Editorial comment: Take your bow, Prof. Jeff Entwistle, and inhale the applause. Yours has been a four-star career.
The amazingly talented set designer will exit both stage and University on May 17, 2020, retiring after a 36-year career at UW-Green Bay (and three as an assistant prof. at Illinois State.). He leaves a long-lasting legacy at the University and hundreds upon hundreds of close friendships. He is loved. Most importantly, his ties to former students, colleagues and friends will continue to exist long after he cleans his office in Theatre Hall on the Green Bay Campus and waves goodbye to the stages just across hall and next door at the Weidner Center for the Performing Arts, of which he magically transformed through the years.
In spring 2018, Entwistle provided an inspiring Commencement speech that described why he stayed and made UW-Green Bay his home, when he could have taken his skills anywhere in the world…
“You are graduating from UW-Green Bay successfully. You have fulfilled your primary goal to leave this university on this day! I failed at that same goal almost 30 years ago and I have failed to leave year-after-year since. And it is all your fault…
Right about the time I should have been leaving UW-Green Bay with my tenure in hand, a group of my very first students, who had arrived the same year I did, walked across the stage at graduation and something happened to me. I was hooked, I was, in fact, inspired! I was inspired by their success. It was not only about the professional skills they had developed; I was inspired by the people they had become in those four or five years…” See his full speech.
UW-Green Bay will miss his faculty-led trips to New York… and productions will miss the behind-the-scences talent of his wife, Donna, who worked in UW-Green Bay’s costume shop for 13 years! His love for theatre was contagious, not only to theatre majors, but for those who had even a few moments in his presence…
Bravo Prof. Entwistle.
The following: Entwistle talked with Critic at Large Warren Gerds in an extensive three-part series…
GREEN BAY, Wis. (WFRV) What did the coronavirus COVID-19 do to your calendar? Everybody has an answer. That of Jeff Entwistle has layers. Speaking by telephone from his home, he started his two-hour interview with me with this: “When the cancellations began to happen, I was the final stages of our New York theater trip that I lead on spring break.”Jeff Entwistle is a theater professor at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, and he has regularly led students and community members on show-packed, fact-packed excursions to The Great White Way.“I had already spent $40,000 out of the $49,000 budget from the people paying for their trip. The Wednesday before we were to leave—less than a week—all spring break trips got canceled, all classes.”
Jeff Entwistle talked about the role of theater at a university, answering this thought sequence: Universities have theater programs. Why do they have theater programs? What is it about theater? You head out in any direction from Green Bay—or anyplace—there’s a theater there. What is about theater?
“You can reach people’s souls,” Entwistle said. “You can reach into their hearts, into their minds. When you share stories and tell meaningful stories—like I remember some of the audience leaving ‘Play Nice.’ The audience was like, ‘What did we just see?’ But it makes you think. And one the things that—my god, I hope they were thinking after that show—was we were doing a play that was talking a lot about child abuse and what kind of things go on. It doesn’t come out in those words in the play, but we’ve got kids afraid of their mother because she’s going to punish them again kind of thing…”
Source: Warren Gerds/Critic at Large: The grand design of Professor Jeff Entwistle of UW-Green Bay, part 3
(See the rest of the interview, here.)
