Gloria Baxter spoke Monday night as part of the Academic Speaker series at UTM.

Baxter’s presentation was called “Old and New Again – Narrative Theater.” In her presentation, Baxter talked about what narrative theater was and it’s history. “Narrative theater is defined as staging prose text not originally written for the theater,” said Gloria Baxter.

The roots of narrative theater go back to Ancient Greek theatre and the use of a chorus which added narrative elements to drama as well as dialogue. Certain aspects of narrative theatre can be seen in Asian theatre as well.

Baxter stated that there are really no rules to narrative theatre, because the form of narrative theater today is a relatively new art form. It’s a form that invites discovery and invention.

She said there are many questions a person should consider when preparing a script for narrative theatre. What kind of play do I want to present? What do I want to say with the play? How do I want the audience to react and feel? What do I want them to leave the theatre thinking about? Many of these questions relate to producing any play no matter what style.

Ms. Baxter’s original script for George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” called for seven actors, Dir. Ken Zimmerman almost doubled the cast size to 13. “My needs were to use as many students as I could,” said Zimmerman.

After her lecture, the 13 cast members of Animal Farm performed a scene from the play. The scene was from the very first chapter of the book in which the animals ran the farmer off the farm and formed their own government. “I think ending the lecture with this scene from Animal Farm was a great way to tie in what she said with how narrative theater looks and sounds,” said Katie Price, a freshman Communications major from Indian Mounds, Tenn.

Ms. Baxter worked with the 13 cast members in a narrative theater workshop, helping them get a feel of performing narrative theater. “It was very exciting working with Ms. Baxter, the workshop was very hands on and she explained everything very understandably. She was such a down to Earth person and I really enjoyed working with her,” said Ana Shaw, a freshman Theatre major from Knoxville.

The lecture started at 7:30 p.m. Monday and, because of bad weather, everyone was asked to leave the auditorium and proceed toward the game room. A half an hour later, the sirens stopped and everyone went back in the auditorium and Baxter continued with the lecture.

Baxter’s adaptation of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” will be performed by UTM’s Vanguard theatre Nov. 4-7.