“Very small, but mighty”— Chatham’s Drama Club

This article was originally published in the Spring 2023 edition of the Chatham Recorder Alumni Magazine by Cara Gillotti. To view more digital Recorder stories, click here.

One night, Finn Dusek ’26 got a text from Sarah Baker ’25. Are you still interested in acting in one of our plays? 

Dusek responded that they were. 

Great, can you be the Queen? 

Dusek said that they could. “Then she sent me the schedule,” Dusek recalls, “and I was like ‘Oh—it’s in a week!’” 

Such is the scrappy, get-er-done ethos of Chatham’s Drama Club, which was resurrected by then-student and now Drama Club co-advisor Maria Shoop ’13, MFACW ’14 after the theatre major was disbanded while she was an undergraduate. 

“As a liberal arts school, I thought it was important to keep theatre alive,” Shoop says. “I think that for students who are actively pursuing arts as a degree but also students who are interested in arts casually, it’s important to have those kinds of outlets on campus.” 

The drama minor 

Officially relaunched in 2020, Chatham’s drama minor offers instruction for students wishing more background in theatre. Courses are taught by Maria Shoop ’13, MFACW ’14 and Dek Ingraham ’20, and include a production lab, a stagecraft course, and a special topics dramaturgy course focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion. 

As befits a scrappy, get-er-done enterprise, students helm all aspects of production—from club management to acting to production to directing to writing. That play Baker texted Dusek about? It’s called Kingdom’s Demise, and it was written by Baker, who also directed the production. 

Having a play she wrote be staged was “truly unbelievable,” says Baker, who is majoring in criminology. “Coming up to tech week, it still hadn’t fully sunk in that what I made was becoming real. It was also very emotional to see so many people coming together and believing in something that I wrote in my free time and were like ‘Yes, this is good, let’s put everything we can into this.’” 

Each year, the Drama Club stages two or three productions, based on a chosen theme. While input is widely sought, the task of choosing the theme falls to the Club’s artistic director, currently Leo Liotta ’23. “The theme often depends on the social climate of Chatham and the world in general,” Liotta explains. “The theme I picked for ’21 and ’22 was escapism, very immersive or nostalgic, things that removed you from the current reality because we’d just had a year of COVID. This year, it’s ‘Hot off the Press,’ which is about doing new things—both new works, and things that are new for us.” 

This spring, the Drama Club is stretching its wings with Heathers: The Musical, the Club’s first full-scale musical in quite some time. Based on a cult-favorite movie from 1988, it’s a dark comedy about a girl named Veronica Sawyer who gets indoctrinated into a culture of popularity. 

For music, the producers plan to have a live pit orchestra. “It’s super-ambitious, and music is notoriously hard, but we have a jazz class that has a lot of talented musicians, we’re finding a lot of people who know people who can come in and pull it off,” says Liotta. 

 Music ensembles at Chatham 

Last fall, Chatham launched its band program. “It’s going well!” reports Chatham Band Director Adam Lee. “Our jazz ensemble, which has the intention of being our flagship program, is up to 15 students. It’s almost a little big band, and there’s only room to grow from here.” Jazz ensemble played at Candlelight last winter, and Lee hopes to hold outdoor performances on the Quad once weather permits. 

Chatham also has a “little tiny itty-bitty” concert band. “It’s small, but we’re doing fun stuff in there,” says Lee. “This semester, students have decided that they really like the music from the soundtrack to a video game called SpiritFarer. And so I am guiding them in writing their own arrangement of that music.”

“To run a good concert band, you need 30 or 40 people, all playing different instruments, and at Chatham we just haven’t had a band program long enough to have developed that sort of student body,” says Lee. “Now, students know coming into the University that band is something they can continue to do. That’s what we’re looking for, and that’ll help us grow something like a concert band.”

The Drama Club reached out to Lee to ask if he would direct the pit band for Heathers: The Musical, but Lee said that he would rather train a student to do it, and so he is working with music student Tsering Sherpa ’24 to direct the pit band. “I will guide and coach her in how to be a conductor as opposed to doing it myself,” he says. 

I ask Liotta what makes a play right for Chatham. “I think that Chatham, because of its history as a women’s college, and because of its current status as a liberal arts college, has a history that was and is very, I think, queer, but also very activism-based, and because of that I think that shows that work really well for us are things that try to make a point socially. There’s also an environment at Chatham that appreciates when people are trying to do something innovative.” 

That innovation spans the digital divide, when not even COVID stopped the Club. “We held rehearsals over Zoom and performed over a streaming service that allowed people to pay to watch,” says Club general manager Nora Robb ’23. “It was a lot of making people’s backgrounds as uniform as possible, which was difficult, making sure peoples’ mics were not awful, getting props and costumes to people who were all over the country. It was challenging.”

“We have continued to try to be ambitious, but realistic as we’ve tried to push the limits of what the drama department could be,” says Robb. “Over my four years here, we got a minor, so maybe we can get a major, or be taken more seriously by the campus’s culture. We’re really hoping that Heathers does that, because it’s such a big, popular show. We’re hoping that people will come.” 

“We’re in a unique spot in theatre in Pittsburgh because we’re very small, but mighty,” says Shoop. “I think we have many interesting things to offer the world of Pittsburgh theatre with our background and with our perspective. You can see that in the passion of the students. The students care about what we’re doing, and they care about making sure that it stays alive. I will continue to invest that time because they continue to invest that time.”

Take Dusek, the Club’s one-week wonder. “I didn’t have many lines, but they were all mini monologues,” they say. “I was really stressed. On opening night, I was supposed to have a bloody napkin around my face, and I completely forgot to grab it. I was so nervous, I almost fell down the stairs. But once things started going, it got a little better. Everyone was really supportive, and it was good.”