Dorothy Somerset and Frederic Wood.
It all started with an argument over poetry.
In the fifties, Dorothy Somerset was a professor in the English Department. She made a request to her department to allow her to run a poetry speaking course and the request was denied. Clearly, she believed in the importance of this venture, so the enterprising Professor Somerset applied to the senate to create a separate Theatre Department and, in 1958, her request was granted. Four years later, UBC built a brand new four hundred seat iteration of the Frederic Wood Theatre, and three years after that, the department offered its first film course. The UBC Department of Theatre and Film was born.
At its inception, the department led a fully-realized instructional program as well as the presentation of a full theatre season. The productions were directed by department staff and run by students and volunteers. The original Frederic Wood housed over 60 plays and 14 children’s productions from 1952 to 1963, when the new Frederic Wood Theatre opened. Salad Days (Slade & Reynolds) was the inaugural production of the new Frederic Wood, opening on September 19, 1963.
Theatre was exploding across the English-speaking world in 1958. In New York, we were seeing the first North American productions of what are now classic plays like The Birthday Party (Pinter), The Zoo Story (Albee), Suddenly Last Summer (Williams), Look Back in Anger (Osborne). In Canada, the Stratford Shakespearean Festival, then five years old, presented its first ever production of Much Ado About Nothing, a play that would be a part of the new Frederic Wood Theatre’s inaugural season, and which continues to excite us 60 years later.
Film students Craig Volker and Karethe Linaae, 1994.
In 1966, Professor Don Soule taught “History of the Film,” the first film studies class offered at UBC, followed by Professor Joan Reynertson’s “Introduction to Film Production” offered the subsequent year. The number of film courses grew under the leadership of Dorothy Somerset’s successor, John Brockington, and in 1992, the department officially became UBC Theatre and Film.
The beginnings of film at UBC were concurrent with an exciting year of film in Hollywood. 1966’s Best Picture was a film adaptation of Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, which also won Oscars for Best Director and Best Actor, proving that theatre was still the viable and salient foundation upon which film was built. There were some big business shakeups that year as well – Gulf and Western Industries acquired Paramount Pictures, and Seven Arts Productions acquired Warner Bros. Warner Bros was a hot acquisition, having produced one of the highest grossing films of the year – and another theatre-to-film adaptation – Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Opening the Frederic Wood: Phyllis Ross, Dorothy Somerset, Norman Mackenzie
Our 60th anniversary has a number of celebrations both on and off campus. A remount of Universal Limited’s Japanese Problem will take place on October 25 at the Soulpepper Theatre Company in Toronto, an alumni-rich event both on and off stage. Much Ado About Nothing directed by double alumna Lois Anderson opens on November 8th, with a pre-reception at Sage Restaurant, and a VIP guest list including our alumni, esteemed guests, Faculty: Emeritus and present enjoying Shakespeare reimagined in 2018.
2019 will be just as exciting, with UBC hosting several conferences. The annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, the convergence of over 70 scholarly associations, is being held at UBC this year and the Canadian Association for Theatre Research and its accompanying show, Michel Tremblay’s Hosanna, directed by Department Head Stephen Heatley and starring our MFA Actor Frank Zotter, is part of it. The Film Studies Association of Canada (FSAC), led by local FSAC Area Coordinator and Film Studies Lecturer, Christine Evans, will also be held at that time.
Film Studies Professor Ernest Mathijs is spearheading a speaker series in March for the 60th Celebration:
*Paula Devonshire (Producer, Ginger Snaps, Land of the Dead, Indian Horse – http://www.devonshireinc.com/);
*Judith Rosenbaum (Assistant Professor, University of Maine – forthcoming books Spoiler Alert and #TalkingPoints: https://umaine.edu/womensgenderandsexualitystudies/people/judith-rosenbaum/);
*Sook-Yin Lee (Actor, Film and Radio Maker, latest film, Octavio’s Dead! – https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0498271/).
Department Head Stephen Heatley at Department party
We welcome two new faculty members to the Theatre and Film Department this year: Theatre Production and Design Assistant Professor Patrick Pennefather and Film Production Assistant Professor Igor Drljaca. We’re also thrilled to have Theatre Production and Design Assistant Professor Patrick Rizzotti returning for his second year at UBC. Learn more about them: https://theatrefilm.ubc.ca/people/full-time-faculty/
You are warmly invited to join us for our 60th Anniversary season in the Frederic Wood Theatre, the Telus Studio Theatre in the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts and Vancity Cinema. Join us for a fresh take on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing from our own BFA and MFA alumna, Lois Anderson; our two current MFA Directing students directing a Canadian classic, Judith Thompson’s Lion in the Streets (Michelle Thorne), and a comedy with music which premiered in 2017, GOLDRAUSCH by Guillermo Calderón (Jenny Larson); our co-presentation with the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival for both Hearing and Deaf audiences, Prince Hamlet, produced by Why Not Theatre from Toronto, Ontario; plus our fifth generation of the Naked Cinema project created by students in the Acting and Film Production programs led by Adjunct Professor, Bart Anderson.
The student-led Persistence of Vision Film Festival (POV Film Festival) is scheduled for April 27 and 28 with topically relevant short films from our 4th year and six of our 3rd year Film Production students.
You won’t want to miss this special 2018/19 season as the Department of Theatre and Film looks forward to the next sixty years.
