Encore: Joy H. Reilly
Associate Professor
(Profile)

Current Research and Creative Activity

As of this writing Joy Reilly is busy with final details of the first International Senior Theatre Festival which will be hosted by OSU Theatre and OSU Health Sciences (Geriatrics and Gerontology) departments August 18-22, 2002 at the Drake Union. This is the culmination of three years development and an outgrowth of her national and international work in this now rapidly growing field, which began in the mid-80s under Dr. Bo Brown. At that time the Department of Theatre agreed to serve as a two-year fiscal agent for the first grants she got from the Ohio Arts Council to develop the first senior theatre company in Ohio, one which would create new works with the elderly. Almost twenty years later, Joy’s original company Grandparents Living Theatre, has spawned two other companies in Columbus: Senior Repertory of Ohio and Footsteps of the Elders. Joy has since resigned as artistic director of GLT in late 90s to focus on creating new works. During her leadership she traveled extensively with the company including representing the United States twice in Cologne, Germany at the first and second World Congress, teaching workshops in Germany and England, being sponsored by the National Council of Aging to perform at the huge annual convention in Washington D.C., and being invited to perform both at Disney World and at the Disney Arts Institute in Orlando. Joy has collaborated on several projects with OSU’s Health Sciences including obtaining a $50,000 Batelle Grant to produce a video on WOSU TV of her script I Was Young, Now I’m Wonderful which won three regional Emmy’s. A 30 minute segment of that script has been aired every year on PBS since the first public broadcast. Several of Joy’s former students have written to say they have seen it in their area. While chairing the conference at OSU, Joy has been meeting to organize the first national association of senior adult theatre: the Senior Theatre League of America which will be formally launched at the conference. Alan Woods (who also serves on this board) will be teaching a workshop on audio description for participants, and several other faculty, staff and students are involved. Our new dean Karen Bell will be performing an original dance piece with Vicky Blaine, former chair of the Dance Department, and Lesley Ferris and Sue Ott Rowlands will be making a presentation about our production of Wit. Several OSU faculty and students and former students will be presenting their research at the Conference which includes workshops, papers and presentations and performances at the Festival on both the main stage and Experimental lab. The final day of the conference will be an Instant Theatre Festival based on the model we have developed at OSU as Take Out Theatre. Playwrights were invited to submit 5 minute scripts celebrating age that include the word Hamlet and French fries in the text. Festival participants will celebrate the final day by competing as actors and directors in teams that will be intergenerational and multi-lingual. Several members of the international women playwrights network have submitted entries. Joy is also participating in performance herself in our Experimental Lab in Howling at the Moon, in which women (past the age of 50) read their own writings. American Theatre’s July/August 2002 issue has a very nice article on page 7 about the Conference and Festival. Pictured are a group of seniors outside the Drake next to the river in anticipation of this event.

While this was in the planning, the Department won several large grants from the university and committed to reworking our Intrroduction to Theatre class, developing new technology and pedagogy. Joy and team have been taking leaps of faith as they experimented with adding power point lectures, requiring all students to participate in a creative project, do online research and quizzes and explore a virtual environment. In keeping with our emphasis as a department on new works and technology, our students have been seeing live theatre in the Bowen and then visiting the Virtual Theatre, a replica of that space, to make their own design choices for the plays we read. Every student is also assigned to a production team, where they select their role, and collaborates on the creation of a five minute new work that is a response to one of the plays they have read in class during the quarter. The students perform their pieces in Recitation but the best projects are then selected to perform in Lecture and some are videotaped for preservation. As a result we have some astonishing five minute projects spawned by Oedipus, Hamlet, Tartuffe (a courtroom scene in which he appeals to get out of jail 20 years later, performed in verse), A Doll House, (in which Nora finds employment in The Doll House on Cleveland Avenue), and Sam Shepard and Anna Deaveare Smith’s pieces which provided ample inspiration for students to interview the homeless around campus and to research and perform people’s perceptions in the aftermath of the “OSU spring party riots.” We have also developed two minute plays (written by Chris Dickman, Greg Maier, Maura Phelan, Eleni Papaleonardos, Chester Harding and Laura Simpson) to answer the question what do actors, directors, playwrights, designers, stage managers and producers DO? These will be streamed on our home page, as will excerpts of Theatre 100 student creative projects. In July Joy Reilly and doctoral students Ann Farrelly and Katie Whitlock will be presenting a panel on the new course at ATHE in San Diego.

Joy presented the paper Hildegard von Bingen’s Ordo Virtutum: an examination of the oldest extant Western musical drama performed by Vox Animae for the 26th Comparative Drama Conference at OSU and, as Honors adviser, encouraged five departmental Honors students to compete at the annual Denman Research Forum in competition with all undergraduates a the university. Leah Reddy won the Outstanding Sophomore and Laura Simpson won third place in the arts. Joy also worked with the newest Writing Company all year, had the first public performance by the new Writing Company Winter Quarter in the New Works Lab, and organized the second annual Take Out Theatre fest in Spring Quarter. Joy was particularly thrilled to welcome back alum Michael Milligan who led a workshop for Department actors and talked to her New Works class about acting and writing one’s own work.

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