Profiles of Weekend Theater Personnel
Patti German
Patti German, TWT’s bright and friendly executive director, took the long way round to Litttle Rock - including Japan and Thailand.
An Air Force brat, Patti lived in California, Kansas, North Dakota, and Blytheville before her family setted
in Missouri where she finished high school and college. She earned a B. S. in education at Missouri Southern
State College in Joplin, studying theater and English .
After teaching in a reading program for a year, she was bored, so joined the Peace Corps, and spent two years teaching English as a Foreign Language in Thailand.
“I liked the non-teaching part of the experience best,” Patti says. “I liked the people, the food was wonderful, the city was wonderful.”
“After the Peace Corps, I floundered a year before going to grad school for a master’s degree in linguistics, and then I was ready for something new. I saw a note on a bulletin board about UALR’S Intensive English Language
program, and that’s how I got to Little Rock, in 1985.”
But once she got here, her graduate school offered a year’s job in the small Japanese town of Nagano, to start an English Language program and, being an adventurer, she accepted. The following year she spent in Missouri to be with her mother in her last year.
Then back to UALR, where she’s worked in Admissions and now is assistant director of the Extended Programs
office.
What nice effects playing in the theater can have are very vivid for Patti.
Directing You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown in college, she saw a shy young man who would barely look people directly in the eye be opened up emotionally with his time in the play, so that he was making conversation
easily and looking in people’s faces.
She has seen the same kind of thing happen at TWT, which welcomes newcomers and neophytes.
In 1987, she won the lead role in
UALR’s production of Kind Lady
and there she met students Duane Jackson
and Andy Hall, both very active today in TWT
She didn’t do any other theater for almost a decade and then
auditioned for Angels in America
, where she caught up again with Duane and Andy. She didn’t make that cast, but she began working around the theater, producing The Lion Sleeps Tonight, stage managing a few shows. She auditioned a few times but wasn’t cast.
“I’ve had some really nice roles since then,” she comments. “My favorite remains Azra, an old woman in Necessary Targets, a show about women in a Bosnian camp after that war.”
She played an old woman in and just recently played a professor in Wit and Du in Keeley and Du.
In fact, she’s overtaxed herself, doing three shows in succession. Add that to her duties as executive director, which she took on last September, and it’s too much at once.
But she’ll be back on stage soon.
“One of my goals is to be in the ensemble of a big musical and I was tempted to try out for Urinetown, but I knew I needed a break. "
We’ll be looking forward to seeing and hearing her again on TWT’s stage.
