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Richard Trousdell '57
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Richard Trousdell '57
Professor Emeritus of Theater, University of Massachusetts & Jungian Analyst, IAAP
Directing His Own Success
Favorite professors:
"There are many. Owen Groves, the calm and wise Chair of English; poet and journalist William Wynkoop who turned Freshman English into a course on critical thinking; Dean Richard Clemo who first encouraged me to do graduate work at Yale; and perhaps most of all, English Professor Genevra McCaw who introduced me to Greek Tragedy and taught me the symbolic thinking that eventually led me to my becoming a psychoanalyst."
Life lesson learned at Adelphi:
"The first essay I was assigned at Adelphi asked: how do you know what you know? I never thought about that before; writing that paper was a mind-opening experience for me. I still think of that lesson today."
Advice for English majors:
"Listen to Shakespeare’s Polonius—"to thine own self be true"—but with several grains of salt. Notice, for example, that Polonius doesn’t follow his own advice! Mostly, be open to your own discoveries as you meet the work of the best minds and spirits our culture has to offer."
As an actor at Cape Cod’s Orleans Theater during his junior year at Adelphi, Richard Trousdell performed in a new Kurt Vonnegut play, Something Borrowed, which got a rave review from critic Elliot Norton in the Boston Globe. Vonnegut himself worked on the production, and he liked Mr. Trousdell’s work so much that he encouraged him to go on with his acting career in New York.
Upon graduating with his degree in English-Dramatic Arts from Adelphi, where one of his highlights was playing the title role in Hamlet, Mr. Trousdell took Vonnegut’s advice and moved to New York where he studied acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse, "made the rounds" of agents and auditions, toured in children’s theater, and won his professional union "Equity Card."
"Life in the theater was exciting, but it was also insecure and frustrating," he recalls. After two years of hit or miss work in the theater – on top of a day job at Bloomingdale’s to pay the bills – Mr. Trousdell looked for steady work and a new direction. Oddly enough, his English degree and dramatic arts training made him a natural fit for NYU’s Personnel Department, where he wrote benefit brochures and gave new employee orientation talks. As a side bonus to that job, he was able to enroll for free graduate English courses at night. While completing a master’s degree in Renaissance Drama, his Shakespeare professor, Richard Harrier, had a profound influence on him. "He taught me that I had a good mind," says Mr. Trousdell, "a director’s mind." That lesson, plus the advice he got at Adelphi from Richard Clemo about applying to Yale, gave Mr. Trousdell the new direction he needed.
The Yale Drama School accepted Mr. Trousdell into its doctoral directing program, but he deferred admission for a year to find out if he really liked directing and teaching. His Adelphi and NYU English degrees won him a year’s work at St. Joseph’s College in Brooklyn and at Our Lady of Good Counsel in White Plains where – shuttling back and forth from one job to the other – he taught English courses and directed his first play, The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams. "I loved the combination of doing live theater and teaching," he says. This was a transformative experience that made him realize what he wanted to do with his life: teach and direct.
After completing his Doctor of Fine Arts at the Yale School of Drama, Mr. Trousdell returned to New York where Gerald Freedman, the original director of the musical Hair and the Artistic Director of the New York Shakespeare Festival, recruited him to be his assistant. Together, they worked at both the Delacourt Theater in Central Park and at the new Public Theater downtown, which began its first season in 1967 with the world premiere of Hair. "I was so lucky to be working everyday with bright and creative people like Gerald Freedman, Joe Papp, Theoni Aldredge, Olympia Dukakis, and Ming Cho Lee," he says. "It was an unforgettable experience."
Following this career venture, Mr. Trousdell’s passions for teaching and directing converged once again. He spent the next 10 years as a director and professor at the Drama Department of Queen’s University in Canada, where he also became Department Chair. Later, he returned to the States to act, direct, and teach at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Dallas Theater Center.
In 1979, he saw an ad for a position at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst that seemed almost too good to be true. It combined professional work as a director with the Commonwealth Stage, and teaching both undergraduate and graduate directing courses. He won the position and held it for more than two decades, where he taught and worked with many talented students, including Bill Pullman, Liev Schreiber, Jeff Donovan, and playwright Connie Congdon. In 1997, he was appointed Department Chair, and in 2000, he retired and was named Professor Emeritus of Theater.
The seeds planted at Adelphi by Genevra McCaw’s teaching on symbolic thinking led Mr. Trousdell to his interest in the psychology of C.G. Jung and its analysis of the symbols of what Jung called "the collective unconscious." As a result, during his retirement, Mr. Trousdell followed his own philosophy – "you can never go wrong by getting educated" – by studying at the C.G. Jung Institute-Boston, where he earned his Diploma in Analytic Psychology in 2004. Today he is a certified Jungian Analyst in private practice in Northampton, Massachusetts, and also publishes and lectures widely on the relationship between theater and depth psychology.
Living in the "Five-College" area of Massachusetts, Mr. Trousdell enjoys the cultural riches of the region by attending productions, concerts, and lectures hosted by the colleges. He also enjoys going to theater in New York, travelling in this country and abroad, and keeping in touch with Adelphi friends – including Marylyn (Tobin) Varriale ’57, Marge (Andrews) Linney ’55, and Carole (Eisner) Bolensky ’57.
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