Welcome to the Farm!
I’m Sarah Deutsch, a part-time stage manager, part-time personal assistant and founder of the Free-Range Drama Farm. Here’s a little bit about me:
Since the age of 12, I’ve known that I wanted to be in the theatre. I became de facto Stage Manager for my 6th-grade class’ stage adaptation of Clue - I was scared to death of going onstage - and I loved it! I began to devour everything I could find about backstage life, and started plotting to make it my career. I worked all through high school as the Assistant Stage Manager at Pittsburgh Musical Theatre, and then went on to study Stage Management at Carnegie Mellon University.
Since graduating and moving to the San Francisco Bay Area, I’ve discovered that my love of teaching theatre outweighs even my love of doing theatre. I worked for 4 years as Stage Manager and Assistant Production Manager for the MFA program at American Conservatory Theatre, and that’s where I found my true calling - helping to create a great educational environment for theatre students to learn in, as well as mentoring and teaching the other stage managers around me.
The idea for the Drama Farm is based on the six weeks I spent in Edinburgh, Scotland, as part of a joint program between Carnegie Mellon and Queen Margaret’s University in Edinburgh. We took 10 students and two faculty from CMU, and together with 5 students and several staff members at Queen Margaret’s, we designed, built, rehearsed and performed a show at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Collaborating with my peers to create our own show was one of the greatest educational experiences I’ve ever had, and for years it has been my goal to create a place where more theatre students can have the same kind of amazing experience.
Ultimately, our dream for the Drama Farm is to have a dedicated facility where students can come for a semester to collaborate on a production of their own making, working with a professional director and a staff of theatre professionals as advisors. That’s a big dream, though - for now, we’re starting small.
We’re working on putting together a two-month “mini-program” for the summer of 2009. It’ll be a sort of “beta test” of the idea, to see what works and what doesn’t, and how it can improve.
What we’re looking for now is a group of passionate, innovative people to collaborate with us to come up with the ideal program. It’ll be rough around the edges, to be sure, but it’ll be fun and exciting, and a one-of-a-kind experience too. As far as we know, this has never been done before - and we want you to help us do it.
What do you say?
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