NEWSROOMS are busy places. Dozens of decisions must be made each day about the content of that day’s paper. Some of those decisions must be rethought several times before the press starts to roll.
All of this is a preface to an admission that should come as no surprise to any newspaper readers: Sometimes, in the bustle, an article does not get the attention it deserves.
Take last week, for instance. An article that deserved Page 1 space wound up back on Page 8 — the ESU News page. As a result, some readers may have missed the article or not recognized its importance.
The news was this: Emporia State University’s production of the play “Five Women Wearing the Same Dress,” in competition at the regional theater festival at Iowa State University, was chosen to be performed at the American College Theater Festival at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. The festival features the best of the best of the nation’s college theaters.
This will not be the first trip to the Kennedy Center by a play from ESU. The university has consistently been in the top rank of undergraduate theater schools in the United States. The theater department’s talented and innovative faculty and students — directors, actors, set designers, lighting designers and costume designers — have repeatedly brought national and regional honors to the campus.
Graduates of the theater program have gone on to teach in schools all over the country, lead their own departments or work in professional theater. Many of them have worked in New York — on and off Broadway.
Emporia gets the benefit of all the talent and professionalism that the department musters. In the fall, winter and spring, the department offers the Emporia audience show after show. In the summer, the ancient and honorable ESU Summer Theatre provides another season of delights.
The theater department is one of Emporia’s treasures and this new honor provides national recognition of the department’s worth.
And that should have been Page 1 news.