THEATER PROFILE Sarah Bay-Cheng: Buffalo’s globetrotting “theoretical theaterist” By Ron Ehmke; photo by kc kratt Between our lunch at Fuji Grill this summer and the time this article sees print, theater director and UB professor Sarah Bay-Cheng will have coordinated a project at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, addressed the International Federation for Theatre Research in Munich, and presented a paper at the Association for Theatre in Higher Education conference in L.A. She’ll also be promoting one book [Poets at Play] and awaiting the publication of another. Such is the busy life of a woman whose career crisscrosses the classroom, the printed page, and the stage. I got to know her when we both worked on WoyUbu, a collaborative project she helmed in 2009 in which two classic plays formed a “mash-up” incorporating two different sets of live actors, projected images, robot battles, audience-controlled computer games, and puppets. The tech-savvy show was an example of what is now called “intermediality,” which Bay-Cheng broadly defines as what happens “anytime you put performance in the context of digital technology.” The field has its origins early in the 20th century, but it has gained momentum in the age of virtual reality, interactive games, and smart phones. Bay-Cheng may come by her interest in performance naturally—raised in Sacramento, she was the child of theater folk and jokes that she owes her birth to her mother not getting cast in the first road show of A Chorus Line—but what originally brought her to college was sports. While at Wellesley on an academic scholarship, she found herself captivated by critical theory among a “spice rack” of other subjects; volunteering as a techie gave her keys to the university theater, where she began transforming classroom theory into stage practice. A year in the MFA program in directing at Purdue convinced her that commercial theater was not for her, so instead she pursued a doctorate at the University of Michigan and spent four years teaching at Colgate in Hamilton, N.Y. before coming to UB five years ago. Along the way she met her future partner, Laina Bay-Cheng, a Ph.D. in social work and psychology who is now an associate professor at UB. The pair have two sons, Diego, eight, and José, nine. The entire family loves Buffalo; the zoo and museums are favorite diversions. Theater is an obvious draw; Bay-Cheng pays particular attention to the offerings at Irish Classical, New Phoenix, Torn Space, and the Subversive. But she’s still a jock at heart; “this past year I started doing triathlons,” she says. “Those are some very wacky, very fit people.” “The nicest surprise in moving to Buffalo,” Bay-Cheng notes, “is the art history that I was woefully ignorant of before I arrived here.” But it’s not just the past that excites her about the area; it’s the “open, dynamic, and inclusive [arts] community.” Bay-Cheng advises students to look beyond the “pick-me model”—the audition-driven dream that “‘eventually somebody’s gonna pick me and put me in this role and I’m going to be successful.’ That does happen, it just doesn’t happen to as many people as are trying to make it happen. “People are going into huge amounts of debt to go to college and are looking for ways to maximize the return on their investment,” she notes. “I am sympathetic to that way of thinking, but I’ve never shared it. … College is becoming one master checklist, where every class is a to-do task. The idea of doing something unproductive, truly unknowable, or with a high risk of failure is to be shunned at all costs. “My role is to encourage students to think about the alternatives—to cultivate a love of risk and a willingness to read things that are too hard, watch things that are too difficult, and try things that are impossible. Otherwise [theater] threatens to become a museum, with no purpose other than misplaced nostalgia.” To that end, Bay-Cheng and her colleagues in UB’s department of theater and dance have developed a new graduate program in Theater Performance. “The arts and humanities have absorbed so much from the sciences, but we have somehow not absorbed the most valuable thing: the spirit of true experimentation, the sense that failure is part of the process. “In hard times, theater is seen as expensive and expendable. I think we need to do a better job of making the case for theater for something other than escape. Otherwise, we end up with [lightweight Broadway fare like] The Addams Family and nothing else.” Bay-Cheng is quick to point out that there is always room for pure entertainment. But theater has the potential to offer audiences so many other things, too—and with such a dynamic teacher, future generations are far more likely to keep seeking them out. Associate editor Ron Ehmke is a Tonawanda-based writer and performer. SUBSCRIBE NOW Back to the Table of Contents Back to Top