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After this academic year, Howard Jensen will be retiring from the Department of Theatre and Drama. His final work as a director at IU will be The Cherry Orchard, which will be presented November 12, 13, 15-20 in the Ruth N. Halls Theatre.

Jensen joined the faculty as chair of the acting program, in 1972, shortly after receiving his Ph.D. from Wayne State University. He has directed over 35 productions at IU, most of them in the University and Ruth N. Halls Theatres (see the sidebar, “32 Years a Hoosier”). He has also directed plays at the Bates Theatre Festival, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, and the Utah Shakespearean Festival.

Jensen’s impact on his students, colleagues, and audiences has been enormous. As chair of the acting and directing program from 1976-1999, he was a major architect of the respective M.F.A. programs in the department. His productions are known for their intelligence, deeply felt emotional impact, and theatrical effectiveness. In 1989 he was honored by Arts Indiana as a “state art treasure who has achieved international, national, and regional recognition outside of Indiana during the years 1979-1989.”

Michael Connolly (Ph.D, 1999), who now heads the acting program at SMU, is among many students influenced by Jensen’s work as an artist and director. “I think one of the things,” Connolly recently remarked, “that makes Howard unique in my experience (now almost thirty years long), is that he creates unique rehearsal processes for each of his productions. I've been in nine shows directed by him; each has been singular in its approach and in the tactics he used to arrive at his ends. Each rehearsal approach managed, often without the actor being conscious of it, to lead the actor to embodiment within acutely specific given circumstances. I think this reinvention of rehearsal to fit the play is what makes Howard's work so consistently ‘right’ as regards not only the tangible specifics of the action but the ‘feel’ of the play as well.”

That his art has been so honored—while his major collaborators are often students—speaks to Jensen’s capabilities and strengths as a teacher. He is a serious, demanding, yet nurturing instructor, one who imbues his students with the discipline of good theatre practice. “Everything I do in a rehearsal,” he once remarked, “is teaching.” The same may well be said of his work with student designers and stage managers. His pedagogy has not gone unnoticed: in 2002 Howard was awarded Indiana University’s Trustees’ Teaching Award, which recognizes outstanding teaching in the academic year.

Plays directed by Howard Jensen have premiered two theatre spaces for the department: 1977’s A Streetcar Named Desire opened the doors of the completely rebuilt Brown County Playhouse, and 2001-02’s Death of a Salesman raised the curtain of the Ruth N. Halls Theatre.

The Cherry Orchard

Recently Howard Jensen informally discussed his final departmental production. Here are some of his thoughts about Chekhov and The Cherry Orchard, which was the playwright’s last work.

Why do you want to direct The Cherry Orchard this season?

H. J. It’s my favorite play outside of Shakespeare, and I think it’s the greatest of modern plays. I find it very affecting and moving. If you are going to spend six months of your life on a project, you should do something you love and want to bring to the stage.

So, is The Cherry Orchard a comedy, as Chekhov proclaims on its title page?

H. J. Oh, let’s not go there; that can be so unproductive. Stanislavsky [the influential director, who first produced The Cherry Orchard] thought it was a tragedy and did everything he could to make it so. Chekhov was furious and vehemently disagreed with his director. I think he was reacting to Stanislavsky’s idea that the play was sad and tragic when Chekhov insisted it was only a comedy. It’s both. It is comic, certainly, in this sense: Of all his plays, this probably has the most extreme characters. They’re vivid characters; some of them verge on the bizarre. I love that about it. Yet The Cherry Orchard is the only one of Chekhov’s plays that moves outside its immediate situation. Without a doubt he’s writing about a family and their servants and acquaintances, but he is also writing about the end of one kind of culture—one way of life—and how another way of life is beginning and is taking over. It’s a play that tries to deal seriously with social and cultural change. And I love that about the play, too. Chekhov was trying something new here. And it’s regrettable that he died so soon afterwards. It would be interesting to see what he would have come up with next.

Chekhov can be a challenging playwright for younger actors. I think he asks that actors bring a lot of life experience to the table when they take on one of his plays.

H. J. Yes. Some of the characters can be difficult. But I teach Chekhov in my Acting IV class, and for the past four or five years, several times we’ve done an act or two from The Cherry Orchard, and the acts played well. It gave me the idea that we can do a good job with the play. I’ve always loved Chekhov. He’s influenced almost every modern playwright who has followed him. He’s an actor’s playwright. He’s in the blood of theatre people.

Working at Utah

A native of Utah, Howard Jensen is a founding member of the Tony Award-winning Utah Shakespearean Festival, where his acting credits include Malvolio, Lear, and Hamlet. In 1976 he began to direct at the Festival’s Cedar City, Utah, theatre, and continues to do so. His 2000 adaptation of the three parts of Henry VI into one epic drama, The War of the Roses, was praised by the Las Vegas Review-Journal as a “triumph” for the adaptor-director. For over sixteen seasons, Jensen has been involved with the Festival, which, as it celebrated its 40th anniversary in 2001, named him one of forty “illustrious persons who have illuminated our lives.”

His retirement will find Howard again directing in Utah, where he is already scheduled to bring Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus to the stage. He has just completed his adaptation of the script, conflating two different source texts into a coherent, meaningful whole. If one of the themes of The Cherry Orchard is how some things come to an end, while other things take on a new beginning, then Howard Jensen seems to be living quite thematically.

Illustrations above are by Dixon Reynolds (costume design for Ranyevskaya) and Fred M. Duer (scenic design for Act 2) of the Ruth N. Halls production of The Cherry Orchard.

32 Years A Hoosier: Howard Jensen's Productions at Indiana University

* Consent of the Governed was a staged reading performed as part of the US. Bicentennial Celebration at the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C.