College theatre professor suspended for slapping student during rehearsal

Bucksbaum Center for the Arts at Grinnell College

Grinnell College’s longtime theatre professor, Ellen Mease, has been suspended from her directing position after it was reported that she had slapped a student during a rehearsal of their upcoming production of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia.

According to the school’s newspaper, The Scarlet & Black, Mease was apparently trying to demonstrate a “stage slap” and struck the student without preparing them or asking for their permission. The student then reported the incident to another faculty member in the department.

The Scarlet & Black reports,

“Visiting Assistant Professor Karie Miller, theatre and dance, entered Roberts Theatre after a student notified her of the incident. Miller spoke with the cast and then left the theater, a source confirmed. That evening’s rehearsal continued under Mease’s direction. When asked in an email from the S&B for more information about her involvement that night, Miller responded that all questions should be directed to the dean’s office.

At rehearsal on Thursday, Sept. 16, President Anne Harris and Dean Elaine Marzluff met with the cast and announced that Mease would no longer be directing “Arcadia,” and Professor Emeritus Sandy Moffett, theatre and dance, would take over.”

While Mease has been suspended from directing this production, it’s not clear if she has been removed from teaching at the school altogether and school officials have declined to comment on additional questions.

What makes this story even murkier is the way Grinnell’s Student Government Association apparently tried to squash the story from being published by the school’s newspaper in the first place. An editor’s note attached to the original article details how students may have been upset about how they were “contacted without their consent” and didn’t want the article to come out. The SGA even allegedly alluded that the publication of this story could impact the funding of the school’s newspaper.

Here’s my take on the entire situation, because it is messy from multiple angles. The first thing that needs to be said is that Ellen Mease was absolutely wrong for what she did and that should never happen on a college production or any production for that matter. When it comes to physical contact on stage, such as stage combat or intimacy, the choreography of those moments should be handled by someone who has been trained and certified to do so. Those certifications exist and while I don’t know if Mease is certified, I can definitely say that striking someone without consent/preparation is absolutely not one of the tenants of that training. In fact, what Mease did is exactly why these certifications were issued in the first place.

It should also be noted that according to the bios of all of Grinnell’s faculty members, none of them state if they have certifications in stage combat choreography, and from what I can see, Grinnell doesn’t offer a course in it.

So where do we go from here? Should Ellen Mease’s 40-year career at the school end over this? I think, at the very least, she shouldn’t be allowed back into the classroom or direct productions until she received training and become certified in stage combat.

As for the issues surrounding the reporting of this story, that’s another issue entirely. I don’t know exactly how Scarlet & Black reporters pursued this story and it’s not unreasonable to assume that their efforts may have been interpreted as relentless. But if the students involved didn’t want to comment on the story, then they absolutely can and should have said that to the reporters. According to the editors, they would have respected a “no comment”. If the students did say “no comment” and the reporters persisted, then that crosses the line of journalistic integrity. Also, if the reports are true that the Student Educational Policy Committee and Student Government Association alluded to the loss of funding over the publication of the story, then that’s just plain shameful.

It is my hope that the Grinnell College theatre community can bounce back from this. But I do want the students and community there to know that what occurred during that rehearsal was absolutely wrong and should never have happened under any circumstance.