Theater Prof. is “keeper of the vision”

By Mike LoRe

“I have very limited opportunities at present because I am in rehearsal for Cyrano De Bergerac,” professor Sanford Robbins said. “I have only early morning and late at night, approximately 11:45 p.m.”

This year, the university’s Professional Theatre Training Program, headed by Robbins, is performing 12 new productions from now until the end of May.

So far this year, he said his day usually lasts from 7 a.m. to 3 a.m., and he only gets three hours of sleep per night.

Two of the plays including Peter Pan and Cyrano De Bergerac, which he produced and directed respectively, will begin previews in the middle of this month.

Robbins, who received his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Carnegie Mellon University, said he began his career as a freelance director focusing mostly on “dead white Europeans,” like Shakespeare, Gibson, Shaw and Molière.

In 1978, Robbins started the Professional Theatre Training Program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and recruited his former Carnegie Mellon professor Jewel Walker and Temple University professor Leslie Reidel to be his partners.

Reidel said he met Robbins two years earlier in Los Angeles at an American Theatre Association meeting.

“He got determined to get me to come to Milwaukee,” Reidel said. “He’s a very determined guy in a good sense because Milwaukee is the last place I thought I would ever go.”

Robbins, Reidel and Walker moved their program to Delaware in 1988 because of the financial aid benefits for students and better location the university offered.

Besides directing at the university, Robbins has been in charge of performances in Finland, Russia, Cyprus and other locations around the world.

He said it was difficult directing in Russia because it was right after the implementation of Perestroika and the fall of communism, which resulted in increased poverty. His students did not even have enough money to buy meals during breaks from rehearsal.

“I wound up taking everyone out to lunch and dinner every day,” he said. “I spent my entire fee feeding the young actors of Russia.”

Not only has Robbins had a positive affect on those Russian students, university students in the PTTP are just as influenced by him. Graduate student Romyl Mabanta said Robbins fills many roles in his life and within the PTTP.

“I don’t even think of him as Professor Robbins,” Mabanta said. “I think of him as Sandy. He’s our coach, my mentor and our director.”

Reidel said Robbins has been chairman since 1978 when the program was first founded and since then, when reappointments of the position come around, everyone wanted Robbins to stay.

Due to their long relationship together, he said the PTTP faculty, led by Robbins, all strive to reach a common goal.

“He’s keeper of the vision and his job is to fan it like a flame, and to keep it alive,” Reidel said. “I’ve had offers to be the chair somewhere else and I always opted to keep working with him and the team we have.”

Mabanta said Robbins is committed to revitalizing American theater and he does so by perfecting details in the plays he directs.

“Sandy can make a beautiful moment of just chandeliers rising up and people surrounding them,” Mabanta said. “He makes great literary masterpieces into works of beauty.”

Robbins, who lives with his wife, Kate, on the outskirts of campus, said the focus should be on students who graduate from the university’s PTTP.

“I don’t think I’m very important,” Robbins said. “I think what may be of some value are the people who have come out of this department and have gone to perform on Broadway or for other theatres.”