Theatre duo close TWU careers in The Seagull

Nov. 18, 2024 – DENTON – Bidding farewell is the inescapable nature of college. Students graduate. They move on. But every so often, the departure is a little more bittersweet when those leaving are beloved, iconic performers in the arts or sports.

Such a moment has come for Texas Woman's University.

The Theatre Division's production of The Seagull, taking place Nov. 20-24, will feature the final performances at Red Bud Theater of students who have become staples of the TWU campus experience.

If you've attended a performance at Red Bud in the last four years, you've seen Brenna Petersen and Adrian Theisen. They are inevitable. They have been in a combined 19 productions stretching back to 2021, including last year's sold-out shows of Hamlet, in which both played the eponymous lead.

"We're doing all this so students can go on to bigger and better things. That's the point," said Steve Young, associate professor of theatre and director of The Seagull. "It's hard because you feel like you've been through the trenches with them and you have a stake in them because you've spent time with them, and they've supported you as the director or teacher or whatever it might be. I don't care what department it is. If you worked closely with a student, it's always hard to say good bye."

After this week, Petersen's and Theisen's only remaining TWU stage appearance will be at December's graduation ceremony.

"I don't think my body believes it yet," Theisen said. "I don't think I believe that I'm actually doing my last show here."

"It feels like I'm ending a chapter of my life that I'm not quite ready to end," Petersen said. "I never ever thought that I would be able to say that I had double digits shows in college. That's been a blessing."

Theisen and Petersen have been more than prominent players in the Theatre Division. They are important members of its COVID class – the students who took the stage in the days after the pandemic lockdown was lifted and people began crawling from the shelter of their homes to cautiously return to theaters.

"We were the COVID wave of students," Petersen said. "We and the professors revitalized the department. A small group of us kept auditioning. We've done all the shows, we've done the read-throughs, we've done mentorship. We've volunteered and we've been very active. And now almost all of us will be gone within the span of six months. We played a part in bringing a theater department that had been quiet into something that's vibrant and exciting and welcoming and safe."

The emotion of entering the real world outside of academia's cloister ranges from relief to terror, a feeling more pronounced in the arts, which can be brutally unkind. It is typically not a world of stability, consistent paychecks and benefit packages, for which a 9-to-5 work life is usually required.

Perhaps that's part of its allure.

But Petersen and Theisen are emerging from college to promising immediate prospects.

Petersen will be working with North Texas Performing Arts, which works with children through performing arts education and family entertainment.

"I just got hired to direct shows at the theater that I've been really hoping to work with for many years," Petersen said. "I think they're seeing if I would be a good fit as a resident director, which would be super cool. I'm going to be able to work with kids of all ages. They've set me up for SIX (a musical and modern retelling of the lives of the six wives of Henry VIII, presented in the form of a singing competition) as my first solo directing job. I think it'll be a high school production, which is cool and a pretty close to full length version of the show, which is a daunting first task but really cool and very exciting.

"I'm hopefully going to be able to do some professional acting work as well," she added. "So it's going to be a very full experience and probably very overwhelming and scary for a while, but I'm cautiously optimistic about how things will go."

Theisen is working with fellow TWU Theatre student Felix Ferris to start a theater company in Denton.

"We've been working on trying to do stuff with local schools, getting more involved so we're hoping to bring kind of more professional, classically oriented theater to Denton," Theisen said. "I have been doing shows off campus in between getting cast in shows here, and I have a lot of friends in the greater DFW theater community. There's a lot of theaters starting up now, especially like, kind of rebuilding the community after COVID decimated quite a few professional and semi-professional theaters in the area. I feel good about it. I think that there's a lot of great stuff happening in Dallas with theater that I want to participate in. It's been interesting to integrate myself into that world. I don't think I expected to be able to consider myself a part of that world before I graduated. You know, I didn't think that that was going to be a reality for me. I was just like, I just want to do any theater, just get any. Anything resembling what might be considered a career, you know, because, I mean, it is. It's weird trying to be an artist professionally. I come from like a long line of starving artists, so I kind of already got it before I got here. But it's still, it's daunting for sure."

Both actors are thrilled to be going out in The Seagull, one of the seminal works of Anton Chekhov, widely considered one of history's greatest playwrights. This version of The Seagull, adapted by Young, is set not in Russia but Gulfport, Mississippi.

"There's live music, there's dancing. I promise you will laugh and you might shed a tear or two," Young said. "I love and adore this play. I've played several characters in it and I've directed it. But it's a piece that I feel like you could study till the end of your existence and still be finding new things about it. This is the play that started the Moscow Art Theater and revolutionized Western theater. The realism movement in theater began that night. God, what a night to have been in the theater to witness that."

"This is one of my favorite plays of all time," Theisen said. "Before I graduated, I wanted to do a Shakespeare, a Chekhov and a classical Greek play because those were the three that I didn't have. And I've done all three. I got to be in Antigone off campus, and I got to do a Shakespeare on campus, and now I'm getting to do a Chekhov. I'm collecting them like infinity stones."

"This is a very good show to be going out on," Petersen said. "Lots of things worked out well. My closest friends in the world are on stage with me. It's a show that I really love. Steve was the first director I did a show with here. He was at my first audition. He was at my last. It's very full circle."

Talking to Theisen and Petersen, their voices are tinged with sadness, which will probably be exacerbated this week when the curtains close for the final time. Much more pronounced, however, is their sense of accomplishment and optimism. They just plain feel good about themselves and what they've done in the last four years. Which they have well and truly earned.

"I've had a college experience," Petersen said. "Not necessarily a typical one that a lot of people would want, but I've done shows. I've directed shows. I've worked professional acting jobs. I've been a professional designer and director. I've gotten to work a bunch of different positions around the campus. I've fallen in love. I've fallen out of love, made friends, lost friends, getting new friends. For the first time in my life, I took six, seven months to just be for a while. Now it's all drawing to a close, and yet I feel like it's about to catapult me. I feel like I've kind of hit all the goals I really wanted to in college. Now getting ready to be an adult outside of an educational setting, I'm about to see what's beyond the wall. And that's as exciting as it is frightening."

The Seagull

Cast
Dinvela Adam
J.C. Boliek
Kaitlyn Chi
Victoria Cortez
Austin Creswell
Timathy Dorman
Christian Hachat
Nicholas Harwell
Gabriel Hawthorne
Alaina Hooke
Cody Leveck
Brooklyn Long
Julia Macleod
Isabell Malone
Meagan Murden
Susi Pastor
Brenna Petersen
Sophia Schaloff
Amyah Starkes
Adrian Theisen

Performances
Wednesday-Friday, Nov. 20-22, 7:30 p.m.
Saturday, Nov. 23, 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.
Sunday, Nov. 24, 2 p.m.

Tickets
$10 for adults, including TWU faculty and staff
$5 for students, children and senior citizens