A Stage for Inspiration

Annie Parham, who graduated this winter from the Honors College with a degree in civil engineering, will transition this spring into a full-time position as a structural engineer with CH2M Hill in Portland. But she’ll bring another passion with her: theater. During her years at Oregon State, she’s performed in shows almost every term. “I’ve […]


May 5, 2018

Annie Parham, who graduated this winter from the Honors College with a degree in civil engineering, will transition this spring into a full-time position as a structural engineer with CH2M Hill in Portland. But she’ll bring another passion with her: theater.

During her years at Oregon State, she’s performed in shows almost every term.

“I’ve always been a very theatrical person,” Parham says. “I went to theater camps as a kid and did the Oregon Children’s Theater Young Professionals Program. In college, I wasn’t sure if I would have time for everything.”

During her first year, though, she took an honors colloquium with Dr. Randall Milstein, “Science of Art, Art of Science,” and it supported her interest in pursuing both theater and engineering. “[Dr. Milstein] encouraged me to keep a hand in the arts, to keep the right brain and left brain happy.”

That inspiration carried her through her undergraduate years, all the way to her honors thesis. At the end of her junior year, the theater director announced that students would have the opportunity to write and act in a devised play, and Parham wanted to participate. “I thought — I’m not going to have time because of the thesis, but I talked to the director and realized I could write a thesis about doing this.”

Devised theater begins with an inspiration — an event, a text, a piece of art — and creators develop a story and show around that inspiration. The theater students at Oregon State, under the mentorship of Professor Elizabeth Helman, began with Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. “It’s perfect for college students in the arts. It’s all about finding yourself as an artist,” Parham says.

Equipped with inspiration and a name, The Upward-Beating Heart (which comes from a sentence in one of Rilke’s letters), Helman held auditions in fall term in which interested students had to create a short performance piece of two to three minutes based on a quote from Rilke and participate in a group exercise. Helman selected 11 students to be involved in the play, and Parham was one of them. Over winter break, the students studied Rilke’s work, and in the first few weeks of winter term, they analyzed the work letter by letter, discussed themes and meanings across different translations and wrote personal reflections on their explorations.

Students pitched different ideas for the subject of the show, a context in which to ground the ideas from Rilke’s letters. They found something that resonated in the Spanish Civil War. The oppression of intellectuals and artists during this time spoke to both Rilke’s encouragement of the young poet to develop true artistic expression and the political and cultural climate of the present day. “Looking back,” Parham says, “the auditions were two days before the election; we found out the result around the same time as our results, and we began writing around the time of the inauguration. It was perfect. There was nothing else we could have done.”

The group studied the history, issues and conflicts of the Spanish Civil War period, ultimately creating six stories with eleven characters and incorporating student-composed music. “The whole process of working with eleven different people from different backgrounds and the very intense ethical and political discussions we had came out in the writing. It’s about artists being oppressed by a government that doesn’t want their voices heard, so it was specific for us but also globally relevant.”

Parham’s thesis addresses the process of writing a devised show, particularly the way that personal, political and current events affect the creation of a devised play. She researched past students’ creative thesis projects to survey ideas for structuring her own.

Parham says the writing process of the thesis has been a challenge, particularly in the midst of another engineering internship and classes. She would come home with two more hours of schoolwork and didn’t necessarily want to write. “But it was easier because it was something I was passionate about. I could spend hours talking about the play,” she says.

The most memorable moment in this project, Parham says, was “when we performed and got standing ovations – seeing that people really like the play, the fact that we could create something that had a positive response.” She also remembers vividly the exciting process of creating the characters with other cast members. After one particular development in the story of the character who would become her role, Ana, she thought, “‘I definitely want to play her — I am her!’ Getting to perform as someone you helped create was amazing.”

Overall, pursuing both of her passions enriched her college experience in unique ways, and she plans to continue cultivating both. “I want to try to keep doing theater for the rest of my life. I don’t know if I could’ve gotten through engineering without theater, or theater without engineering.”And her theater-centered thesis inspired her to possibly pursue graduate school as she continues her engineering work with CH2M Hill. “I wasn’t planning on going to grad school, but now, I think maybe I could do it. I had a glimpse into writing a thesis, and next time, I could see myself writing a technical thesis. The honors undergraduate thesis is such a great opportunity.”

CATEGORIES: All Stories Students Uncategorized


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