Due to students only spending four short years at Smith, institutional knowledge from student organizations can be difficult to preserve. As alumni move further into their post-graduate lives, the specific details of their lives at Smith become fuzzier. A pivotal event for a student club, if the details aren’t recorded, might become legend or might be lost entirely.
Out of a desire to preserve institutional memory, I interviewed two people who were instrumental in creating a club that has been very dear to me: Smith Shakes, the student organization which puts on several Shakespeare productions every year.
Georgia Fowler ’21 and Fee Pelz-Sharpe ’21 founded the club in 2018 after a chance meeting. They were both sophomores taking an Italian conversation class. During a discussion together, Fowler off-handedly mentioned wanting to direct Twelfth Night, a Shakespeare play filled with grief, gender-bending and love triangles. Fowler mentioned that her only problems were that she didn’t have any directing experience and she didn’t know what student organization she should work with to mount the production. Pelz-Sharpe remembers: “I was like, ‘Oh, well, that’s really cool, I think you should do it. I love Shakespeare. I would love to come see Twelfth Night.’”
Later, Fowler reached out to ask Pelz-Sharpe (who had directing experience) if they would be interested in co-directing the show. This is how Smith Shakes’ first production came to be.
The process was somewhat chaotic. They weren’t an official club, so they couldn’t reserve rehearsal or performance spaces. Because Pelz-Sharpewas involved with the debate club, though, they were able to book spaces through debate. In return, the debate club ran a bake sale at the show.
The show also had no budget. The costumes came from the closets of both Pelz-Sharpe and cast members (but mostly Pelz-Sharpe’s). They decided to set the production in the 1980s. This was partly because Pelz-Sharpe was interested in exploring the uncertainty and anxiety of the era as well as the inescapable influence of the AIDS crisis on queer life. The choice was also practical: “Those were also the easiest clothes to thrift,” Fowler notes.
They performed Twelfth Night in the Davis ballroom. Fowler and Pelz-Sharpewanted to make the space feel “homey and warm.” Because the space echoes, Fowlerand Pelz-Sharpe had actors bring in rugs from their rooms. The first few rows of the audience were filled with blankets and pillows to give the production a relaxed energy. In addition to the natural light from Davis, they used fairy lights and lamps from people’s rooms. To add to the vibe, they hung tapestries. “We wanted it to seem like this hodgepodge, queer safe space,” Fowler remembers. They also took a couch from Talbot House, carried it across Davis lawn, and brought it to the ballroom.
Fowler and Pelz-Sharpe didn’t expect a huge turn out. “Maybe we’ll get twenty people, you know, it’ll be friends coming to support,” Fowler had thought. They were shocked when around one hundred and twenty people turned up to see the show. “We kept having to set up more and more chairs,” Fowler remembered. Pelz-Sharpe says, “Obviously because the world is how it is, a million little things went wrong right before, so it was really stressful. But then when the lights went down and the actors started coming out, there was that moment of relief and joy.”
The performance generated curiosity about the future of Smith Shakes. Pelz-Sharpe remembers, “I had a lot of people asking afterwards, ‘What is Shakes? Is it new? Are you going to do another one?’ And that felt really exciting.”
Back when they had started rehearsals, Fowler and Pelz-Sharpe hadn’t planned on starting a club. During the rehearsal process, however, they realized that the actors were interested in performing more Shakespeare plays.
The process of organizing and chartering the club took a lot of time and certainly a lot of energy. Fowler recalls that it took “about a year and two and a half productions to get to that point in the process where we became officially recognized on campus as an org rather than just a bunch of nerds in a room screaming about early modern English writing. Which we still were, to be fair.”
Now, five years later, Smith Shakes is a chartered student org with ten shows under its belt. In fact, Smith Shakes is performing Twelfth Night again! The production is directed by Izzy Wade ’24 and Nora Sullivan ’24 and will take place on April 20, 21, and 22.
When Pelz-Sharpe found out that Smith Shakes was putting on Twelfth Night again, they “lost [their] mind:” “It made me really, really excited and honestly just super emotional, that this thing that started out on a total whim is still going on almost five years later.”
Fowler is similarly proud that the club has continued: “When you start something and you’re only at the institution for four years, you wonder, ‘Is it going to keep going?’ Last year, Kate [Nash ’23] texted me a picture of the general interest meeting, and it was a room in Seelye full of people, and I started crying. It kept going, and people are still excited, and people still want to be doing stuff. That was an incredibly rewarding moment.”
