You Can't Do Theater Alone

One Hundred Years of the Millsaps Players

For a while, I made my living selling furniture and equipment to schools. That experience taught me that the four most expensive structures at any school are the lunchroom, the laboratory, the sports field, and the theater. Every school has a space for a theater and a dedicated space for theater if they can afford it, and every good school that can afford it has a theater department.

Theaters are worth the money for many of the same reasons that sports fields are worth the money. They provide an opportunity to gather together a diverse group of students and teach them to work together for a common goal. That’s something you often can’t teach in a classroom, no matter how many times you try to break students up into study groups. In particular, theater encourages extroverted students to work with introverted students in ways they might never otherwise.

Yesterday, we marked a full century of theater at Millsaps College. Born in the nineteenth century, a small institution with a remarkably rich history, Millsaps emerged as a catalyst for the significant and sometimes painful social changes that swept over Mississippi and the United States in the twentieth century.

The first play presented at Millsaps was “As You Like It,” directed by Professor S. G. Noble in 1912. It was performed in a lecture room in Murrah Hall. In 1920, Milton Christian White began teaching at Millsaps in the English Department. He soon began petitioning the college president to allow the formation of a regular group of student actors to put on plays at Millsaps, which became known as the Millsaps Players. Their first play, in 1924, was a two-act farce called “Fascinating Fanny,” which I’ve never been able to find a copy of. The student newspaper gave it a good review, so I assume It was at least funny. Throughout the nineteen twenties, thirties, and forties, Professors White, Paul Hardin, and Ross Moore exchanged duties directing plays at Millsaps, moving from a lecture hall in Murrah to the cafeteria space and “a natural amphitheater” where the bowl is now.

Lance Goss came to Millsaps as a freshman in 1945. He intended to become a medical doctor, but he soon became obsessed with the plays Professor White put on. In 1949, he graduated with a B.A. in English, followed by a short stint in the Navy. Professor White suggested that if Lance were to get his Master's Degree, he could return to Millsaps and take his place in the faculty. Lance enrolled at Northwestern University from the Navy and earned his Master of Arts in Theater. After a brief stint in regional professional theater, Lance returned to Millsaps in 1953 as the new professor of Speech and Dramatics. Between Millsaps and the Jackson Little Theater, Lance went on to direct one hundred and eighty-two plays, influencing the lives of hundreds of Millsaps students.

To celebrate its one-hundredth anniversary, The Millsaps Players presented a panel of four former players who went on to have careers in theater. Michael Guidry, the new editor of Mississippi Today, graduated in 2005. He moderated the panel and was the only member not taught or directed by Lance Goss. The rest of the panel was Lisa D’Amour ’91, Alan Hunter ’79, and Ward Emling ’76. Most of their talk was dedicated to the topic of what one can do with an education in theater, and they each touched on their lives after leaving Millsaps and making a life out of what they learned there. Theater is sometimes considered a not-very-practical degree, but our panel demonstrated that it doesn’t have to be that way.

Much of this event was emotional for me. Lance died in March 2001. Knowing that, except for the current students, nearly everyone in the room was there because of Lance’s life and work was a pretty intense realization.

When I came to Millsaps in 1983, my parents were concerned that my learning disability might prove a problem. My father never, in his life, used the phrase” learning disability” to describe me. He called it “my troubles.” I did too, until I was well into my fifties.

I took some courses at Hinds Junior College just to see if I could handle college work. Millsaps would be considerably harder, we all agreed. We decided that, at Millsaps, I wouldn’t do any extra-curricular activities except for my fraternity, and I could take introductory courses in art, literature, and theater, but that’s all; everything else had to focus on getting me through the Else School of Business. We agreed that was a sensible plan. Even with those constraints, getting my work done on time was almost impossible. I would get a business degree but wouldn’t impress anyone as a student. The people who taught me were more than fantastic; many of them I still count as dear friends. Business and management were just not my calling, though. I had a hard time explaining that to anyone, so I mostly just didn’t.

When my father died, there was a considerable struggle for control over the things he built in life. Already unhappy with my job, once that started, I began to feel physically ill, landing in the hospital several times, convinced I was having a heart attack when it was just massive panic attacks. Angry, hurt, and nearly suicidal, I left my father’s company so that I wouldn’t have to be in the middle of what became an effort to break it into pieces and sell them off, one by one.

After giving up on my father’s plan for me, I was at a loss for what to do with myself. One summer afternoon, two months after I let the directors at Missco buy out my interest in the company, I found myself walking around Millsaps, really aimlessly, trying to see if returning to familiar grounds might inspire something in me. Millsaps is far less populated in the Summer. Walking through the Christian Center, I noticed Lance’s door was open.

“Hey, Bud.” He said.

When I was a student, I was never in any plays, as was the agreement with my parents. I went to them all, though, and I knew everyone who was in every play. Although I wasn't a member of the players, I was intensely aware of them and intensely aware of Lance. Even though I wasn’t his student, I found reasons to visit his office several times a week.

Lance’s office was made to entertain students. Besides a desk and two guest chairs, he had a wingback living room chair for himself, a sofa that sometimes became a prop on stage, and an assortment of mixed chairs that made room for many of us to sit at his feet and listen to his stories. There were also half a dozen ashtrays. Lance Goss was the last civilized person I ever knew who still smoked in public. For some reason, smoking and theater were closely related for a long time.

Although I had taken Introduction to Theater, Lance wasn’t really my teacher, not in the sense of a classroom with grades. Lance was my friend, but through friendly conversations, he taught me more about the things I really wanted to study than any of the teachers in my classrooms. We discussed theater, film, and art, and I drank from the well he presented as often as I could. He knew the things I wanted to know.

Explaining my current predicament that summer, I apologized to Lance for not doing more to help the Players when I was a student and for not taking more of his courses after the intro. For some reason, it was important that he knew I supported him and considered what he was doing important, even if I didn’t show it. That’s when he suggested since I didn’t have plans for the next year, maybe I could come back to Millsaps and take the courses I wanted to take before but couldn’t. At a time when I thought I was surely lost and drowning in quicksand, Lance was offering me a branch to pull myself up on.

For the next three years, I did exactly what Lance suggested. I enrolled in every class that interested me, in every class I didn’t dare take when my father was alive. I already had a BA in business, so the pressure of getting a degree was gone now; I could fill the empty coffers in my mind with the things I felt compelled to know. I made up for not volunteering for plays as an undergraduate by volunteering for everything the players did.

Lance never taught plays in the classroom. He taught plays by directing them. Since each play involved several actors and several technicians working together for a period of five or six weeks, it ends up being a pretty intensive classroom where everyone participating adds something of their own interpretation of the text into the performance, which is precisely what the people teaching literature were doing, but in a more practical matter, since, instead of turning in papers, you had to present your work before, not only your professor but a live audience.

Although I met him when he came to Millsaps, I hadn’t had an opportunity to work with Brent Lefavor. Suddenly thrusting myself back into the players, Brent became a dominant fixture in my life. Besides technical theater courses, I took American Theater and Drama from Brent and then History of Theater One and Two. He was an intense teacher. He preached the practice of reading a new play every week. While I’ve certainly missed some weeks along the way, I’ve always tried to keep up with that idea.

There’s more to a play than just the words on a page. One of the most intense conversations I ever had with Brent was for a play called “Who’s Happy Now,” which was a man’s childhood memory of his parents. Brent was directing, and I was the lighting designer, playing a supporting character. For most of the play, he wanted a very naturalistic lighting style, which I agreed was the right choice. Since the play was set in the South West, I hoped to convey the sense of the arid plains with my lighting. The play was a memory, though, a sad and sentimental childhood memory, and I wanted to do something to suggest that. The play ends with the father, played by Larry Wells, and the mother, played by Christine Swanne, dancing as the last visual of the play. Starting with naturalistic light, I dissolved into a very intense lavender from one side and an equally intense amber from another, hoping to suggest a fading memory before going to black. I wanted to leave the audience with the impression that what they had seen was a matter of the mind and a piece of the past.

In those days, you put a dyed sheet of polyester plastic in front of the lamp to make theater lights different colors. They once were made of gelatin, so even today, they’re still called “gels” even though they haven’t been actual gelatin since Hitler invaded Poland. Modern lights can make any color simply by reprogramming them, but in those days, Brent kept a library of over a hundred color gels backstage. One day, Brent asked me to stay for a minute after class. “I’m concerned about your choices for the last scene.” He said.

For the next hour and a half, two fat men discussed the relative values of purples and ambers and discussed it sometimes, intensely. Everyone else cleared out of the room while we hashed it out. I had immense respect for Brent as an artist, so I knew I had to make a sustainable case for why I chose those colors and why I broke from the very naturalistic color scheme at the end of the play. That kind of conversation is the very heart of what makes the collaborative aspect of theater so remarkable. We were both trying to interpret the text, as were Larry and Christine, but the four of us had to do it together. Ultimately, we agreed to run the technical rehearsal with my choice for gels, but we also agreed to retain the ability to delete that cue if it just didn’t work for Brent. Sitting in the dark with Brent and the Stage Manager for the technical rehearsal, I ran my last lighting cue with the lavender and amber lights. It was a long cue, almost a minute of that very expressionistic lighting while the music played. I studied Brent’s face as that last cue faded out to black.

“Yeah,” He said.

“Yeah, keep it?” I said.

“Yeah, keep it.” He said. And, more often than not, that’s just how collaboration in theater works.

One summer day, Lance was having a Sunday lunch at Piccadilly Cafeteria, and he had a massive heart attack. He soon was on an operating table, having a quadruple bypass to save his life. Lance had been fighting any suggestion he should retire. He joked that they’d have to carry him out on a stretcher. It almost happened.

I had planned to move to Los Angeles that next fall. I had friends there. I had picked out an apartment. I had arranged to rent out or sell my house on the reservoir. Los Angeles was going to be my forever home. With Lance in the hospital, everything about the players was up in the air. He wanted to come back, but would he be able to? With Lance sick and George Harmon announcing his retirement, I was concerned about the future of the Millsaps Players. California can wait, I thought. I needed to be in Jackson until we knew what would happen with Lance and the players. That Fall, Brent directed “Dracula.” I designed the lights and the pyrotechnics. After that, we did “Wait Until Dark,” where I had the same jobs. Lance was well enough to attend the performances. He wanted to return to directing in the Spring.

Returning that Spring, Lance wanted to do two plays. “A Day At The Fair” and “Dangerous Corners” were both in the round. Since we didn’t know Lance’s health, I arranged with Brent to stage manage both plays. Normally, an undergraduate student would do that, but since this was a fairly delicate situation, I felt like I should take a much more active role. Lance laughed that the hardest part would be directing a play without smoking. He knew that I still smoked. Sometimes, he would laugh that I should sit closer to him so he could at least smell it on me.

“A Day At The Fair” went very smoothly. Lance was almost his old self. When it came time to do “Dangerous Corners,” though, his physical condition started to deteriorate. Recognizing this in himself, he began to lose that self-confidence he always had in the theater. He began to doubt himself. “Dangerous Corners” would be Lance’s last play.

Having always lived on campus, Lance had to move to an apartment when the old faculty houses were torn down to build the massive New South dorm. I met Lance at his car every rehearsal and walked him up the hill into the Christian Center and his office. It was his practice to hold court in his office for about an hour before any rehearsal. It was becoming harder and harder for him to make that trip.

One day, a few days before technical rehearsals for “Dangerous Corners,” I took Lance to his office. We had some time for just the two of us. Sitting quietly, I could tell something was on his mind.

“I can’t do it anymore.” He said. I’d been expecting something like this. It’s not just that his health and strength were failing; he was losing confidence in himself.

“Maybe you can’t do things like you always did, but you still have much to give. We can figure it out.” I said.

“No, I have to retire,” he said, his eyes turning red. The water began to flow.

I tried to think of things to say to make him feel better and make him not give up, but the intensity of what he was feeling made me not know what to say.

“Don’t tell Ward.” He said. “I don’t know how I’m going to tell Ward.”

Ward Emling graduated from Millsaps before I graduated from high school. He had a career in film and television before taking a position as the Film Commissioner for Mississippi. I want to say he was the first person to hold that position. If not, he was close to the first.

Most people thought Lance lived for his plays, but really, Lance lived for his students. Someone who graduated in the 50s, 60s, or 70s would always visit his office. Lance kept up with their careers, whether they went into acting or not. If they went into acting, Lance kept copies of their playbills and videotape copies of their movies, and he would make sure that his current students knew what his former students were up to.

Returning to Jackson for the Film Office, Ward regularly took an interest in Lance. Before the heart attack, it wasn’t unusual to see Ward sit in on a rehearsal, sitting next to Lance's directorial rocking chair. I think it meant something to the students to know that they were part of something that extended beyond their years in college.

It struck me deeply that, in this moment of fear for his own mortality and facing having to give up his life’s work, Lance thought not of his own fate but of one of his students and how it might impact them. He didn’t want Ward to know that his long performance as the head of the Millsaps Players was over.

“I’m pretty sure Ward will understand. He cares about you a lot. I mean, it shows, it’s always shown. Whatever you need to do in life, he’ll understand. Besides, even if you can’t teach, once you get your strength back, you can come to direct shows just whenever you feel like it. Whatever you need to do, we can figure it out.” I said.

At that point, I still thought Lance might regain his strength and there would be more plays. I knew lots of guys who had productive careers after a heart attack. It didn’t happen that way, though. “Dangerous Corners” was his last play. It was a play filled with people I cared deeply about. Within a few months, Lance moved from his apartment to The Orchard, a retirement home in Madison County.

Ward helped Lance move to The Orchard. He set him up with the biggest TV I ever saw and moved his beloved video tapes, some of which he was in. Several of us tried to talk Lance into visiting campus to see productions, but only Ward could get him to do it. As Lance’s strength left him, his sister moved him to the coast to be near her. In 2001, Lance drew his last breath in a nursing facility in Pascagoula. Not long after his death, Matt Henry, who was one of the leads in “Dangerous Corners,” died in Texas.

The players struggled after Lance left. Trying to replace Lance and George Harmon at the same time proved a lot more challenging than I thought it would. The process began to wear on both Brent and me. Eventually, Brent left to take a position at New Stage. Our theater in the Christian Center had to be condemned when a water main broke under it and washed away much of the foundation. The theater major was put in abeyance. The Millsaps Players would have vanished if not for professors in other departments volunteering their time.

When the art department moved from the Ford Academic Complex to their new building, the third-floor space became available, and discussions were held about whether that could become a new home for the Millsaps Players. With generous help from Millsaps Player Alumni Joel Howell and David Bowen, the school converted the former art studio and offices into a performing space and the former ceramics studio into a theater shop. Sam Sparks, who was one of the last theater graduates before the major went into abeyance, was asked to return as the new Theater professor and director of the Millsaps Players.

I got news of Sam’s return from Brent and then from Nicole Saad. It was as if a weight was taken from my shoulders. That which I mourned as lost was given new life and the mantle was taken up by someone we all considered the perfect person.

You can’t do theater alone. It’s a collaborative effort. In the case of the Millsaps Players, it’s a collaboration between generations of people spanning the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Last night, I sat again in a dark theater, surrounded by people who were all touched by the work done there, some in the fifties, some in the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, and even some as late as last week. Lance wasn’t there, but he was there. In a way, he’ll always be there. He was why we gathered. Watching Ward, Alan, and Lisa deliver their remarks, I thought most about the times I talked about them with Lance. He had a story about everybody who ever trod the boards for him.

The Millsaps Players have been around for 100 years, and maybe there will be 100 more. It’s something we do together, and new stories are being written every day.