For acting major Weston Barnwell, performing an original theater work at Upstate Medical University made him see his theatrical training in a new light. The project helped him realized that Broadway isn’t his end goal.

“I think there’s power in intimate storytelling, and small venues, and telling stories to people who need the stories told,” he said, “as opposed to a wealthy New York crowd.”

The show, called “Prognosis: Poor,” was developed through improvisation by Building Company Theater last fall and starred Syracuse University drama students. Based on a true story, the show was performed at Upstate Medical University for medical professionals and other community members.

Through experimental theater and educational programing, the Building Company Theater aims to help people understand how that art form can foster dialogue outside of traditional theater settings.

Stephen Cross, artistic director of Building Company Theater and an associate professor of acting at Syracuse University, said he was introduced to concepts of arts in community engagement settings while working with the Irondale Ensemble Project. He later moved back home to Canada, where he started a “sister” Irondale Ensemble in Nova Scotia.

When Cross moved to Syracuse to begin teaching at SU, he said he wanted to continue this kind of creative ensemble work to help develop a kind of theater that’s reflective of the communities it’s being presented in.

Building Company Theater works with local organizations — including Hopeprint, Center for Community Alternatives and Syracuse OASIS — to develop education programs that are based in theater exercises.

“It’s not just about going and sitting down in a chair and watching a show,” Cross said. “There is theater that is more participatory, there’s theater that has a much softer, or more flexible, relationship between participants and doers.”

The frameworks for these programs have been developed by Cross and other artists who work with Building Company Theater, including junior theater management major Greg Mytelka. The curriculum for some of the programs is based on teaching practices from Augusto Boal’s “Theatre of the Oppressed” and Viola Spolin’s “Theater Games for the Classroom,” Mytelka said.

Like Barnwell, working with Building Company Theater has also opened Mytelka’s eyes to some concepts not extensively covered in class, such as drama therapy and applied theater, Mytelka said.

“It’s really just made me a more mindful and creative person,” Mytelka said. “I really gained a much deeper appreciation for theater as an art form and for the way you can use theater beyond a physical stage.”

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Building Company Theater has also worked with medical professionals to develop initiatives at Upstate Medical University and the Syracuse VA Medical Center. One to three times a month, medical residents at Upstate go to the Syracuse Stage/SU Drama Complex as part of the Education Through Theater Arts program, developed by Cross and Stephen Knohl, a professor of medicine and the residency program director at Upstate.

Through workshops drawn from physical and improvisational theater, ETTA aims to help medical professionals reconnect with the humanities to strengthen relationships with patients. The exercises guide residents through group activities that help participants take time to breathe, listen and be in the moment, Cross said, in order to improve communication.

The motivation to develop ETTA, Knohl said, stems from acknowledging the shortcomings of physicians, who are sometimes seen as poor communicators by dissatisfied patients.

“Medicine is both a science and an art. Sometimes I feel we are so focused on the science that we forget the art,” Knohl said in an email. “We can’t heal and we can’t comfort what we don’t understand.”

This past weekend, Sue Henderson-Kendrick, Upstate’s director of graduate medical education, along with Kay Frank, Upstate’s strategic program evaluator in the department of medicine, presented the ETTA model at the Innovations in Medical Education Conference in Los Angeles.

Frank stressed the importance of communication in regard to patient safety. She said this issue inspired her doctoral dissertation topic after experiencing miscommunications with medical staff when her father was struggling with colon cancer.

After conducting patient satisfaction surveys, Frank’s research revealed that ETTA is making a difference at Upstate. Frank and Henderson-Kendrick are continuing to gather data in hopes to bring the program to other residency programs beyond internal medicine.

“We’re importing a more humanistic characteristic into this hard science,” Frank said. “It’s changing the way we do medicine.”

Theater, in its varied forms, has the ability to address difficult topics in a way that gives people the opportunity to observe and process the material from a distance, Cross said. His current Building Company Theater project, a one-man show called “Fragile White Guy,” addresses issues of implicit racism through humor.

“Fragile White Guy” opened last week at SALTspace, a shared performance venue owned and operated by the Near Westside Initiative. Cross said the satirical nature of the show creates a playful energy in the room that theater naturally evokes.

“(Theater) is about play. And once you start to play, then you can get some kind of objectivity about things,” he said.

Published on February 26, 2019 at 9:46 pm

Contact Haley: hrober03@syr.edu