Dick Sewell, Professor of Theater and Dance

By Robert Gillespie

"The difference between a play on the page and a play on the stage is the difference between a mounted set of cat bones in a museum and a live cat," said Dick Sewell. In February, after 27 years of putting live cats on the Colby stage, director Sewell will produce his finale, playwright Sewell's The Maroni Notebook.

In his office in the Runnals Building one day last November, the adjunct associate professor of theater and dance recalled a one-act play on a temporary stage in Runnals gym in 1974, his first year at the College. On opening night the crew had to shinny up the light poles to re-aim the lights, which illuminated only the front row of the audience.

"We've come a long way since then," Strider Theater not the least of it, said Sewell, whose career at Colby spans the growth of the Theater and Dance Department. "It was very much a collective effort. The big thing has been the assemblage of a small but strongly collegial department. It's been really exciting to work with, for which I am very grateful."

Staging The Maroni Notebook seems a fitting exit for Sewell, who entered theater through the door of playwrighting. A couple of his plays were put on during his college days at Bard, but his socialist tendencies got him in hot water, he says, and he walked out short of graduation-only to go into "the most unlikely thing for a socialist poet," the U.S. Army. Stationed in Germany, he was approached through the USO to direct a production.

"Having chutzpah and naiveté, I agreed," he said.

Back in the States with a European credit-the play won a contest among Army posts-the Montville, Maine, native knocked around in summer theaters and taught at High Mowing, an arts high school in New Hampshire, before returning to Maine in the late 1960s. He directed plays at Coburn Classical Institute in Waterville, which kept him alive, he says, until his third try at establishing classical theater in Maine succeeded.

In 1970 The Theater at Monmouth, with Sewell as artistic director, became the first professional classical repertory theater north of Boston. The theater he founded is the only classical repertory theater anywhere in the United States to survive without a major donor or connection with an academic institution, he says.

Shakespeare was his touchstone-"theater that cherishes, relies on and extends the power of language" rather than theater that relies on the power of event or personality. "The kind of theater that interests me is the kind that does it through language," he said.

But ask him his specialty and he laughs. "Prop making?" He points to the donkey's head he made a few years ago for A Midsummer Night's Dream.

"I'd have to be called a generalist," he said. On top of teaching directing and playwrighting and directing at least two shows a year he has taught Greek, Renaissance and Restoration theater history. "I know a little bit about a lot of aspects of theater, and I am very comfortable with the poetic language of most of the areas of English theater," he said.

He makes costumes for plays, too.

"He's a man for all seasons," said Tina Wentzel, chair of the Theater and Dance Department. "Dick is a very, very bright man. He's probably read every play out there."

In 1974 Colby gave Sewell an honorary degree-a salute, he says, to Monmouth "for the arrival of classical theater in the outback." The next year he was directing Colby students in Runnals gym.

"I get them on their feet as soon as possible, let them blunder through the scenes," he said. "It's probably traditional, old-fashioned stage direction-mostly active scene work, going over and over it. I try to make sure that they understand what the words mean, the connotations and suggestions. If you really understand that, a lively scene emerges."

The Maroni Notebook promises a lively scene come February. Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's elopement to Florence plunks the idealistic English poets in the middle of hectic Italian politics and street fighting, earnest lovers and revolutionaries. All sides have their say. Words, as one character says, are "living wings."

"There are things said in it I really do believe," Sewell said. "But I hope it's a good story."

Sewell's actors are rehearsing The Maroni Notebook in their Jan Plan course, the ideal time to put together a production, he says. Learning how to do a play is an experiential process, and both students and director in the Jan Plan "can give their whole mind to it."

"The only way to learn theater is to do it and do it and do it," he said. Some former students "go to every audition in New York City. But I would never say it is a profession in which anything is promised. I say, learn theater, enjoy it. If you can't bear to do anything else, do it."

And what will Sewell's next act be, now that he's stepping away from those live cats on stage?

"I'm sixty-seven," he said, "and I haven't had my midlife crisis yet. I have a lot of trunk plays and trunk novels. I will be busy."

Dick, break a leg.