Ethan Brown

Author: Ethan Brown | Majors: Anthropology & Political Science | Semester: Fall 2022

Ethan Brown is an Honors student with the Fulbright College of Arts and Science, majoring in Political Science and Anthropology. Through this project, conducted in the Fall 2022 semester and continuing into the next, Ethan has been mentored by Alessandro Salemme, working for the Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History to capture the oral history of TheatreSquared. After graduating this coming semester, Ethan plans to go to law school.

The traditional model for capturing oral history is to center research around one person, event, or culture. Grounding one’s research in this fixed point can help to situate the subject, as well as the informants, in the research question. This semester, I have been lucky enough to be a part of a research team seeking to document the oral history, not of one person, or one event, but of one local institution: TheatreSquared. Throughout this semester, my team and I have found informants, cultivated questions, and conducted recorded interviews in order to understand TheatreSquared as a product of a national theatrical arc, while also being an organization innately married to the Northwest Arkansas region itself. Using our interviews, we have hoped to gain insight into the formation, foundation, and continuation of TheatreSquared, and how this institution hopes to contribute to the expansion of its immediate location of Dickson Street, along with the greater regions of Fayetteville and Northwest Arkansas into hubs of the arts and of American Culture.

I stumbled upon this opportunity by chance. The Honors College had emailed a list of research teams for the semester, and, upon closer inspection, I saw the Oral History of TheatreSquared project, led by Alessandro Salemme with the Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History, shining back at me. As an anthropology major, focusing on human culture and human institutions, this project seemed perfect for me, allowing me the opportunity to better understand a place of uniquely human art, art that has been around, in some form or another, for millennia. TheatreSquared also served as a keeper of personal memory, existing as a space where my boyfriend and I had gone for date nights or study sessions. When I saw this project, I knew I wanted to take a part in it.

From this project, I learned a lot about TheatreSquared. Founded in 2005, the theatre company started in a small building across the street from its current location. Eventually, the funding and willpower directed toward the project reached a crescendo enough to start construction on a new and innovative building, where the theater exists today. The building itself was a callback to the theaters of Europe, with one individual scouting out dozens of European theaters to gain inspiration for TheatreSquared. Since this transition to the new building in 2019, TheatreSquared has sought to position itself as a major player in the local arts scene, cultivating local playwrights and actors, and seeking to bring a taste of professional theater to Middle America, a place so often forgotten in any discussions regarding Culture and the Arts.

Conducting interviews and being responsible for the creation of probing questions has been a rewarding experience. Constructing questions that will draw out rich information while accurately painting the evolution of this institution was, at times, a difficult task. However, with a great team to lean on, and a fantastic mentor in Alessandro, I was able to structure questions that led to fruitful interviews. While we as students were responsible for the interaction portion of the interviews, Alessandro and his team were responsible for filming the interviews in order to create a documentary about the institution. We are all excited to see how the documentary will turn out, and I know that we’re all proud of having a place in it. Next semester, we will continue the process of interviewing individuals with important ties to TheatreSquared, and we will keep to our goal of capturing the oral history of such a unique and influential community institution.