Hi! I'm from the Cumberland University chapter located in Lebanon, Tennessee. I was wondering if anyone had any ideas on how to pump our cast up. Last spring, we initiated 12 new members, but it seems like no one wants to get involved with anything. Does anyone have any tips for us? I am starting to get tired of holding meetings where only us officers show up. Thanks everyone!

My cast is currently in a similar situation in that we are trying to become more active as a group. Our solution to this, in part, is simply to stay active in the life of the theatre department by going above and beyond our current involvement. Ours is a small school with a small theatre department and an even smaller APO cast. Here, it's possible to accumulate enough points for a bid in less than a semester because everyone does everything.

However, the Cast as an organization has not been very active in the past. We are trying to change that by organizing social events and by contributing to the physical assets of the theatre. We usually use important dates as a excuse to get together. Some good examples would be Christmas, Halloween, the Oscars, the Tony's, Founders' Day, your faculty sponsor's birthday, etc. The seating for our audience is older than everyone in the cast except our faculty sponsor, so we have begun to raise the funds needed to replace the chairs. It will probably take us several years, but it's a way of being and staying active. Zeta Theta cast also does concessions for HSU's shows. This semester, we're going to build nice, permanent concession booths for the theatre.

In the long term, you might seek to establish traditions (yearly cast productions, service projects, etc.) and if possible, include your understudies in such activities beginning with their audition period or before. My cast awards points for working concessions, for example. Seek to make "a life useful" a real part of cast tradition, so that active participation seems normal.

Seek a life useful.

Andrew