Former MA student Allison Dillon, honours the late Professor James Loehlin.
When I was a student at Winedale in the summer of 2013, James assigned me the role of Prospero. My initial excitement quickly turned to apprehension. James valued when students were “word perfect” in their performance and with his encyclopedic knowledge of the plays, a dropped syllable or an inverted word never escaped his attention. With so many lines, I found it difficult to get through the play without a mistake. Disappointing James, every Winedale student’s worst nightmare, seemed like an inevitability. I monomaniacally focused on the text, hoping that if I set the verse deep enough into my mind errors would be impossible.
A key component of the Shakespeare at Winedale program is that the students are responsible for crafting the costumes and props that appear on stage. James tried and tried to convince me to make a robe for Prospero. An anxious mess, I stubbornly refused. None of the patterns he showed me or rich fabrics he’d found could divert me from my futile attempt to be a word-perfect Prospero.
Finally, one day at lunch, James pulled me away from my meal and led me to the back of the barn. He showed me a dull, dusty curtain in a storage bin. It was the first curtain that had ever hung in the discovery space of the Theatre Barn, decades old now and starting to fray. James asked if I would make a new robe if he let me use this curtain as my fabric. He knew that would be too special of an offer for me to decline. He’d found the tool to pull me out of myself and gently push me to do more than I thought I could. The way he cared for his students is something I’d never seen and will likely never see again.
