Want to help decide what musicals and plays we produce for our 2019-2020 season? Apply today to be on the 19-20 Play Reading Committee. Click here to get more details and to apply. It’s a lot of work, but also a very rewarding way to serve our community and help chart the artistic course of our Majestic Community Theatre program. The committee is chosen by myself and the aim to is represent the community at large. However, it’s also very much depends upon who applies, so if you know someone who has a strong opinion about the Majestic, encourage them to apply! The deadline for application is April 15th, 2019.
And if we’re recruiting the PRC, that means proposal season is right around the corner! As discussed at our State of the Majestic meetings in January, we will be making a couple of significant changes this year to the process:
In past years there was a requirement that directors had either directed at the Majestic previously or been a senior crew member on a Majestic production. We’re lifting that requirement for two reasons. Firstly, it has limited our pool of submissions so that for some slots, there wasn’t really a choice being made. Just a confirmation or rejection. Thus, if a rejection were to occur, the process would need to start over. To avoid this, we need to encourage a diverse number of choices for our PRC to choose from for each season slot. Additionally, it required that potential directors be de facto chosen by other directors by virtue of requiring them to have worked on a previous production as senior crew. This limited the potential of directors new to our community to those favored by current directors, which while not an inherently bad idea, can lead to a more closed community than we want.
In previous iterations of the process, the PRC was required to tackle the job of making decisions not just about the show being proposed or the director’s visions for it, but about the directors themselves. This isn’t an appropriate thing for volunteers to be doing within our operational paradigm and has the potential for very negative situations to arise. Instead, decisions about the fitness of volunteers to fill roles at the Majestic will be made by me. I am a professionally trained supervisor and a public employee who was hired to make objective decisions according to City of Corvallis policy and procedure. I go thru training each year on how best to enact discipline, hire or terminate, and other difficult tasks. Thus, I am the best and most appropriate person to make decisions about who should be allowed to occupy the various volunteer positions at the Majestic. It’s literally my job. So where does that leave the PRC then, if I decide who is qualified and able to direct shows? Well, it’s just that: I decide who is qualified and able, not who actually does it among the qualified applicants. The first step in the process moving forward will be applying to be able to propose. I will review the applicants, check their references, skills, experience, and determine if they meet the minimum qualifications for the positions. If they do, they will be allowed to propose. If they don’t, they won’t be allowed to propose and I will suggest improvements to their skills or experience that would improve future applications.
So those are the two big changes to the our season proposal process. If you’d like to be a PRC, apply here. If you’re interested in directing at the Majestic for the 2019-2020 season, shoot me an email to chat about the process or the official process will begin on May 1st.
Thanks for all that you do!