Remarks by Bruce Brockman
USITT President

Our next inductee was affectionately known as Woody to his classmates and peers (and the occasional recklessly brave college student). His colleagues often referred to him as FAN for the initials he always signed his renderings with. His many students referred to him as Mr. Newlin, or later in his career, “Doc.” Many of his former students became comfortable calling him Forrest after they had long graduated, although I never could. Dr. Forrest A. Newlin was an outstanding designer of costumes, scenery, and lighting, an avid scholar, art and theatre design historian, and paramount to him, a consummate teacher.

Forrest Newlin received his Bachelor of Arts, Bachelor of Science in Education, and his Master of Arts degrees from Kansas State Teachers College located in Emporia, Kansas, the town in which he was born and raised. After graduate work at the University of Oregon and three years teaching at Idaho State University, Mr. Newlin returned to KSTC to teach with his long-standing mentor and colleague, Dr. Karl Bruder.

Following the completion of his Ph.D. at the University of Nebraska, he moved on to teach at Texas Tech, Southern Methodist University, University of Nebraska, and University of Oklahoma. Mr. Newlin was also a Fulbright Lecturer at the National Institute of the Arts and at the National Taiwan University in Taipei. In 1993 he joined the faculty of Texas Christian University where he served as a vibrant and highly respected department chair for the remainder of his career until his untimely death in December of 2002 after a brief and courageous battle with cancer.

Mr. Newlin was an accomplished and gifted stage designer. He had equal facility with costumes, scenery, and lighting, and it was not unusual for him to design all three areas simultaneously on any given production. It was this understanding of the interdependence and cohesive whole of the design elements that he passionately modeled for his students. In addition to his hundreds of designs for academic theatre, his design work was seen on many professional theatre stages here and abroad, including work at the 1992 World's Fair in Seville Spain, musicals at Burt Reynolds Dinner Theatre, and even a production of Annie Get Your Gun at the Golden Hills Theatre that was directed by Joshua Logan.

His designs have been displayed in numerous exhibits including the 2 nd Biennial Design Expo produced by USITT in 1982, and solo exhibits at USITT Texas Design Showcase, University of Minnesota, Morehead State University, University of Arkansas, Tarkio College, Chico State University, and in a retrospective of his work at last year's USITT conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Mr. Newlin gave back to his profession freely. He served as the Chair of the USITT National Conference held in Fort Worth in 1996, as President of the Southwest Theatre Association, as Treasurer and member of the Board of Directors of the Texas Section of USITT, and as the Program Chair for the 1983 National Conference in Corpus Christi. He served as the Vice Commissioner for Heritage of the Scene Design Commission for many years. In that capacity, Mr. Newlin introduced or re-introduced many members of this organization to a wealth of important designers along with design aesthetics and visual trends that shaped twentieth century theatre. He chaired and presented panels on The L. B. Tobin Collection, David Reppa, Radio City Music Hall, The Metropolitan Opera and its designers, Lynn Pectal, Eldon Elder (a fellow Emporia-ite), Lemuel Ayers, who was the subject of his dissertation, and most recently Jo Melziner, one of his favorite designers.

As students, many of us were fortunate to be part of an impressive design symposium on projected scenery which enabled us to literally sit at the feet of Jo Melziner as he talked about developing projected scenery for several of his legendary American premiers and then listen to Eddie Kook describe how the projections were actually accomplished.

Mr. Newlin's list of professional accomplishments is extensive and exhaustive, but it is his students that he considered his greatest achievement. He was proud of every one of them. During his 40-year teaching career, he served as thesis and dissertation advisor for dozens of MA, MFA, and Ph.D. students and trained literally hundreds of undergraduate design and technical production students. Every one of his students is fiercely proud to have had him as his teacher.

He instilled a sense of discipline and respect for the art form in us as much as he helped us shape our talents and our attitudes as young theatre artists. We all miss him. If you were one of Forrest's students, I would ask you to stand, and I will leave you with a quote from him about his teaching.

“In 1962 as a beginning teacher, I was caught up in teaching facts and was most concerned with the students learning the material that was presented to them. Teaching was all about presenting information. I worked very hard at presenting the material in exciting and interesting ways so as not to bore my students, and to help them I would condense the information into outlines and lists of bulleted items to make the facts easier to memorize. I still do that as an aid to their learning. But I find that I am more interested now in the student than in the material and have come to focus on them as individuals, each of them with a different way of learning. I sometimes think that good teachers teach themselves (their attitudes, their opinions, and their excitement) as much as they do a discipline. Good teachers are passionate about learning and about their discipline, and the best teachers impart this passion to their students. There is no limit to what a passionate student can learn about a subject.”

It is my honor to induct Forrest Newlin as a Fellow of the Institute. If I can call upon Tim Kelly, Lance Brockman, and Henry Tharp to help me present Charlene Newlin with Mr. Newlin's plaque and medallion.

Follow these links to stories about the other new USITT Fellows:

• Fred Foster, remarks by Sonny Sonnenfeld
• Ken Vannice, remarks by Mitchell K. Hefter
• Paul Vincent, remarks by Richard Arnold

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