Ella Scurlock presenting at Pryor Center Presents: An Oral History of TheatreSquared

Author: Ella Scurlock | Major: History and Anthropology | Semester: Spring 2023

My name is Ella Scurlock, and I am studying History and Anthropology in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. My mentor for this project was Alessandro Salemme, producer at the Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History. This research took place in the 2022-2023 Spring Semester. After graduating, I plan to get an MA in History at the University of Arkansas.

In Spring 2023, I was able to continue the research that was started in Fall of 2022 by myself and the team of Honors students alongside the Pryor Center with producer Alessandro Salemme as our mentor. In the whole of this project, we interviewed seventeen staff members of TheatreSquared, a local and nationally recognized theatre company in downtown Fayetteville. Our mission was to record the history of the company and how it has impacted and been impacted by the local community, doing so through the eyes of the founders and current staff. We designed questions for each interviewee based on their contribution to the organization and interviewed them in the context of their work: on the main stage, in the scene shop, and in the offices of TheatreSquared. In doing so, we were able to capture its history and how it has grown alongside Fayetteville. The interviews will soon be in the Story Vault on the Pryor Center’s website, available for the public to view and learn from. Hopefully, these interviews will give a close and personal look at the way the arts shapes our communities.

For this project, myself and five other Honors students worked together to create a timeline, design interview questions, and conduct interviews. Our mentor helped us organize our meetings, managed the technical equipment, and kept us in contact with TheatreSquared. We also collaborated with our mentor to present our work at Pryor Center Presents. The presentation acted as the culmination of our work, and each student presented a summary of the topics they focused on as we designed our mission statement and questions. The project has improved my communication skills in a team and in public as well as my ability to plan and organize things like interviews, presentations, and the timeline and themes of the company. We also spent much of our time meeting at TheatreSquared’s permanent building, giving me a chance to interact with the community in ways I did not have time for before. Through this project, I was able to really dive into the theatre community in Fayetteville and talk to people who had history and influence in this world. This project also opened my eyes to how organizations like TheatreSquared function and how I can use it to explore their impact on the surrounding culture and economy.

This is the second project I have worked on with the Pryor Center, the first being an oral history of the Symphony of Northwest Arkansas in the spring semester of 2022. This project has seen many improvements since then, namely in organization and communication. In the future, I plan to continue working with the Pryor Center on new projects next semester with the two other students from our team who did not graduate this spring. Our plan is to continue to develop this project into a formalized, yearly research project, in which each year the students will choose a new topic relating to the community to study. I hope to see this flourish and live on after my time at the University has ended.