UC Santa Cruz

The managing of a theatrical company is as much an art as any performance or design, and yet one which receives the least attention. The reasons why a company works are often ethereal and fleeting, even for the most well-established theater, but in the case of UC Santa Cruz’s Barn Theater or other high-turnover theaters, that ungraspable working method is a yearly struggle for each new generation of managers.

In this thesis, I hope to clarify the practices by which a student-run company interacts with both the student body and bureaucratic machine, which is the University, in order to illustrate the importance of easily accessible information inherited from previous generations of managers. I will also outline a process by which our knowledge may be easily passed from generation to generation without the difficulty of re-learning the managerial lessons previous managers had already discovered. I also aim to have the reader understand that a lack of information drives down the quality of theater, and taking previous knowledge and expanding upon it is a better learning process than struggling to rediscover lost information

Drawing on all the previous material, I will transpose it into a framework which can be used by independent theater companies outside of the collegiate environment, which will assist companies with high managerial turnover improve or maintain the quality of their productions during the transitional process. This general improvement of quality will also allow the possibility of transformation from “poor theater” into a more professional form.