Paving the Way for Stage Management
Alice Pollitt and the late Paul Backer at the SDA awards ceremony in 2014. That year, Alice received the Aileen Stanley Memorial Award for Undergraduate Student in Design/Tech.
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USC CALLBOARD
AN ENDOWED PROFESSORSHIP in stage management is a first for the USC School of Dramatic Arts, and the first of its kind in the country. Announced in June, this groundbreaking professorship was established with a $1.5 million gift from Byron and Teresa Pollitt and their daughter, Alice, a USC Dramatic Arts stage management graduate who earned her BFA in 2015. “So often in theatre you hear about the actors, the actresses, the individual performances on stage,” says Byron. “We’re very proud that the first endowed professorship at the School of Dramatic Arts at USC recognizes a role on the production side of theatre.” “Teri and I felt it was just really important … to support the arts in a way that honors what the School has done for our daughter, as well as what it can do for the students that follow,” he says. “I wouldn’t trade it for anything,” Alice says of her experience at USC. She was speaking by phone during a break from her job as production stage manager for the new Mona Lisa-inspired musical, Lisa and Leonardo, at the New York Musical Festival. “You have courses that give you certain tools, and if you can’t use them in a university production,” she says, “you’re using them at full throttle working with your peers on student productions. You can do everything that is mapped out for you, or you can challenge yourself. Doing other things within the curriculum to kind of squeeze every ounce of education that I could, ended up being a really solid foundation for when I came out here [to New York].” “By the end of my four years at USC,” she says, “I had worked on over 30 productions. I needed that experience to be the person confident enough to take charge in the room.” Among Alice’s other credits — earned while she was still a student at USC and since graduation — are the 69th Annual Tony Awards, Broadway productions of American Psycho, Noises Off and Aladdin, and shows for Berkeley Repertory Theatre, the Public Theater and Marin Shakespeare Company. Surprisingly, theatre as a career wasn’t Alice’s first choice. “I had always enjoyed being in the theatre, performing and being behind the scenes — that started in elementary school,” she says. “But because pretty much everyone in my family either has an MBA or a CPA, I kind of assumed that’s what I had to do.”
Photo by Ryan Miller/Capture Imaging.
The Pollitt Family endows a history-making professorship to further the development of the School’s stage managers.