Muhlenberg Honors Mildred Greene In Costume Retrospective

 

Logo of Muhlenberg College (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Allentown, PA – Muhlenberg College Theatre & Dance will remember Mildred Greene, long-time costumer and costume designer, with a special exhibition of her work Feb. 5-27. The exhibition, titled “It Fits, You’ll Wear It & Love It,” will honor Greene’s impact on the department and its productions.

Greene built and designed costumes for the Theatre & Dance Department and Muhlenberg Summer Music Theatre from 1979 until her retirement in 2003. During her 24-year career at Muhlenberg, she designed and produced thousands of costumes for the stage.

The exhibition will feature costumes as well as photographs of Greene’s design repertoire spanning her Muhlenberg career. A free reception for the exhibition will be held Friday, Feb. 7 from 4 to 6 p.m.

Greene’s skill, expertise, and no-nonsense charm endeared her to her colleagues and hundreds of students, according to Curtis Dretsch, professor of design and technical theater.

“Mildred could do more, with less, more quickly than anyone else I’ve ever known,” Dretsch says.

Greene was destined to create costumes for the stage, as her father was an upholsterer and her mother sewed clothing and dance costumes for the family. She worked in New York City during World War II as a pattern maker for McCall’s Pattern Company while also work in alterations shops honing her construction skills.

Reviewers consistently praised Greene’s work throughout her career. “Mildred Greene’s costumes deserve to be kept on display as examples of theater art even after audiences can no longer enjoy the sterling play they frame,” wrote Morning Call theater critic John Flautz in his 1988 review of “The School for Scandal.” “They are nothing short of stunning!”

Muhlenberg College is a liberal arts college of more than 2,200 students in Allentown, Pa. The college offers Bachelor of Arts degrees in theater and dance. The Princeton Review has ranked Muhlenberg’s theater program as in the top twelve in the nation for the past seven years, and Fiske Guide to Colleges lists both the theater and dance programs among the top small college programs in the United States. Muhlenberg is one of only eight colleges to be listed in Fiske for both theater and dance.

“It Fits, You’ll Wear It & Love It” runs Feb. 5-27. The exhibition will take place in the Galleria Lobby, Baker Center for the Arts, Muhlenberg College, 2400 Chew St., Allentown.

Muhlenberg Stages A Brisk ‘Winter’s Tale,’ Nov. 20-24

List of titles of works based on Shakespearean phrases (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Allentown, PA – Toward the end of his career, Shakespeare broke away from the conventional rules of play writing and wrote a series of plays that featured wild dramatic verse and then-contemporary humor. The epitome of this defiantly innovative approach was “The Winter’s Tale,” written around 1610, and coming to the Muhlenberg College mainstage Nov. 20-24.

“The play has a real spirit of experimentation and rebelliousness,” says Troy Dwyer, who directs the production. “When they go see Shakespeare, many audience members brace themselves to do a lot of work. And often enough, modern productions make them.”

Dwyer’s aim, he says, is to allow the audience to relax and enjoy the playfulness of Shakespeare’s writing.

“I want the audience to let us do the work,” Dwyer says. “I want them to experience a strong sense of joy and understanding that they don’t have to labor for. That joy can come from comedy or it can come from the thrill of genuinely absorbing drama.”

“The Winter’s Tale” is the story of two intertwined kingdoms gripped by an icy prophecy. A demon bear hunts its victims along the tree-lined shore of Bohemia. Hundreds of miles across the ocean in Sicilia, something just as nightmarish stalks a young queen – her husband’s jealous madness. As both monsters pounce, Shakespeare’s unpredictable fantasy is set into motion.

Part suspenseful tragedy, part rollicking comedy, part grisly fairy tale, the play defies convention while showcasing what Dwyer calls “some of the most breathtaking language ever heard on the English stage.”

The show runs Nov. 20-24 in the Studio Theatre, Trexler Pavilion for Theatre & Dance at Muhlenberg College. In the interest of expediting the action, Dwyer has cut the play to a brisk two hours.

“Modern audiences are very different from 1610 audiences,” Dwyer says. “They understand stories differently, and I think if you’re going to do Shakespeare in 2013, you have to adapt to that different sensibility. That doesn’t mean dumbing the play down or stripping out historical context. It just means being thoughtful about pacing and emphasis, and working to develop relatable characters.”

Dwyer has also added choreography by Allison Berger and an original score by Sean Skahill for an enhanced multisensory experience.

“I want the audience to be pulled away from the dependence on language and narrative by providing other textures of experience,” Dwyer says. For example, the play’s infamous demon bear is depicted not by a large fuzzy costume but by the actors, through movement and music.

“The music and choreography makes it a more holistic and engaging experience for audiences,” Skahill says. “Music can express what you can’t get out through just talking.”

Dwyer says the play closely examines the institution of marriage with its inherent issues of power and parity. He expands that exploration to modern-day issues of marriage equality by gender-swapping certain characters.

“The play is partly about marriage and who has a right to it,” Dwyer says. “It’s about the ways that marriage is both a privilege and a peril — about the mythic demands that get mapped onto the institution of marriage. The play’s young lovers believe that marriage is something worth fighting for, which is a refrain we hear all the time in current discourse. I think the play helps us to disentangle some of the more oppressive threads woven into marriage vows.”

Muhlenberg College’s Theatre & Dance Department offers one of the top-rated college performance programs in the country, according to the Princeton Review rankings. Muhlenebrg is a liberal arts college of more than 2,200 students in Allentown, Pa., offering Bachelor of Arts degrees in theatre and dance. It has been named annually among the Fiske Guide to Colleges’ top 20 small college programs in the United States.

“The Winter’s Tale” runs Nov. 20-24 in the Studio Theatre, Trexler Pavilion for Theatre & Dance, Muhlenberg College, 2400 Chew St., Allentown.

Performances are Wednesday through Friday at 8 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m., and Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets and information are available at 484-664-3333 orwww.muhlenberg.edu/theatre&dance.