Announcer 0:00
This is a KUNV Studios original program. The

Wesley Knight 0:04
content of this program does not reflect the views or opinions of 91.5 Jazz and more, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education.

Keith McMillen 0:16
Hello, and welcome to Focus on Olli. Ollie is a program at UNLV dedicated to retired or semi-retired individuals who remain engaged and active in civic activities and lifelong learning. Olli is the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UNLV. Olli is made possible by support from the Bernard Osher Foundation, established by philanthropists Bernard and Barbara Osher, with a mission to support lifelong learning, higher education, and the arts. This series is designed to give you an in-depth look at the Olli program and encourage you to join in the fun. And welcome back. This month, we're going to be looking at something very special. Olli is teaming up with the Nevada Conservatory Theater on campus in a special class, hopefully two special classes, actually for fall and for spring, dealing with NCT. And to talk about NCT today, we have Kirsten Brandt and Bruce Ewing. Now you probably know Bruce from his Broadway programs, and maybe you're joining him this fall, taking a trip to New York. But you probably haven't met Kirsten, but you're going to. Kirsten, why don't you introduce yourself to these folks and tell them a little bit about your background with NCT.

Kirsten Brandt 1:41
Oh, sure thing. Hi, everybody. I'm Kirsten. It's really a pleasure to be here. Yeah, I am just starting my fourth year, so I've just completed three years here as the executive director of Nevada Conservatory Theater and the chair of the Department of Theater. And Nevada Conservatory Theater is the producing arm. We just of the department, we've just celebrated our 25th anniversary of creating live theatrical performances. We do a show of six, a season of six plays every year, and the uniqueness of Nevada Conservatory Theater is that it is, again, it was created by the faculty on campus as a laboratory and a producing arm for the department, and we bring in professional artists to work alongside our graduate students and our advanced undergraduate students to create a season of really enriching pieces of live performances that run the gamut from the reinterpretation of classics to new plays and to some and and some good old standards, but also trying to push the envelope as to what theater can be in the future.

Keith McMillen 2:48
Wonderful, Bruce. How did you get involved in this?

Bruce Ewing 2:51
Well, I've been a fan of NCT for a number of years, and being that it's right here on campus, it it over over over the past few years, it went through a rough spot, obviously, as every theater program did, especially with with COVID being the destructive force it was in so many parts of our life. And when Kirsten came on board, I got very excited because it seemed to have this new energy and this new hope that was coming into this program. Because I really believe that NCT Nevada Conservatory Theater should be a regional theater that Las Vegas can stand behind and be in love with, and and I think this under Kirsten's new leadership here, I just think it's a program that can grow into that sort of stature in in the theater community nationwide. So just as a fan of the program and watching Kirsten caress it back to life and all the energy that's going into it with the student body here, but also other professionals that come to visit, it's gotten to be a very exciting program, and or it's it's returning to its old time.

Kirsten Brandt 3:58
And that's our goal is really to To be a regional force in Southern Nevada, and to to create a we say welcome home when people come in. We want it to be the home theater for people in Las Vegas and Southern Nevada to call their regional to be the regional theater here, creating work for our community.

Bruce Ewing 4:17
And and you know I have all these students that ask why don't we have a regional theater in Las Vegas, and the thing is, we do. You know, it's it's it's young in its energy and trying to grow back. But that's why I'm. I would love to see just our entire city get behind this program, and and so I want to start it with Ali, and and you know we can we can study this program and be behind it, and then watch its growth over the next coming years.

Keith McMillen 4:39
Well, there's no doubt that Ollie students love theater, as witnessed by the number of people that accompany you to New York every year to see musicals. This is right here in our own backyard, and people don't know about it. We're across

Kirsten Brandt 4:55
the street, literally, literally across the street from Ollie.

Keith McMillen 5:00
Yes,

Bruce Ewing 5:01
and then the nice thing is, and and this is how Kirsten and I started developing this this this class that we want to do that we are going to do is in teaching the musical theater courses that I've taught at Olli for the past 1819 semesters. People get more excited about theater when they know a little bit of the background, when they know a little bit of what they're getting into, they they put for musicals. You put some of the music in their ears. The the perform you learn a little bit about the performers, the composer, the lyricists, the writers, the directors, and then you're invested in it when you go to see it. So our hope with this class is we want to make it available for Ollie students to come in to learn about this upcoming NCT season, and then to get excited about it. But each show in our class time, we're going to study how it was created, how it was put together, the underlying themes of each of the shows. Just get the discussion going and get excitement so that you understand what you're going to see for each of the productions this year. So that's sort of where we're heading. But I really think people. Before I go to New York, I sit down with all the you know this this September I'm bringing 70 people to New York, and we sit down and we're gonna see five shows, but we study the five shows before we go, and people love it when we get to New York. They just they they connect so much more. Now we want to do the same thing right here with NCT and say let's learn about it and then let's go see it together and let's talk about it afterward and and make this more you know this great communal experience even more wonderful.

Kirsten Brandt 6:36
Absolutely. I mean I think the one thing regional theater does so well is really engaged with the community, and that's one of the reasons I came here was really to bridge that off the campus, you know, into other aspects of our community that really haven't have been underserved by the department and the university. Just making sure we're connecting to everyone that lives here, knowing that we're here for them. And I also I just want to second what you said, Bruce, because I'm from California, and one of the theaters I used to work at, we would do this thing called a Ghostlight Forum, which was three weeks before the show. We'd invite all of anyone that wanted to come to a conversation about what the show was, and at that project, we would hand out these study guides or a know before you go guide, and so when I came here, I started doing that no before you go guide, so that our audiences, once you bought a ticket, you get this sort of pamphlet that tells you thematically what the show's about, gives you maybe even some writing exercises if you want to do them, but just kind of demystifies what we're doing. But I think we're what Bruce and I are talking about doing with this class is really upping even that up a notch by bringing in experts by talking about how we came down the path to a certain design choice, how intimacy and fight choreography work in a rehearsal room, how we choose what what actors are going to be on stage. I think all of those insider things really kind of add to the overall enjoyment of the piece that someone is seeing, and to understand a choice that I think is just really allows for not just a an intellectual satisfaction, but also allows audiences when they go see other work that they haven't had the opportunity to sort of do a deep dive beforehand, to use that background as it start that learning that they've to to un un mask a choice in something else they've seen. I think that could be really exciting for an audience member,

Bruce Ewing 8:34
and then to share things within a class.

Kirsten Brandt 8:37
Yes,

Bruce Ewing 8:37
and and and to be able to talk about it before and afterwards, or or you know, if we haven't gotten this far yet, but once people start experiencing the class and people decide, okay, let's all go see this production, and whether we do it all on the same day or the same weekend, when we can then come together and talk about it more, it just enhances the entire process and the entire experience, and that's where theater gets exciting as an audience member. It's not something you just go see and then go home and forget about.

Kirsten Brandt 9:05
Right,

Bruce Ewing 9:06
many many times these shows live with you for several days

Kirsten Brandt 9:09
or longer.

Bruce Ewing 9:10
Yeah,

Kirsten Brandt 9:11
I mean, there shows I saw years ago that completely still resonate with me. But I think what we're also trying to do is increase people's curiosity, and curiosity is one of my main pillars of who I am as an artist. Is I'm a curious person. I want to know more. I want to understand it. And I think when we have curiosity, it actually breeds more curiosity as you keep going, and then you want to know more and more. And I think that that's the exciting thing about talking about a show before seeing the show, and then having conversation after you've seen it, to see you know where where was it successful? Does it spur another idea from it? Theater has always been this sort of place where art intersects with live performance, intersects with music. I mean. We are we pretty much take all of those all of the art forms and throw them together and stick them in front of an audience, and I think audiences then could even have have their interest piqued by one of the artists referenced in say our production of Big Love that's coming up. You know, it might pull them into a whole different genre of visual art that they didn't know because we are this clash of all of these esthetics,

Bruce Ewing 10:27
and you know, I mean, just from our participation in Ali in that program, we have over 1000 people that are just curious. Oh

Keith McMillen 10:35
yes, oh absolutely, and I mean

Bruce Ewing 10:36
that's the exciting part when we bring all this together,

Keith McMillen 10:39
and they have backgrounds in so many different areas too. It's

Bruce Ewing 10:41
amazing.

Keith McMillen 10:42
It

Kirsten Brandt 10:43
is. Yeah, absolutely.

Keith McMillen 10:44
So your your season is six shows.

Kirsten Brandt 10:47
Yes.

Keith McMillen 10:48
We were talking earlier, and the first our first class in fall is going to focus on the first three shows.

Kirsten Brandt 10:56
Yes.

Keith McMillen 10:56
Can you give us a clue what they are?

Kirsten Brandt 10:58
Sure, of course. We've announced our season, so you can you can check that out on the NCT website. We're doing. I'm actually directing the first show. It's called Big Love. It is based on the Suppliant Women, which is an ancient Greek tragedy by Aeschylus. It's about 50 brides who run away from the 50 men that want to marry them, and they are trying to find asylum on this island. It is big. It is brash. It is written by a playwright named Charles Mee, and it is a contemporary retelling of that story. It's incredibly hilarious. I think our tagline is "Love is a mess and matrimony is deadly, and it's it's really about relationships. And the great thing about what Charles Mee does is he he he talks about the importance of modern takes on things, and so here's this ancient Greek tragedy that is has been lifted into sort of a a dark comedy, talking about what are relationships today, what what does it mean to enter monogamous marriage? What does it mean to be a woman or a man or a transgendered person in a contemporary love environment? What is love really? The play questions and what is desire, and what is our social contract? So that's our first show. It's very funny. It's nonstop, no intermission. Very there's a lot of mayhem in it, and then we're doing another adaptation, the Inspector General, which is a Gogol play that's got a modern adaptation by a man by the name of well, I call him Doc, Michael Mark Chummers, and he's recontextualized this political satire to the U.S. and it's about a corrupt city council in a tiny American town, and it's just again another chaotic sort of social commentary, but told through the gaze of satire. And then we're ending the first semester with "It's a Wonderful Life, a live radio play. So the yes, the Jimmy Stewart movie, which is one of my favorite films. But we're doing it as on stage. But we're the audience is going to watch these actors set in the '40s do a live radio play, and so we have a live Foley on stage. So radio listeners will actually get to watch kind of radio happen, and all the things that you don't see because you're only hearing voices. What what's happening with other characters that we don't actually hear through the story? So, and that'll be a lot of fun, and that will be our our holiday offering.

Keith McMillen 13:36
The just to clarify something, the Kirsten mentioned Foley. If you're not aware of Foley artists, basically those are the live sound effects that you will hear in the radio play. So when there is a knock on the door, somebody is taking a piece of wood and knocking on it, or horses, or whatever it's called for, or thunder, or whatever-it's all done live in front of a microphone, and in this case, on the stage in front of you.

Kirsten Brandt 14:08
Yes.

Keith McMillen 14:08
Yeah. If you've watched old movies, if you've been to any of my classes, you've watched old movies. Sometimes you see radio plays performed in front of live audiences while they're being broadcast. That's exactly what this is all about, and I know some people around KUNV are very excited about this one. Yeah, it should be a lot of fun. You've probably got a sellout crowd just with the staff around here right now.

Kirsten Brandt 14:32
Fantastic. We're happy to add shows too. So if they sell out, we'll add

Bruce Ewing 14:35
another. And the fun part of this too. I mean, for people that are considering taking this class, we will have well, we have the director of the first production in the class.

Kirsten Brandt 14:46
Yeah, we have the director of the second production is Davos, who's one of our faculty members, who is a dramaturge, playwright, and director.

Bruce Ewing 14:53
And and so I mean, having access while getting ready to go see the show to the people that, or maybe some of the. Cast members, some of the other artists that are all part of this-that's invaluable. I mean, it's it's going to be just a great thing for all of us.

Kirsten Brandt 15:09
And our adapter of Inspector General will be coming into town in this semester, as will Benny Ambush, who is our director for "It's a Wonderful Life. So we'll have access to a lot of different people from across the country to come in and talk about their life as an artist, the work they do, and why this play now. And that's one of the important things I think for us to to just say as as a theater company, we're really looking at why are we picking this play to do now, and all of these I think have something to say about where we are in the world and what's important for the conversation within our community for us to be having?

Keith McMillen 15:45
That anticipates my one of my questions: is how do you go through this? I mean, are some of these new? Are you looking for new playwrights at all?

Kirsten Brandt 15:54
Well, we are, and the next semester we actually are doing a new play called "How to Defend Yourself, which is written by Liliana Padilla, and that's a newer play. It's only been in the last five years, so that's a Nevada premiere, and that's about assault on a college campus. So it's more of our one of our heavier pieces. But after that, we actually are commissioning two writers. I have I can't say who they are yet because one is confirmed, the other I'm just waiting to sign. And we have the David and Stephanie Vrondrak New Play Festival Fund. And the last two years we've had six playwrights for each festival writing a 10-minute play. This year we have two playwrights each writing a one act on the theme of the future, and those artists will be hopefully in residence, or at least here to to see their shows, and those will be presented. So we're commissioning them and producing them, which is a rarity. A lot of times, playwrights are just commissioned, and the theater thinks about whether or not they want to do the show, and they hold on to it for a while, and maybe it never gets produced. But we're making a commitment to writers, new writers, to do that, and that hopefully will start to evolve into other ways in which we can pull writers in. We've done some offshoot things. We had did some a couple when I first got here. We did parking lot plays, which were new plays that we did, and then we did it two years in a row. The second year, they were all student written plays, and they were a lot of fun. But yes, new plays. Our commitment to new voices in American theater is pretty strong, and we want to give our audiences a really great sampling of newer voices in addition to classic work. I mean, we're going to end next the second half of the year. Our closing show for the season is going to be the play Clue, based on the film and the board game, which I'm super excited about because I'm a huge fan of both the board game and I actually just dug my board game out the other day, so we had it in the office, and the film, and that's just going to be an irreverent, fun who done it. I think everyone might know the Clue board game. You know, so and so Colonel Mustard did it in the billiard room with the lead pipe, whatever it may be. So I think we're looking for a combination of things. So there's a little something for everybody, but my hope is that through this class we can, the fear of the unknown, the fear of the non-name recognition show, we can dispel by really giving audiences more information about the piece, who the writer is, why the piece was written, and why it's important for us to do it now, and what conversation we hope they're having as a theater maker. If my audience isn't talking about the show afterwards, I haven't done my job, and I think I want people talking about it, going either if they're going to have drinks or going out to dinner after they see the show, or you know just meeting wherever. Just I want them to have a conversation about the themes in the piece, whether they're laughing through it or crying through it. Either one, you know. I want a conversation, and I hope these pieces linger with them. But yeah, new voices and contem and and I like to say the reinterpretation of a classic because I don't really think you can do a classic as a classic. You have to think about why you're doing the classic right now, and how that relates to us. So if I was going to do, you know, I was about to say the name of the Scottish play, which is about abuse of power, right?

Keith McMillen 19:17
Right.

Kirsten Brandt 19:17
You know, or are you doing a Richard the Third, or if you're doing a Romeo and Juliet. What is that about parents interfering in their child's love lives? Right. You can take a whole bunch of different tax attacks on how you do these pieces, but yeah, I think it's important that we give our audiences a little, you know, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, but also kind of tie them all together in something that speaks to the immediacy of the moment,

Bruce Ewing 19:41
and what's really fun, I think, with with following the season of NCT, are the students that you watch. We were just talking about this, but the past three years that Kirsten's been here, there were the grad students that have been with her for three years, and I went to graduation to see my niece this year, yet saw her actors. You know, graduating also, and you you become connected to the company as an audience member, and and that just is exciting to see on our campus and in our community. And then already, one of the actors I saw is going to be up in um shakes, Utah Shakes this summer, and to see them then leave this program and go and and get professional work wherever in the world they're going to be. It's it's it's going to be fun to watch. I think

Kirsten Brandt 20:26
that's one of the reasons I wanted to come here was every year we bring in 10 new graduate acting students, and they are there are they become our core company, and audiences then get to say I just saw her play Cinderella, and now she's, you know, she's playing this character in the underpants, or she just played Head of Gobbler, and now she's playing this very silly person in this other piece. And you get to really connected with those actors, and every three years you get a new group, and you actually get to watch them grow. It's just there's something really special about that, and you know we have a graduate program in design as well, and our and our graduate students design most of the work that we do, and and they're quite brilliant. And you can also say, oh look, look what they did in the round, or look what they've done on the Judy Bailey stage. And I just think it's it's fantastic because you're invested then in the artists that you're seeing that you're seeing, even and

Bruce Ewing 21:21
in the designers too. In the designers, I love going into the black box theater because every time you walk in there, you're in a different place, another world, and it's just amazing how they take this simple room because it really, I mean, it's it's seriously only a black box. But every time you go in for a different show, the configuration is different, the set is different, and the way I love personally, just as a former actor, or I love watching actors work in the round because you've got to be aware of your audience in every direction and still make sure your story is being told. And it's so great to see that, and so great to see the way our designers at NCT help provide that and make it happen. It's amazing, and

Kirsten Brandt 22:01
a lot of that is the mentorship of our faculty, and our faculty are all working professionals. You know, out there, I'm a union director. We have union, you know, SAG and Actors Actors Equity performers. We have USA United Scenic Artists Designers. I mean, we're all working professionals in the field, and so we're bringing that area of expertise to our mentorship of our students, and then bringing in these guest artists. I mean, we have Alan Maroka, who is going to direct Clue. Many people recognize him from Sesame Street, and he's directing Something Rotten right now over at Utah Shakes. So, I mean, we've we're just we have a great group of guest artists that are that are coming into town, and that also helps create puts NCT in the DNA outside of here, you know. So we're now going to be on these amazing humans resumes, but also they create a pathway for our students to find work outside our our amazing undergraduate population as well as our graduate students have connections then to not just us but other professionals that might you know are one of my students might find themselves in Florida and Benny might be there doing a show going great come do the show with me and I think that that's a really important thing for us to be doing and and how how we feel more like a regional theater than anything else is through that this project process of bringing in guest artists.

Keith McMillen 23:24
Okay, so I don't know that this is a characterization that is even useful, but normally a typical Ollie class follows a pretty standard roadmap. It sounds to me like your roadmap is going to be about two or three weeks for every one of these shows, maybe with some guests from that show or that are dealing with that show, people are going to really get to understand the whole process.

Kirsten Brandt 23:53
Absolutely, I think that's the goal. I mean, I think you know, I don't know who watches the after on some of these TV shows where they remember when DVDs used to have like a commentary and you would learn so much, right? They don't have that anymore. I don't even think there's DVDs anymore. But you know, I love being able to like watch a show and then kind of listen to the creators talk about the choices they made. And I think I would love that before I watched it. And I think that this is just a great way for them to get to know. So a couple weeks on each show, you know, and and how we plan out which guests are going to come, talk about what at each time. I mean, the first show, for example, Big Love. It's a there's a lot of intimacy coordination in that, and a lot of stage combat work in that in that piece. And I think for audiences to understand how we do that ethically, safely, and for the well-being of the artist is a really important thing in in our in our contemporary world.

Bruce Ewing 24:50
And something we don't think about as audience members-you go in and you see it. What we're going to have access to in this class is the ability to speak to the people that are creating it, and and. And then go see it. It's such a great opportunity for us as Olli students to be able to be part of really part of the process. I mean, you know, in in in a bigger way than just going to lunch and then showing up at the show. We'll have that background, and it's it's going to be. I'm I'm very I'm I'm very excited. The thing about artists is

Kirsten Brandt 25:19
we love talking about what we do,

Bruce Ewing 25:20
yeah,

Kirsten Brandt 25:21
because it's so misunderstood a lot of the time. Oh,

Keith McMillen 25:23
absolutely. So you know, and it's not

Kirsten Brandt 25:26
easy.

Keith McMillen 25:26
I'm thinking you're talking. We're talking like swords here, sword fighting, or

Kirsten Brandt 25:31
there's a there's a lot of different things that happen in Big Love.

Keith McMillen 25:34
Okay, there's

Kirsten Brandt 25:34
hand to hand. There's I don't want to give it away. There's a lot. There's a lot of different types of combat. So when we talk about stage combat, it does include swords, it does include you know single weapons, those kind of things. But even I mean that training alone, I'm working on the rehearsal schedule right now, and that actually is taking a lot more. It's going to take more rehearsal than some of the scenes I'm doing because it needs to look

Keith McMillen 25:56
convincing and yet be safe.

Bruce Ewing 25:58
Exactly,

Kirsten Brandt 25:59
absolutely,

Bruce Ewing 26:00
intimacy the same way. Exactly, it has to be safe for the performers to get to a place where they can be intimate and to know the boundaries of intimacy on stage.

Keith McMillen 26:09
Yes, make it look

Bruce Ewing 26:10
real, but not make it something that's that's threatening or bothersome or or triggering in any way to any human being. Right, it

Kirsten Brandt 26:17
has to look spontaneous and natural, but while at the same time it is heavily rehearsed and specific. But I also like talking about the training our actors do, and our designers do, and directors and writers. I mean, some people, oh, it's just so easy to jump up on stage and do something. It is so not. It is. It there's a reason I'm a director because acting is too hard. But it's. But I think that understanding-you don't just go. Oh, I'm a doctor now. I'm going to go perform that open heart surgery. It's, it's. Oh, I have to understand how to speak classical text in order to make you, the audience, understand. If I'm saying, oh, for a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heavens of invention, you have to be able to, you know, understand how the the poetry works right, and I think that just that that process of I you know when I even talk to my actor friends I'm like wow respect I have a lot of respect for the day even when they're professional the continual training that they

Keith McMillen 27:15
do sure you know absolutely I I have never understood Shakespeare until in high school. I had a class on Shakespeare by a teacher who loved it and who could explain it to us and really break apart the. I mean, it's written in English. It is, but this is English from a few weeks ago, you know. But he did point out, and I hate to end with a terrible joke, but that Shakespeare predicted the advent of the automobile in Romeo and Juliet. I bet you didn't learn that. No,

Kirsten Brandt 27:49
it's a joke.

Keith McMillen 27:50
Romeo says to Juliet, "Come, let me clutch thee.

Bruce Ewing 27:54
Oh, oh, dad joke, dad joke, dad. Okay, it's a dad joke. So you know, we haven't mentioned. Can we mention? So this class is going to be fall semester, 10 weeks, Thursday afternoon, 1245.

Keith McMillen 28:06
Yes,

Bruce Ewing 28:06
and and we hope people. We're so excited about it, and it's such a great way for so many of us to to be on that inside track with everybody and to see how important training is. We live at a time where people, you know, kids go on game shows to get a career, and they don't have the training. But this is our chance to see part of that training and what work goes into it, and to understand it better. And it makes it's going to make all these shows more exciting for us. I think.

Kirsten Brandt 28:32
I think so too. And I also just think that it's about our community, and I think it's about you know our family here, our Las Vegas family, and it's not a brought-in show. It's not you know something that's just going to play for three days. These are shows that are grown here for here, and I and I just you know would love to just have the community be part. You know have the that community engagement and know that we're here for them and speaking with and for them.

Keith McMillen 29:00
Yeah, wonderful. That's going to be a wrap today. But if you're more interested in this, stay tuned. We're going to give you a phone number and a website that you can get a hold of. Get a hold of us and find out how to sign up to come to one of these classes. And we'll see you next month. Thank you very much.

Bruce Ewing 29:19
Thanks, Keith.

Kirsten Brandt 29:20
Thank you.

Keith McMillen 29:22
Thanks for listening to Focus on Ollie. There are several ways to get more information. Our web address is ollie o l l i dot u n l v.edu. You may also email us at ollie at unlv. That's ollie o l l i a t u n l v at sign unlv.edu. You can also just give us a call at 702-895-3394 Monday through Friday between the hours of eight and five, except of course on university holidays.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai