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Saturday, September 01, 2007

Coming to 'thesda.



So I suppose ol' UD will have to go and blog the thing. It's called Redshirts, and it's a play about bigtime university athletics:



"I have to choose my words very carefully," said Lou Bellamy, Penumbra Theatre artistic director, as he began to discuss the experiences of Lou Bellamy, University of Minnesota theater professor. The academic Bellamy is quite familiar with the topic that director Bellamy is staging as Penumbra opens its season in St. Paul.

"Redshirts" (the title refers to the practice of keeping a player out of varsity competition for a year to extend his or her college career) concerns a group of student athletes at a major university who are accused of plagiarism. Beyond that dramatic hook, though, the work by playwright Dana Yeaton explores the minefield that athletes, coaches and professors tiptoe through every year as they juggle academics and high-stakes college sports.

Bellamy has seen hundreds of real-life examples over some 30 years of teaching at the university -- student athletes who navigate the system with varying degrees of success and failure. He's been caught between the rock and the hard place of balancing academic necessities and flunking a student, which can end their athletic career and, ironically, dash whatever hopes they might have had for more education.

"The stakes are way too high," said Bellamy, "as universities are being used as training camps for the professional leagues. We have a ways to go on this."

Bellamy heard about "Redshirts" through Blake Robison, artistic director of Round House Theatre of Bethesda, Md. Round House is coproducing the show, and this production will travel to Bethesda. Previously, Robison headed the theater department at the University of Tennessee and invited playwright Yeaton to come down in 2004, several years after an academic scandal at the Southeastern Conference school.



"My motives were not to do an expose about the obvious thing -- that there's academic fraud in college football," said Yeaton. "I wanted to write a play about people we think we know, but that goes several layers down, like the stereotypical dumb football player who we later see is smart and self-aware."

In Yeaton's play, four running backs for fictional Tennessee Southern University struggle through a poetry class and end up being accused of plagiarism when similarities appear in essays they each wrote. The backfield coach intervenes with the English professor. Throughout the piece, a tutor figures prominently with the athletes.

If all this sounds familiar, local audiences certainly would find resonance with the academic tutoring fraud at the University of Minnesota that forced the resignation of basketball coach Clem Haskins and four top officials in the athletics department in 1999. Jan Gangelhoff, an administrator in academic counseling, was the leading figure in a scandal in which she and others completed assignments and wrote papers for athletes.