Position: Assistant Professor of Theatre History
Hometown: Erie, PA
College & Major: Penn State University for Theatre Arts
HC Ithaca College: In which areas do you specialize/teach?
Dr. Dail: I teach Theatre History, Social Activist Performance, which is my area of research, some upper level seminar courses, and Intro to Theatre. So, I teach everyone in the department, except juniors. I teach more on the historical, analytical side, and less on the actual practical, performance side.
HCIC: Tell me a little bit about yourself and how you ended up at IC.
DD: I did theatre my entire life, primarily as a performer, and then in undergrad, I continued performing, but I also got interested in directing and choreography. In my junior year of college, I had to take a theatre history course, and I fell in love with it. I took every theatre history course that I could fit in my schedule from then on. After I graduated, I went back into performance. I performed professionally for seven years and joined Actor’s Equity, which is the union that professional stage actors work under. Then somewhere in there I realized I wasn’t necessarily happy performing. I mean, I could do it and it was paying the bills, but something was missing, so I did a little bit of research and discovered that University of Maryland had a really good theater history program, both master’s and doctorate at that time, and so I started part-time in the master’s program. By my second year, they told me they’d give me full funding plus an assistantship if I stayed for the doctoral program, so I did.
HCIC: What’s your favorite thing about being a teacher?
DD: I adore the exchange of ideas that occur in a really electric classroom, which doesn’t happen often, but when it does, nothing quite compares with the feeling of a student getting it for the first time. Really using their brain in a different way. And that also feeds my need for learning more, too, so it really has to be a reciprocal relationship.
HCIC: I know (from taking your class last semester) that you have a special interest in the social activist theater group, Stage for Action. What are your thoughts on theater for social change in today’s world?
DD: I think it’s still applicable in today’s society, but in a much smaller way than what Stage for Action was trying to accomplish. I really am a strong believer in what I would call community based theater where a group like, [the Ithaca based] Civic Ensemble for example, is trying to change something very specific or expand the dialogue in their immediate community on a certain topic. I think that’s where it has the most impact today. I really don’t think it can have the national scope that people thought it could have in the thirties and the forties.
HCIC: What’s your all time favorite play?
DD: Oh, that’s a complicated question…In terms of musical theater, I really love most productions by Sondheim, but especially Sweeney Todd and Assassins. In terms of non-musical theatre, I really appreciate the work of Anne Bogart, and one production in particular that she did, thatSITI Company did in the early 2000s, called Score. I like original work, so that’s a really hard one to answer. It also depends on what I’ve recently seen.
HCIC: If you could meet one celebrity or person from history, alive or deceased, who would it be?
DD: Wow, I have a list of so many people that I would want to meet. Some are really personal because of what I research and because I want to know their story, but in terms of a person that I think—I mean I’m obsessed with meeting the President. I know that’s really weird, but I would love to meet President Obama, Gertrude Stein, Maya Angelou—there are so many different people! But I would’ve loved to meet my maternal grandmother.