Goshen College’s theater department may be small but it is filled with talented people, as seen by the program’s recent participation in the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival. KCACTF is a five-day event where several GC students were able to participate in  multiple competitive semifinals and finals for scholarships.   

Aysia Adkins, a junior music major, was a semifinalist in the musical theater intensive. She recalled, “It’s a lot of people… I’m not actually sure the number, I feel like it was a hundred or something [people] on day one that I auditioned.” She explained how the number of people went down to around 60 people for the semi finals and then to 16 for the final. 

Meredith Blossom, a senior  english and theater double major, was scene partners with Jocsan Barahona Rosales for the Irene Ryan’s acting scholarship. 

She remembered her favorite part of the experience was “finding out we made semi finals which was 45 out of 180 people … at the end of the night they announced 45 people … [Jocsan]was listed at the very last of the list,” she said. “I just remember being so, so excited and jumping up and screaming and I think I started crying too.” 

Amy Budd, associate professor of theater, shared that over all four years there have been 10 theater majors participating in total and “three out of the four past four years we have had a finalist.” 

The festival includes bigger schools like Ball State and Illinois which can have several hundred people in their theater departments. “They have like four people in finals. For us to send a person up to that level every year makes me so so proud of our students,” Budd said. 

Even though there are competitive aspects of the festival, its primary goal is to be an educational experience. Budd explained, “There are hours and hours of workshops. There are between, I would say three to six different workshop opportunities that students can elect to attend and numerous topics around production design and performance.” The examples she gave were resume preparation, stage combat technique, stage intimacy, voice and speech and many more. 

There is also real-time experience. Kaitlyn Baker, a senior theater major with a focus on the technical side, was a part of the stage management intensive- so she got to use those skills at the festival. Baker managed the stage for applicants auditioning to earn Ryan’s scholarship, and she explained what that looks like: “So for the Ryan’s that’s a lot of checking people in, making sure everybody’s there on time, as well as making sure they go into rooms with their respondents so they can get all of their feedback.”

 Another part of the experience Budd finds educational is all of the outside feedback students receive for their work. She said, “We are tiny and I think it’s, in any field, it’s good for students to study with multiple professors and have multiple mentors. So KCACTF every year is our big opportunity to get some voices into people’s heads other than mine.” 

She pointed out that this can particularly affect students who are on the technical side of the theater program, saying, “We don’t have a design and production focused faculty member. So our students have a disadvantage only having one professor with one set of expertise … so, those students in particular have new perspectives and to get to talk with folks that are in their specific area of interest.” 

Along with performing and helping performances run, students are also able to go see shows once or twice a day. However, a large part of the experience is the social community. 

Baker shared one of the things she enjoys was the bus ride which this year was a four hour ride to Madison, Wisconsin. 

Adkins said, “My favorite part was definitely the community in the festival. There were just so many hundreds and hundreds of theater kids that were staying in the same hotel, so that was the really fun part was that you were never isolated.”