One of the first concepts that I teach in my Theatre Appreciation course is that “theatre is an art form which is evanescent.” The word “evanescent” literally means “vanishing, or fading away.” In theatre, images of a performance are created in one instant and are gone the next; a quality that makes theatre performance unique. Once a performance is over, it’s gone forever. No video or film can capture the true moment in time when actors and audience exist in the same space at the same time.
— William “Peppy” Biddy
On a rainy morning last week, William “Peppy” Biddy stood in front of a computer next to his desk in Cromwell Hall talking via Skype with a student in Italy. The student’s name is Tristan, and he and Biddy were going over a marked up version of the student’s M.F.A. thesis discussing Biddy’s suggestions for improvement.
Biddy was wearing headphones, glasses, a yellow untucked short-sleeve sport shirt and jeans. He is a small, compact man whose work requires him to speak with precision. There is something about the voice, something musical, maybe it’s the hint of whimsy at the edges of his sentences.
In May, after 31 years in the MUW theatre department, Biddy will be retiring. Boxes filled with mementos are scattered about the floor of his office. Later, when I asked him what was it that first piqued his interest in theatre, Biddy walked over to the boxes and extracted a 35mm camera and a Kodak M22 Instamatic Super-8 movie camera.
“It started in elementary school,” he said holding up the 35 mm. “I’d take pictures and then take the film to Mr. Shanks downtown. I’d have to wait a week to see what I had.”
Early on, his two older sisters nicknamed him Peppy.
“They made it up, and that’s what I thought my name was until I saw it written, maybe when I was going into the first grade.”
At times in his life he thought of jettisoning Peppy, but when he applied for an equity card and needed a unique name, his friends reminded him he already had one.
By the time he got to the seventh grade, he had saved his money for the movie camera, which he bought at Hawkins Rexall Drug in east Columbus.
“We’d make little movies in the yard. I’d do things in church and school.”
It was not until he got to Ole Miss that he realized you could actually study theatre, a discipline that not only includes acting, but video and sound production, lighting, costume design, even construction.
The ignorance and misconceptions about this field of study persist. With each new crop of students, Biddy answers questions about the value of a degree in theatre. Parents want to know what their children will do with such a degree.
“Anything they want,” Biddy tells them.
Theatre involves collaboration, problem solving, improvisation, attention to detail, Biddy says. “These are things employers want in their employees.”
“Almost all of our graduates are now employed in professional theatre of some kind, or an extension of that,” he said.
Graduates of the program — theatre is a three-person department at The W — work in video production; 10 students work at Busch Gardens in Tampa; another student, Johnny Weaver of West Point, is responsible for most of the video in the World War II Museum in New Orleans. W theatre graduates are acting, directing plays, teaching, directing choral groups, working as university administrators. One, a female, is about to go to work for the Tony-winning Utah Shakespeare Festival as a master electrician.
This past weekend, about three dozen of these students traveled here — some from as far away as the West Coast — to pay homage to their teacher in a production titled “Last Call.” Biddy directed the revue billed as “a retrospective concert from 31 years of MUW theatre’s musicals.”
“I always wished I could see some of these again,” Biddy said. “Maybe they will indulge me.”
Indulge they did. Students rehearsed on their own in their homes and apartments, often connecting with one another and their director by Skype. Current students rehearsed and performed with the returning alums.
Over the years, we’ve been amazed and delighted by the quality of Biddy’s student productions at The W. How do you get those performances, I asked?
“On the brochure, we call it ‘individual attention,'” Biddy said, laughing. “When you’re directing a play and it has seven characters, you’re really directing seven plays.
“As a director you have to know how they (each actor) process things. There are no two people who operate the same way. I have to bring these people into the same world.”
As far as retirement, Biddy, 59, isn’t quite sure what it holds. “I’m not retiring from life or the theatre. I’m retiring from this office.
“David Frank (who years ago taught ceramics at The W) told me, ‘don’t stay longer than you need to.’
“Though it’s a leap (into the unknown), if I sit in this room till I was 65, there would be things I will not be able to do.”
While he’s got a directing gig lined up at New Stage Theatre in Jackson, Biddy doesn’t rule out something altogether different for his next act.
“I could be happy working with the national parks or with therapy dogs.”
Therapy dogs?
Biddy says he didn’t know that world existed; then he started hearing the term and seeing how people, his mother and late father among them, reacted to Kenzie, his border collie. “I could see how people’s behavior would change when she was around.”
More and more he noticed it.
“Once it’s in your brain, once you learn something, you see it everywhere,” he said.
Whatever Peppy Biddy’s next act is, I have little doubt the work he’s done these past 31 years has equipped him, just as he has equipped his students, to do anything he wants.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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