Category: Theatre

The second main stage production from SMU Meadows Theatre was Top Girls. It debuted October 22 at the Margo Jones Theatre, and it ran through Sunday. The production was declared by arts writer Mark Ravenhill to be “the best play in the last 20 years.”

It opens with a dinner party in a London restaurant thrown by Marlene, the newly promoted managing director of the Top Girls employment agency. Her guests are famous women from history and myth, including Pope Joan, the Victorian traveler Isabella Bird, the 13th-century Japanese-courtesan-turned-Buddhist-nun Lady Nijo.

Photographer Kim Leeson went behind the scenes to capture the production.

Graduates of SMU’s Student Theatre program are using the education gained in their four years of training to produce some of their own work in the Dallas-area and beyond. In addition to mainstage shows, SMU Meadows School of the Arts Theatre division offers the ability for students to run their own fully staged works. It’s called SMU Student Theatre (or SMUST), and they’ve produced shows that range from homages to Star Wars to True West. Double major Ally Van Deuren (B.F.A. Theatre, B.A. Journalism, ’15) documents the student theatre experience.

Film, television and stage actress Wrenn Schmidt (B.F.A. Theatre Studies, ‘05) visited Meadows School of the Arts recently to talk to theatre students about the industry and how her training at SMU prepared her for a career as an actress.

Schmidt, best known for her roles in Our Idiot Brother (2011), Mary and Louise (2014) and Boardwalk Empire (2010), studied in the theatre studies track within SMU’s Division of Theatre. Before SMU, she graduated high school from the prestigious South Carolina Governor’s School of the Arts and Humanities.