USC Price Professor and Bedrosian Chair Raphael Bostic led a panel on the set of “Whipping Man” at the Pasadena Playhouse. (Photos by Jeffrey Taylor)
The USC Price School of Public Policy and the USC School of Dramatic Arts have announced a partnership called Policy at the Playhouse.
Policy at the Playhouse began as an initiative at the USC Bedrosian Center on Governance with the idea that conversations about governance happen in many different forms and must be voiced by many different communities. Because the School of Dramatic Arts is steeped in the language and voices of artists in the field, this partnership will allow the program to grow and deepen within the USC community. The initiative will provide conversations about theatrical productions on and off campus, as well as create a new podcast of the same name to bring conversations about Angeleno theatre to off-campus audiences.
“The Price School is known for its interdisciplinary activities, and we’re pleased to expand the conversations around governance through the Policy at the Playhouse partnership,” said Jack Knott, Dean of the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy. At USC Price, the program will be led by the USC Bedrosian Center.
“I am very excited to partner with USC Price on Policy at the Playhouse,” said David Bridel, Dean of the School of Dramatic Arts. “By promoting and reflecting upon the civic function of the theatre, we celebrate its original impulse – to bring communities together to imagine new futures and interrogate the past.”
“This partnership will allow the great expertise at the School of Dramatic Arts to deepen the conversations we have already been having at the Price School about theatre, and hopefully, vice versa,” added Aubrey Hicks, Executive Director of the USC Bedrosian Center. “The arts are too important to leave out of governance conversations, we must explore what it means to live in our democracy. We look forward to a successful and productive collaboration between the School of Dramatic Arts and the Bedrosian Center.”
The partnership marks the first formal relationship between the USC School of Dramatic Arts and the USC Bedrosian Center, although faculty from the schools have collaborated on projects in the past. Recent collaborations include a panel discussion of the theatre of politics during the 2016 presidential election; the Price Projection Room podcast which looks at visual storytelling, media literacy, diversity, and the public good; and the Bedrosian Bookclub Podcast which discusses new and classic works (fiction and non) through a lens of governance.