Dead Parrots Society member Zach Wymore has been getting pretty fancy lately.

For his 300-level physical styles class, Wymore is learning to undertake the careful art of cross-dressing. Wymore, a double major in theatre and business with a dance minor, said cross-dressing incorporates much more than makeup and a wig. It’s about the walk and the attitude too.

Wymore said part of understanding a role is researching and observing people relevant to that role; for example, watching how women walk around campus.

“I’m a really good woman,” Wymore said.

Stroking his beard, he acknowledged the irony.

Attiring to the role

For students in Western’s theatre department, thoroughly researching a role can be the key element to a star performance.

When the role is from a different time period, Wymore said he researches the style, clothing and history of that era.

This background research is assigned in theatre classes as homework, along with theory, rehearsal, stage tech and costuming, depending on the concentration of the student involved, Wymore said.

“It’s a lot more of an academic study than people give it credit for,” he said.

Wymore is currently involved in three productions in addition to taking three classes. Because only one of his productions is for credit, Wymore is only enrolled in 13 credits this quarter.

Productions through Western’s theatre department can earn students up to three credits, depending on the type and extent of involvement. For example, Wymore is earning three credits for his involvement in Tartuffe, a restoration-era comedy that ran through Feb. 5 in the Old Main Theatre. But this does not always apply to student-run productions.

Deborah Currier, chair of the theatre and dance department, said students can sometimes earn credit for student productions, depending on how closely the students work with a faculty mentor.

“The whole purpose of getting course credit is that you are learning and getting faculty advice and mentorship,” Currier said.

Wymore is also part of the dance performance “Shimmer,” which will be performed on Feb. 25, at the Whatcom Museum.

Wymore is also preparing for a new run of Western’s US, a theatre and dance production about the American experience. US will be performed at the American College Theater Festival in Colorado later this month, he said.

“It’s a very light class load, but it’s a very heavy life load,” Wymore said.

The rule of thumb is that every minute of a performance requires an hour of rehearsal, Wymore said.

Wymore said his current “life load” consists of roughly 14 hours of rehearsing, six hours of sleeping, two hours in class and two hours of free time each day; this has not allowed for as much involvement with the Dead Parrots Society as he would like.

Dead Parrots Society, Western’s comedy improv group, performs almost weekly and will travel to Chicago this March to defend their national title.

While Wymore was in every Dead Parrots show except one during last summer and fall seasons, his current projects make it impossible for him to do weekends.

To describe his feelings about improvisation versus scripted theatre, Wymore used the analogy of a love affair. His affair is with improv, but without plays, Wymore doesn’t think he could get by. He finds improv more engaging, but has done theater for much longer.

“It’s like choosing between my babies,” Wymore said.

Behind the scenes

Western senior Natalie Hoyt, also a theatre major, prefers not to be on the stage at all.

“I have always believed that I am better off behind the curtain than in front of it,” Hoyt said.

She feels more at home with her stage management concentration, or voice acting, which Hoyt said is a safe form of acting.

Hoyt said her dad is a voice actor — he supplies voices for radio commercials. Hoyt and her brother were involved with his company as kids. Hoyt’s starring role was the voice of the “Azteca girl” in the restaurant’s commercials; her brother’s, in advertisements for REI.

Voice acting pays well, and she is still considering taking up her dad’s recording business, since she doesn’t have a clear goal or dream job, Hoyt said.

“My career goals are to get a job in literally anything I can find a job in and to make enough money to intermittently move from one country to another and then get a new job,” Hoyt said.

Teaching the art

Western sophomore William Johnson said that after taking a few years off to act in New York, he decided he wanted to teach the art of theatre, so he is pursuing a theatre major with a concentration in education.

His goal is to one day be an acting professor.

Johnson graduated from Skyview High School in Vancouver, Wash. in 2006 and went on to study at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York. Johnson said he started acting at a young age, with Sunday school puppets, skits and church plays, and became more serious about acting in his freshman year of high school.

While in the Big Apple, Johnson said he held several acting jobs. The most notable was an off-Broadway production called “The Forbidden Broadway,” a satirical review of whatever is currently happening on Broadway.

Although he’s not involved in any productions at the moment, when he is in a production, Johnson said he spends as many as 80 hours a week practicing. Right now, he said he’s taking time to focus on his classes and set himself up for his teaching career.

Johnson said he feels he has had his chance at professional acting and is ready to stop living job-to-job, with no real promise of the next.

“I don’t want to give it up [acting], I want to teach it,” Johnson said of acting.

After completing his BA at Western, Johnson plans to go to the University of Oregon for his PhD, which he said is the only university in the Northwest to offer a PhD of educational performance.

Wymore said he would one day like to start his own theatre company that incorporates elements of dance and improv.

“Definitely theatre first, then business,” Wymore said “We’ll see what the world has to say about that though.”

A different kind of major

Wymore said theatre students have been conditioned to automatically apologize for their interest, because theatre classes are massively underappreciated.

“Yeah I’m dressing up like a lady, but that’s my assignment,” Wymore said. “We do a lot of work here; capital-W Work that I think a lot of people don’t consider because it’s not sitting at a desk being miserable.”

Currier has been the department head for four years and said she enjoys working with students in the theatre and dance department, which recently merged into one department. Dance was a program on its own without a department and, like many programs, was at risk for being cut, Currier said. 

“We had been planning on merging for a couple of years and decided the time was right,” Currier said. “There’s no such thing as fiscal security these days.”

Hoyt said she didn’t always have her sights set on a theatre major. She was originally going to study linguistics until she started going to parties with theatre majors.

“I was always like ‘oh, I’m so stressed; I have to write a 25 page paper about glottal stops,’” Hoyt said. “There are not 25 pages of information in the world about glottal stops.”

Hoyt said her theatre friends had different assignments and stresses, such as rewriting a script so that the main roles could be played by drag queens and then designing a wig.

“I was like, ‘Why can’t I be stressed like [them] instead of like this?’ So I changed my major,” Hoyt said.

Hoyt said while theatre is more work than she was expecting, it is a different breed, needing much more emotional effort.

“You have to put a lot of yourself into everything you do and that takes up a lot of the space that paperwork would fill otherwise,” she said.

The hope is that in the end, all of their hard work will launch their careers, whether on the stage, behind the curtain or in a classroom.

Theatre Major concentrations:
66-68 credits each
 • Acting
 • Directing
 • Dramatic Writing
 • Educational Theatre
 • Technical Theatre
 • Theatre Management
 • Stage Management
 • Costume Design
 • Lighting Design
 • Scenic Design

A day in the life of a theatre major:

• 14 hours of rehearsing
• Six hours sleeping
• Two hours in class
• Two hours of free time

Related articles:

• Theatre, dance programs increase productions: Departments combine; some foresee rise in quality, while others expect a dip
• The story of ‘Us:’ After a year of work, Theatre Department creates play on what it means to be American
• Dance, theatre programs merge into one department