Lakeside School

Last spring, I had the pleasure of recording an oral history interview with Al Snapp, who was hired at Lakeside in 1979 to manage the new St. Nicholas Hall theater, direct plays, and contribute design and sets to all productions, as well as teach history. Snapp directed the arts department from 1984 until 2015. He taught theater courses, migrated yearbook creation to digital tools, and developed the school’s first digital media class. Early this fall he visited me in the archives, sporting his familiar fedora, eager to discuss something he had been thinking about since his retirement in June 2021: creating a “drama archive where alums can see each year the plays and musicals performed at Lakeside and access the programs for those shows.”

I set to work. And in true archivist fashion, I got curious about the origins of drama at the school. It turns out that drama has been a part of Lakeside since the 1920s. In 1922 the Dramatics Club articulated a lofty goal: to promote a “taste for wholesome plays and for the drama, rather than moving pictures.” Students put on five productions that year, one of them en français. Under the direction of Helen Taylor Bush (who later founded The Bush School on the site of Lakeside’s old campus in Madison Park), “Le Surprise d’Isadore” was performed start to finish in French.

Tatler newspapers in the 1930s faithfully mentioned the annual Lower School Christmas play (“The Doubting Shepard” was a popular one). Lakeside was never a religious institution, but an undercurrent of Christianity permeated school life at the time. On occasion, students were the playwrights and the directors: in 1939, Hazard Adams ’43 wrote and directed a play for the Lower School drama club called “An Incident in the Life of the King of Hearts.” Hazard’s father, headmaster Robert Adams, was a poet and writer himself, and at one time had been a drama teacher.

In 1942, Lakeside boys collaborated for the first time with Bush School girls on a coed production, a performance of “What A Life,” which had premiered on Broadway in 1938. A few years later, a Tatler review commended the small but dedicated drama crew for continuing to put together such successful performances. It’s likely that some resources were hard to come by during the war, but Tatler was a big fan: “This club deserves the thanks and congratulations of the whole school for the contribution they are making to school life.” One contributor was Bill Anderson ’46 (later stage name: Adam West, of 1960s “Batman” fame), who did some of his earliest performing with Lakeside’s drama club.

Early on, members of the faculty who taught English or history oversaw drama club productions, but in 1954, Phylllis Taylor, wife of English teacher George Taylor, was hired specifically for that role. Taylor was the second female faculty member employed at what was then a boys-only school. (Janet Eiseman, librarian, was the first.) During most of Taylor’s time, the drama club put on just one major production each year. Drama was not yet viewed as an essential part of a Lakeside education.

Things changed in the 1960s. Upon his retirement at the end of the decade, headmaster Dexter K. Strong looked back with pride on how Lakeside’s arts programs had grown during his tenure. Drama had just been added to the year-round curriculum. Courses comprised improvisation, pantomime, characterization exercises, and one-act plays.

By 1971, the year Lakeside merged with St. Nicholas and created a Middle School, more arts electives were offered than ever before. The list from one of that year’s news bulletins included tonal harmony, composition analysis, baroque music, ethnomusicology, glee club, brass choir, ceramics, sculpture, woodcraft, architecture, graphics, painting, cinema, and drama. A tradition was born with the 8th grade production of “Horton Hatches the Egg,” directed by teacher Eleanor Owen as a part of the Middle School Arts Festival. The 8th grade musical continues to be an annual celebration of dramatic and musical talent at Lakeside.

The summer of ’72 saw a much needed renovation of McKay Chapel, during which the original pews were removed and a lighting grid was added, a huge improvement for music and drama performances in a building that hadn’t been updated since its construction in 1950. What the school really needed, however, was a bigger space to accommodate a student population that had ballooned with the merger. After years of planning, work began on a new arts center: St. Nicholas Hall was dedicated in 1979. The first drama performance in the new building was a performance of “A Midsummer Night's Dream” followed by “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” then “Black Comedy” and “The Real Inspector Hound.” The next school year saw the first full season of plays in St. Nick, including: “You Can’t Take It With You” and “The Sea,” directed by Linda Hartzell, who later left Lakeside to become artistic director at Seattle Children’s Theater.

Just as the physical performance space had expanded, so did the drama program’s course offerings. The number of plays grew from one or two to as many as five per year. A curriculum guide from the 1980s advertised yearlong theater arts course, including an introductory course, drama (emphasizing development of techniques), theater production, and an advanced acting course.

Hartzell started a program that gave senior drama students the opportunity and space to direct their own original short plays, a valuable (and unusual) experience for high school students. To promote original works, Snapp and Hartzell together created an original musical, based on a children’s story, called “The Geranium on the Windowsill Just Died but Teacher You Went Right On,” performed in 1980. Seattle stage actor Rob Burgess, who has worked in maintenance (and now is foreman) at Lakeside since 1978, was especially adept at choosing student actors and fitting those actors to plays. Burgess and students collaborated on a couple of original productions, including “Pieceful: The View From Here,” performed in 1993.

Middle School teacher Margery Ziff joined Marcia Mullins in directing as many as three Middle School shows per year. Ziff was a big proponent of improvisation and developed a course that allowed students access to the emotional aspects of life and people. Improv courses are a good study in how essential a drama program is for a school. It’s a practice in getting over one’s inhibitions, an environment where new and different ideas are given a chance, where students are allowed to open themselves up to rejection — from fellow students or from an audience — and understand its value as a part of the learning process. Drama, more generally, is also a training ground for collaboration, one of the most valued skills for a young person to have when entering adulthood. Middle schoolers who had taken improv courses were better able to thrive in the Upper School’s program.

The drama program also offered students glimpses of what life was like outside of school. The Upper School drama department, for many years, hosted a playwright in residence, a professional in the field who actively worked and produced plays in the Seattle area. This program led to a collaboration between Lakeside and ACT Theatre. The Young Playwrights Program was co-created by Snapp, Hartzell, and Mark Sheppard.

When Sheppard passed away, Lakeside hired Alban Dennis, who continued to develop the ACT playwriting partnership. Although the partnership recently ended, Lakeside has continued its own version with the fall public presentation now called New Works, which today includes Middle School drama teacher (and alum from the Class of ’06) Jenny Estill’s 8^th grade original pieces. Dennis created another innovative drama program, Circus!, in which student directors choose a script, cast it with students in the drama program, and direct the performances. In recent years, the scripts have been chosen from those written by Drama IV students. The department’s offerings have evolved quite a bit since the early days, but the continued presence of drama at the school indicates its enduring value.

The list of past directors in the Middle and Upper schools is long, as are the lists of participants in each production. Luckily, the archives has a decent collection of drama programs dating back to the late 1970s, thanks, in large part, to generous alums and former faculty. If there are holes in the collection, it’s often possible to find short write-ups and even lists of performers in back issues of the Tatler.

Snapp’s visit got me working on digitizing programs, inventorying the collection of performance recordings, and migrating some of those (on VHS tapes) to an accessible format for viewing. It’s a work in progress, but one that’s right in line with the archives’ mission. I’m sure there are more pieces of the dramatic puzzle out there. If you have a Lakeside drama program from years past, or a home video of a Lakeside drama performance, please consider sending it our way. 

This piece was previously published in the Fall/Winter 2022 edition of Lakeside magazine.