes star Duff Goldman ’97, history, who gave the show a shout out in a recent appearance at Auburn University.
Levitas says that the Monday Wednesday Friday team wants “to create sharp, funny comedy that is written, acted and produced well. We don’t want to present slow, long performances and we’re really serious about tackling this in a new modern medium.”
— Monica Berron ’12
The tough-minded attitude that pitcher Jay Witasick ’93, learned on the way to the major leagues served him well during a 12-year career there – and informs his work these days with TWC Sports Management in Timonium.
“I was mentally tough,” says Witasick. “No matter what happened in the game, I was ready the next day. When the game was over, the game was over. Even today in business, I never let any one game or one out define a whole career.”
As a transfer to UMBC as a rising sophomore, Witasick posted a 7-5 record for the Retrievers over two years. He was 4-1 with four complete games in 1993 and finished second in the nation with 12.3 strikeouts per game. He signed a professional contract with the St. Louis Cardinals, who picked him in the second round of the 1993 draft.
Witasick finally broke into the major leagues with the Oakland A’s in 1996 and pitched for seven teams over 12 years. A starter early in his pro career, he then shifted to the bullpen – from which he made 349 of his 405 appearances and retired with a 32-41 record and a 4.64 ERA.
Today, Witasick guides a new generation of players – both at TWC and as an assistant baseball coach at Harford Community College. Players under his tutelage benefit from the experiences of his battling baseball career, but his own memories center on the joys of that life in Major League Baseball.
“I enjoyed every day I played in the big leagues,” says Witasick, who played in two World Series. “I felt like a kid for 15 years straight. It’s fun. That’s the way it should be.”
— Jeff Seidel ’85
Sometimes a small act of kindness can lead to big results.
One year into her undergraduate education, Kara Freeman ’91, engineering and information technology, was doing well at UMBC. Unbeknownst to her, however, her parents were fretting how to pay for the next semester. A grade school principal of Freeman’s contacted then-vice provost Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, to ask for help.
UMBC’s future president did not know Freeman or her family personally back in 1987, but found time to speak with her mother and offer useful financial assistance tips. The family secured the necessary aid for Freeman not only to finish but to excel as a scholar. Freeman has not forgotten Hrabowski’s intervention in her success – and it has had a big impact on her life. Freeman is now the vice president of administration and chief information officer for the American Council on Education (ACE). And part of her duties at the council are to help universities such as UMBC best use technologies to help their students.
A Washington, D.C. native, Freeman was the daughter of a firefighter father and a mother who worked as an equal opportunity specialist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. She and her four siblings inherited their father’s strong work ethic and their mother’s never-say-die attitude and appreciation for helping others.
Both parents also emphasized the value of education. “They let us know how important school was and that we should stay on top of it,” she says.
Freeman started as a computer science major, but quickly migrated to information systems management, where she could focus on applying her people skills and avoid the long hours of solitude that programming often requires.
She also attributes much of her success to UMBC’s cooperative education program, which helped her land internships with IBM and General Electric: “When I graduated, I had work experience. That put me way ahead of anyone else.”
Her first job after graduation was as a systems analyst with AT&T, thanks to her tireless efforts in petitioning the company’s recruiters at job fairs. She followed this with stints working for WorldCom and MCI and, later, a consultant job for defense contractor Lockheed Martin.
In climbing the corporate ladder, however, Freeman has made a point of reaching back and helping others on the same climb. It’s a trait she picked up at UMBC, when she herself was seeking a mentor. As Freeman tells it, she and a friend never made it to a campus classroom where they were to be assigned a mentor, and instead wandered into a room filled with aspiring young mentors.
To this day, she remains in contact with her own protégée from that program, a then-nine-year-old inner-city student (who is now 30 and successful in the business world herself). And Freeman continues to participate in a variety of mentoring and education programs, including UMBC’s Center for Women and Information Technology (CWIT).
“I just have a strong need to make sure that others can learn from what I have learned,” Freeman says.
Freeman wasn’t looking for a new job when her sister pointed her to an information technology (IT) management position that had opened up at the American Council on Education. But she looked into the prospective job that offered, she observes, “a weird connection between what I love to do and what I do for a living.”
The council’s mission is to establish a national and international agenda for postsecondary education and training, and technology now plays an ever-increasing role in this effort. While part of Freeman’s job involves managing and making strategic decisions about the council’s technology, she sits on a board that advises ACE president Molly Corbett Broad on larger issues.
“When decisions are being made about any particular area, the technology needs to part of that discussion,” says Freeman. “In many cases, the [IT] folks are not at the table. Here, I can influence the decisions.”
Another part of her job involves understanding how colleges and universities use technology to help better prepare their students. Computers are becoming a core part of business and academia, yet higher education institutions can vary wildly in how they make full use of new technology. Her insights help ACE assist its members in the best use of these technologies.
Earlier this year, at ACE’s annual meeting, Freeman presented a panel about how universities can use technology. “For me, it is exciting,” she says. “Sometimes you think of IT as keeping the email on. But in this day and age, it is really much more strategic.”
— Joab Jackson ’90
How does a student 1,500 miles from home cope when disaster strikes? How does he offer help and hope across an ocean?
Huguens Jean ’12, Ph.D., electrical engineering, flew to Haiti in March 2010 to find Port-au-Prince still reeling from a devastating earthquake. The streets surrounding his childhood home felt foreign and distorted – unusually silent, filled with unfamiliar smells and crumbling buildings.
The earthquake struck in January, during the final days of his grandfather Andre Torchon’s battle with cancer. Travel to Port-au-Prince for the funeral became impossible. Two months later Jean was able to fly to Haiti with his brother, Clifford Muse ’11, information systems. Unable to fulfill their grandfather’s last request that they dress in white at his funeral to celebrate life’s joys, the brothers resolved to honor his memory in another way. They would capture on film the joys of life in Haiti, joys that endured even at a moment of profound national suffering.
The documentary Lift Up, co-directed by Jean and Phillip Knowlton ’03, visual arts, records their journey. It follows Jean and Muse as they build a kite in their grandfather’s honor, just like the kites they had flown with him as children in Haiti. A deeper look reveals Knowlton and Jean’s own journey as filmmakers, each traveling through uncharted territory to share stories of resilience in the face of profound loss with eloquence and compassion.
Jean and Knowlton met as undergraduates at UMBC when they co-captained the track and field team. They came from different worlds—the engineer from Port-au-Prince and the artist from Silver Spring, MD—but they stayed connected through their love of film, even as Jean moved on to graduate school at UMBC and Knowlton to edit music videos in New York. When the earthquake struck, their connection led to collaboration.
“We wanted to help the folks of Haiti in a way that was more meaningful than just texting money,” says Jean. “As a Haitian, it was very difficult for me to watch the devastation from a distance.” When the opportunity arose, they bridged that distance, flying to Haiti to film the post-quake recovery experience, checking their preconceptions at the gate.
The Port-au-Prince that Jean and Muse found was markedly different from the one they had left. The sense of disconnection was jarring in a different way for Knowlton, who had never before been to Haiti. Like Jean, he looked to Haitians for guidance to understand and document their experiences of survival, mourning, endurance and revival.
Jean recalls Knowlton speaking with the local residents, telling them how their strength of spirit amazed him. “To watch them sing, dance and continue with life in the midst of the devastation touched him profoundly,” says Jean, who was moved to tears as he filmed the conversations. “My friend from Maryland was in Haiti, in the middle of the rubble, helping us capture on film this very personal journey, and he did it just because he believed in our vision. I was grateful and humbled by his presence, and I cherished every bit of his collaboration and friendship.”
The result is a film that speaks to the universal importance of community in times of hardship. Lift Up contests negative representations of Haiti that the filmmakers argue have too often dominated media narratives. It also seeks to keep Haiti’s post-quake recovery in the public eye and promote longer-term humanitarian assistance there as news coverage wanes.
Lift Up reflects the vision and passion of the filmmakers as much as the experiences of its subjects. In film, Knowlton sa
On May 23, UMBC’s alumni community grew by more than 2000 members at the university’s 41st annual spring commencement ceremonies. UMBC Magazine would like to introduce you to four graduates who have joined the select ranks of Retriever alumni – Phillip Fitzgerald, Donna Viola, Michael Young, and Brian Mathew Courson – and encourage you to check out more at our Class of 2011 website.
Read the full story in the Summer 2011 issue of UMBC Magazine.
UMBC’s Department of Theatre takes center stage at The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts – and extends the university’s impressive legacy in college theatre’s biggest annual festival.
By Richard Byrne ’86
Washington, D.C. – It’s 7 a.m. and a pickup truck pulls up outside the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts as the purples and pinks of a May dawn fade into morning daylight. Inside the truck is the entire set for the UMBC Department of Theatre’s production of Lynn Nottage’s play Las Meninas.
It’s going to be a big day for the students, faculty and staff gathered at this early hour to prepare for UMBC’s appearance at the American College Theatre Festival (ACTF). But before the cast performs before a sold-out Terrace Theatre 13 hours from now, there’s a truck that needs to be unloaded. And a set to build. And a show to rehearse. And all of it accomplished on an unfamiliar stage.
The first hurdle has already appeared. A broken freight elevator means that the pieces of associate professor of theatre Elena Zlotescu’s dynamic set must be taken up bit by bit through the Kennedy Center’s standard elevators.
Greggory Schraven ’97, the department’s technical director, is already rallying his bleary-eyed troops from the back of the pickup truck. “God gave you muscles as well as good looks,” Schraven says to one student without a piece of the set in hand.
Director Eve Muson clucks like a mother hen over cast members feeling the crush of pollen on this warm spring day. Other students hope for a glimpse of Broadway legend Bernadette Peters, who is rehearsing for a production of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies elsewhere in the building.
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UMBC’s performance of Las Meninas at the Kennedy Center tonight is the capstone to another tremendous achievement in the theatre department’s rich history. The American College Theatre Festival is American college theatre’s biggest event, and UMBC’s selection as one of four universities to perform full-length plays here at the festival finale is the equivalent of reaching the Final Four in men’s and women’s college basketball.
“Participating in the ACTF affords us the opportunity to celebrate the unique contributions that university and college programs make to American theatre,” says Alan Kreizenbeck, a professor of theatre who also serves as the department chair. “UMBC’s long-term success in the festival demonstrates that we take this opportunity seriously and that our colleagues and audiences respond enthusiastically.”
UMBC’s path to the Kennedy Center wasn’t easy, but it was straightforward. Las Meninas advanced through an initial round of judging on campus in November 2010, and then triumphed in a second regional round of adjudication held at Towson University in January.
The investment of time, energy and money required for success in the ACTF is immense – so the university only enters every four years or so. And this year’s success with Las Meninas is only the latest chapter in UMBC’s long legacy of appearances at the ACTF.
Only Boston University has appeared more times at the Kennedy Center as part of the festival than UMBC, and Las Meninas joins a string of winning productions that started in 1975 with You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown and continued in 1979 with Five by Beckett. The theater department went two years in a row in the 1980s – with a 1987 production of The Importance of Being Oscar and again in 1988 with Springs Awakening. The last two visits to the Kennedy Center were in 1996 (The Diary of a Scoundrel) and in 2004 (Buried).
“There’s clearly a commitment at UMBC Theatre to never rest on laurels, or to simply warm-over an old idea,” says ACTF artistic director Gregg Henry. “The program always seems to be investigating, probing, and challenging the cross-disciplinary boundaries of the performing arts, consistently collaborating to make unforgettable and vital theatre events.”
The foundation of UMBC’s winning production was the play itself. Las Meninas is an early work by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage, who used a mysterious 17th century rumor of an affair between French Queen Marie-Therese of Austria and an African dwarf named Nabo as the springboard for a tragicomic meditation on race, sexual desire, politics and the clash of cultures. Las Meninas begins as a broad but brainy physical comedy and ends having explored dark corners of the human soul.
Muson recalls being attracted by the play’s provocative intelligence when she first read Las Meninas in 2001 in American Theatre magazine, and says it was near the top of her list when the department decided to compete in the 2010-2011 ACTF cycle.
“But it wasn’t just the director’s passion for it,” says Muson. “The faculty was immediately taken with it, too. The play speaks to the department’s aspirations. We can bring a lot of design creativity to it. In the world of UMBC theatre, we do unusual plays in unusual ways – or plays that you know in unusual ways. So Las Meninas is in line with our aesthetic.”
The students in the cast and crew shared that view. Rising senior Katherine Hileman, who played Queen Marie-Therese, says that “in reading the play last summer, I never looked at it as a period piece. It’s so contemporary and so true to today…. [Muson] couldn’t have picked a better script.”
Las Meninas had another plus in its favor. The play’s diversity of gender and race allowed a broad range of roles for student actors at a university as diverse as UMBC.
“You’re always looking for something with a mixed race cast,” says Muson. “When you find that play, you get really excited. You say: ‘I have the kids to do this.’”
The cast of Las Meninas was not only diverse, but also talented enough to pull off a difficult and idiosyncratic play. Among the leads, rising senior Sean McComas had the sensitivity and steel to play Louis XIV as a boy king. Katherine Kopajtic ’11 doubled up in roles as a Mother Superior and Queen Mother of France – two women perched on precisely opposite poles of sexual permissiveness.
Hileman was selected to tackle the broad tonal shifts from comedy to tragedy in Nottage’s depiction of Queen Marie-Therese – a spoiled naïve monarch who falls in love with a tiny African jester and bears his child. But the greatest challenge was assigned to Keilyn Durrel Jones ’11 who had to answer the question: How does a 6’1” actor play a dwarf?
Mostly in a swaggering crouch, it turns out. “It was very taxing,” Jones says with a gentle laugh. “I was icing my knees often, and there was always the smell of Ben Gay and ibuprofen.”
Muson concurs. “It was hard,” she says. “The body had to be believable enough. But what I find with theatre audiences is that if you say, ‘This is how we’re going to do a dwarf,’ the audience will be happy to go with you as long as you don’t violate it.”
Terrace Theatre – 11 a.m.
It’s late morning, and all is quiet backstage. The costumes are hung carefully in silent dressing rooms.
But the stage buzzes with activity and high-spirited banter. Department associate staff member Terry Cobb has got the lights arranged, and now everyone else (actors included) lay down the gaudy floor of the set and wipe down the Mylar panels that evoke the multitude of mirrors at the palace of Versailles. Greggory Schraven’s voice punctuates each accomplishment with a persistent and enthusiastic cry of “Rock’n’roll!”
Indeed, spirits are a little too high and unfocused for Eve Muson, who comes back into the theatre as the set nears completion and tries to get everyone refocused on the imminent performance. She asks sharp questions, assigns tasks, sets a time to break for lunch – and frets.
“It’s getting a little oodgie-poodgie,” observes Muson of the mood onstage. She wants less oodge and less poodge and more concentration.
* * * * *
Another factor in selecting Las Meninas as UMBC’s entry in the ACTF was the possibilities offered for Elena Zlotescu to depict French King Louis XIV’s sumptuous court at Versailles in her set and costume design.
But as an accomplished and award-winning designer, Zlotescu is less obsessed with the look of the play (“anyone can design a beautiful set”) than with how the play’s richness will shine through in her work. Las Meninas is told from the point of view of the convent-bound child of Queen Marie-Therese and Nabo, and an air of fable and fact mix uneasily in the story.
“You can’t tell from the play what is real, what is memory, what is imagination,” says Zlotescu. “It’s a combination of different worlds.” The two-way mirrors used by police in interrogation rooms were one inspiration: “You are behind the mirror, but you see everything.”
Versailles and its startling mirrored halls were also an inspiration, Zlotescu adds, as much for their usefulness in the political ambitions of the French court as their grandiose beauty.
“The most impressive moment in Versailles is when you are in the lobby with a lot of mirrors,” Zlotescu observes. “But why did Louis XIV choose to have mirrors on both sides? Well if you are in that hall with just five people, you will be multiplied and it seems as if you are surrounded by 100 people. It was about power.”
Zlotescu’s set mirrored the play’s intellectual complexity, but it also possessed a remarkable simplicity in its practical design – a key to allowing the technical team to meet the festival’s requirements that departments build and strike the set within a single day. “I don’t like things too complicated,” says Zlotescu. “You can suggest everything with simplicity.”
Despite its simplicity, Zlotescu’s set did challenge the technical capabilities of UMBC’s department. The department’s secret weapon in making things work smoothly, she says, is Greggory Schraven.
“He will never say ‘no,’” says Zlotescu.
Schraven says that the planning required for the traveling versions of Las Meninas at Towson University and the Kennedy Center “is intensive, almost military.” There are spreadsheets and schedules coordinated with a team led by senior stage manager Kiirstn Pagan ’11.
Pagan says that “things do have to change a bit” when the show shifts to a new theatre. At Towson, she says, the crew and actors were “super enthusiastic and energetic to get the show up in the three hours that we had to do it.”
The careful preparation and energy, Pagan and others say, led to the performance at Towson being one of the best of the entire Las Meninas experience. “We were all shocked at Towson at how well and how relaxed we were with the show.”
Interviewed a week or so before the Kennedy Center performance, however, Schraven was already wrestling with the fact that “the Kennedy Center was not made for the modern truck.”
Little did he know that the freight elevator would be busted, too. Yet Schraven made sure that everything went to plan on the big day – even with that unexpected hurdle.
Terrace Theatre – 1 p.m.
The load-in and construction are accomplished. Now it’s time for the cast to sharpen their performances.
Muson’s style of directing is pitched perfectly for the excellent student actors in her cast: authoritative yet never overpowering. She begins with a vocalization exercise as the actors come back from lunch – carefully pushing the cast to adjust their voices to the theatre.
“It’s a great big space,” says Muson, filling the room with her own voice. “But you’re a great big person. You’re the court of France.”
As the afternoon progresses, time gets tight. Some technical delays seep in, and one can see the gears in Muson’s mind racing. She continues to give acting notes to the cast, and changes some of the blocking on the fly.
Muson has a brainstorm deep in the second act: a simple shift in movement to liberate Kopajtic, who plays the Queen Mother, from a tight spot on the set and give her more range to perform. She seems bemused and irritated to discover a simple thing so late in the game.
“They should take away my M.F.A.,” Muson wisecracks.
One problem in the rehearsal is a fussy latch that attaches the two separate parts of the Queen’s bed which come in from opposite sides of the stage. There is a note to fix it.
Otherwise, Las Meninas is ready to go.
* * * * *
The excitement of performance is enthralling, but UMBC’s Department of Theatre is also in the education business. So what are the students involved with Las Meninas learning?
Many of the students involved in the play also take it as a six-credit class – and what they study isn’t just their lines, or the intricate details of stage management. A complicated historical play like Las Meninas offered a chance for all the students involved to dive into the play’s nooks and crannies.
“It’s a complex play, and it gives our students opportunities for research,” says Muson. “Part of what I love to do is immerse them in that research into the world of the play.” That world included the fashion, court politics and dance of the era.
The other invaluable experience for students involved in Las Meninas is the chance to take the show on the road with a talented faculty and staff who also work professionally in regional theatre.
Muson and the rest of the faculty and staff “all treat us with professionalism,” says Jones. “They train us to be professionals and they treat us as professionals. So when we got to this festival, we were relaxed, we had a confident air and professionalism about us.” McComas says the confidence imparted by Muson and the rest of the faculty led to the cast’s quiet certitude that they were putting together a play that would get them to the Kennedy Center. “We never talked about it in rehearsal,” he elaborates. “We didn’t care. It was about doing the best work we could do right here, and if we went on, we went on.”
“We treated it as any other UMBC production,” says Pagan, “which shows you the level of UMBC productions.”
Terrace Theatre – 8 p.m.
The show is officially sold out, and there’s electricity in the air as the crowd files in and finds their seats. Soon the lights go down and the play begins. Having watched the afternoon’s rehearsal, tonight’s performance of Las Meninas seems supercharged.
Indeed, the only unintended drama tonight was foreshadowed in the rehearsal. The fussy latch of Queen Marie-Therese’s bed came undone not once but twice – and there are some nervous moments on- and off-stage as Hileman and Jones successfully keep their balance and their focus in their scenes of tenderness and terror.
When the show ends, the audience showers the performers with applause. The crew is also called to the stage. Gregg Henry presents Muson with a plaque and lauds not only the performers, but their parents and UMBC administrators for their support.
For Muson, the Las Meninas journey is not over. Under her direction, the play will be part of the Columbia-based RepStage’s 2011-2012 season, incorporating much of Zlotescu’s design work.
But for this cast and crew, it’s almost over. After the show, UMBC President Freeman A. Hrabowski, III, and his wife Jackie wander back to congratulate the actors. Most of them are already in dressing rooms, basking in their triumph and removing makeup, but when they hear that Hrabowski is backstage, they emerge quickly in groups of two and three – many happily disheveled – to say hello and accept their kudos from the president.
It’s a moment in which elation and exhaustion exist in simultaneity – a brief window before the cast and crew must strike the set and come home from their most excellent adventure.
Photos by Chris Hartlove
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Web Extra
A story in today’s Baltimore Sun reports that freelance journalist Matthew Van Dyke ’02, political science, is being held in a prison in Tripoli, but that he is in good health.
Read the full story here:
Pamela Meister ’08, M.P.P., has been appointed as the next Harford County Council administrator. Meister most recently served as the associate executive director at the Baltimore Jewish Council after working as the director of government relations and public policy with the same organization. She also worked as the legislative director to state Sen. Paul G. Pinsky, a Prince George’s County Democrat, from 2004 to 2008. She has a psychology degree from George Washington University and a Master of Public Policy from the University of Maryland Baltimore County.