NTID Theatre History: Introduction

This InfoGuide will list NTID theatre programs, photos, videos, posters, flyers, and playbills. Joseph Fox, Marketing Communications Specialist and Panara Theatre House Manager at NTID, and Barbara Ray Holcomb, an alumna and retired faculty member, have worked with us to supply metadata. My student worker, Joel Sibert, assisted in uploading the materials to this InfoGuide. 

Dr. Robert F. Panara wrote the following document about NTID Theatre History. This is from the John Panara archive collection. This document is edited. If you want to see the original document, it is linked below this section. 

"The Drama Club arrived on the scene about the same time NTID started and opened its doors to students from different schools, backgrounds, and ways of communicating and expressing themselves.

We didn't have any real buildings of our own. We had to borrow space, dressing rooms, and a stage from RIT---using Ingle Auditorium and Webb Auditorium for our productions. Naturally, this was a case of "shared time" as well.

We had to limit our rehearsals to a week or 10 days because other organizations were also scheduled to use the auditorium at a specific time and date. We had to improvise—yes, really improvise.

Stage sets had to be created on short notice, and set-up costumes, if you call them "costumes," were mostly rented from a downtown store in the "near slums" called "The Next-to-New Shop." These were closer to being "Next-to-Old"! They were mostly worn-out fashions of decades past, a few imitations of "Royalty" in princely or queenly robes, and lots of "trinkets and baubles" fit for trading with 18th-century Indians.

The cast of characters chosen for the productions was mostly volunteers --brave souls who craved a moment in the spotlight or, as Andy Warhol said, "could become famous for 15 minutes." Warhol was talking about TV, which is what the NTID Drama Club did.

It was "live TV"—no longer practiced rehearsals, to be shown as videotapes or showcased after six full weeks of rehearsals like nowadays. It was 'live' like the early Milton Berle show, "The Sid Caesar Show of Shows," and the "Honeymooners." So anything could happen on the stage, and it usually did!

It was about embarrassment and "ham acting", about watching people make idiots of themselves, or striving to make the impossible happen. It was fun to see them stumble, the accidental happen, the awkward moments. The audience loved it - they could laugh with their friends, classmates, roommates, at them, etc. But we did have our stars. Yes, real big stars developed--sometimes overnight, a 'Star is Born.'"

B & W Photo, 1970. Robert Panara and NTID Drama Club seated outside (Left to right: Freddie Gravatt, business manager; George Payne, secretary; Guy Wonder, president; Michael Deninger, advisor; Robert Panara, advisor; Loy Golloday, advisor; Kevin Nolan, treasurer; and Charles Baird, vice president).