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Theater producers

Why I Chose Theater Instead of Science

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Theater producers

 

I love science. I love learning about how the world works and using answers to find new questions. I spent all of high school and college focused on learning about science.  Then, in college, I learned that real science, experimental science from the ground up, is slow and often you don’t get those answers until decades into the process.  So, I took my honors degree in Anthropology and Zoology and my membership in Sigma Xi, the scientific research honors society, and I turned to my other love, theater.

Theater has so many of the same elements of science.  A group of passionate people working together to make limited resources tell a story about some idea or problem. There are always new questions, new answers, new puzzles.  You get to build relationships with incredible people who look at the world in wildly different ways but come together to create one ephemeral piece of art.  And you get to do it in a period of months with a hard deadline that cannot be moved because an audience has paid and the press is coming to that first show.

So I work in TAPS as the Production Manager and I get to help students, both in the department and in the many student performance groups on campus, make theater.  Making theater gives students the chance to look at the world and at problem solve from a different lens than that of the classroom or lab and can open up many exciting ways of thinking.  Research, communication, collaboration, problem solving, all of these are things that come up daily, hourly as a production moves from concept to performance.  Come and check it out. 

Jane Casamajor

Production Manager
Theater & Performance Studies

If you have a Stanford Story you would like to share, contact melissas@stanford.edu.