Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, Professor and Mrs. Sammler,

It is my great privilege this evening to introduce Ben Sammler, this year’s recipient of the USITT Distinguished Career Achievement Award in Technical Production. Connecticut has been Ben’s home since 1971, and it is where he currently holds an endowed chair position at the Yale School of Drama as the Henry McCormick Professor of Technical Design & Production.

Most of us in USITT know Ben as a leading educator, a supportive mentor, a diligent editor, an award-winning author, a USITT Tech Expo founder, and a frequent conference presenter. I might note however that Ben is also known as one of central Connecticut’s most avid gardeners, an enforcer of fun activities such as highly competitive volleyball games between students and staff, and a wicked Euchre player. For years he was also known as “He Who Will Not Smile, although several of us have made it our life’s work to change that reputation. As evidenced this evening I am happy to report that we have met with some success.

 

Ben’s theatre career began in earnest at SUNY-Brockport where he received a BS degree in math education while being very active in theatre production activities. Upon graduation, Ben joined the theatre department’s teaching staff as an Instructor, serving also as the Theatre Department’s technical director. In those days, Ben’s lifetime partner, his wife Lorraine, worked in the same department as the business manager. These two have continued to partner in many ways throughout Ben’s career, especially in parenting their lovely and charming daughter, Anya.

In 1971, responding to encouragement from Dan Proctor, Brockport’s set designer and a 1970 Drama School graduate, Ben left Brockport to attend the Drama School to make him tenure-track ready. However, Dan was also a good friend of mine, and for reasons I’ve never fully understood, a couple years after he shipped Ben off to Yale, Dan approached me about the Brockport position, which I in turn accepted in 1974. This decision on my part made it impossible for Ben to return to the apple-growing fields of western New York. And although this left Ben on his own, all reports indicate that my own selfishness did not seriously impede Ben from moving ahead and fashioning his own successful career.

Eventually Ben too received his MFA from the Drama School; actually that year was also 1974.. At the point of graduation he already held the post of Lecturer, teaching and also working as technical director for both the Drama School and the Yale Rep.

In 1974 Ben was promoted to the rank of Assistant Professor remaining as technical director at the school until 1980. By that time he was already an Associate Professor and the newly appointed department Chair. In 1980, he changed jobs, taking on the position of Production Supervisor for both the School and the Rep. During his 35 years as a member of the Yale faculty, Ben has made many contributions to the profession and has mentored close to 300 graduate students. I think I can safely suggest that no other single educator in this country has guided so many successful entertainment-industry careers.

When I was a student, the Yale staff was small in number and had few teachers for technical students. After Ben took control, by a variety of means, staff numbers grew many-fold. The staff now numbers in the dozens. Like all successful leaders Ben surrounded himself with good people. He made opportunities for students to work alongside these professionals in work-study positions, and transformed the curriculum to one that turned out managers as well as knowledgeable and skilled technicians. These people have assumed lead roles in entertainment-based industries across the nation and internationally. A sure sign of a Yale grad is the superb project management skills that they bring to a task, complete with some iteration of the “Ben Forms” for resource estimations that so many of us across the nation have adopted for our own use.

Ben’s foresight and ambition has transformed the original TDL Program (Tech, Design & Lighting) into the current Technical Design & Production Program. The program has gone from a generalist focus in Technical Production to one that addresses the needs of present-day theatre technical designers and technical managers. Although admission to the School requires meeting very high standards, it can be truthfully said that any one time nearly 25% of the nation’s technical production graduate students are studying at the Drama School.

As someone who, from the beginnings of his career, identified communication as one of the most important elements of the profession, Ben etched and paved the road to introduce new ways for technical managers to communicate. To this day, Ben continues to edit Technical Briefs: a how-to guide for theater technical professionals that was started in the late 1960s, but which after a lengthy hiatus was rejuvenated by Ben and fellow Yale faculty member Don Harvey. These two, along with their many students who enrolled in technical writing classes and a few outside contributors have produced three-or-four briefs quarterly for nearly 30 years.

Today these briefs have been assembled into anthologies published by Focal Press: two so far and a third soon to appear. Ben is also the co-author (with Alyce Holden) of Structural Design for the Stage, which won USITT’s Golden Pen Award in 2000, and as a follow-up to that endeavor has led numerous professional development workshops in the subject of structural design at USITT, CITT and even KSTT (the Korean Society of Theatre Technology).

While for years it seemed that Yale held few ties to USITT, Ben led the way in forging a relationship that has benefited the school while at the same time has integrated Yale TD&P grads into all sorts of activities. He served as a Technical Production Vice-Commissioner and Co-Commissioner for a number of years, But perhaps most notable is Ben’s leadership in the creation and nurturing of Tech Expo, which this year is celebrating its 12 th anniversary. This biennial activity has provided a public forum for technical managers to display their creativity and has opened a peer-evaluation methodology that has served members well when it comes to promoting their own national identities. Even more important perhaps than the display is the accompanying catalog with its “technical brief-like” prose and illustrations giving future technicians access to specific solutions rather than the more general information found in most textbooks. And none of us need to be reminded of Ben’s fine editing skills, which made those early editions cohesive and coherent.

Early in his career Ben focused on building a network of Yale grads. To this day he remains in current touch with nearly all the students who have passed through the Yale TD&P Program. Grads work in as many capacities as there are technically-oriented jobs in the entertainment industry: manufacturers, sales reps, educators, regional theatre TDs, consultants, engineers, business owners and managers, production managers, and numerous other fields. Ben’s remarkable achievement is that his program offers student’s access to numerous professionals, contacts with those professionals, and a network of alumni that, as mentioned earlier, numbers close to 300.

In November 2006, the New England Theatre Conference (NETC) presented Ben with the Leonidas A. Nickole Theatre Educator Award -- the first time the NETC has so honored a theatrical design and production educator.

Please join the Technical Production Commission and USITT in recognizing the magnificent and dynamic career of Professor Bronislaw ‘Ben’ Sammler.