BSU Professor Honored with Board of Regents Faculty Award for Prolific and Creative Playwriting

Scholar Has Dedicated His Career to Writing Plays and Teaching

 

MEDIA CONTACT: David Thompson, dlthompson@bowiestate.edu, 301-860-4311

(BOWIE, Md.) – Professor Robert Bartlett likes to create plays in areas that stimulate him — colorful and active and full of people. He also likes to stage the plays he writes in non-traditional locations such as a record shop and a laundromat. And the last three years of his life as a teaching artist have been his most productive.

Bartlett’s work has received high accolades from the University System of Maryland Board of Regents as a recipient of the 2022 Regents Faculty Award for Excellence in Scholarship, Research, or Creative Activity. He is the only artist awarded in this category. The faculty awards are the highest honor presented by the board to exemplary faculty members within the system. Seventeen awards were given this year to faculty from the 12 USM institutions.

Bartlett, associate professor of theatre in the Department of Fine and Performing Arts, has worked at Bowie State University for 25 years.

In the past three years, Bartlett has written six full-length plays, a twelve-episode web series, and had five premieres of his work including noteworthy productions of “Swimming With Whales,” which was honored with six 2019 Helen Hayes Award nominations, including best play.

His fictional story of a war veteran driving across country, “The Regular,” was among six plays invited to the national 2020 Seven Devils Playwrights' Conference. He has a full load teaching four to six courses per semester in playwriting, dramatic literature, play analysis, and an innovative theater appreciation course he co-created. He also serves as a mentor to young playwrights at Bowie State.

COVID shutdowns force new way of playwriting

With the worldwide pandemic keeping many people inside, Bartlett said he soon was compelled to cozy up to write in his lovely home. COVID also forced many writers in theater to rethink for whom they were writing their plays, since theaters were shuttered and the hopes for production shut out.

Bartlett says he resisted “leaning into” COVID or writing about it or its lockdown. Rather, he wrote within the confines of COVID without naming it.

THE MIXTAPE, described on Bartlett’s website as, “courtship in the time of quarantine: a series of Facebook posts,” was his way to use his art to get him out of the pandemic, literally and figuratively.

“For one of my classes this semester, I assigned a final exam that required students to write a short rant monologue and shout it out their windows, telling the world what they miss and what they hope to retain about this new way of living,” Bartlett is quoted as saying in a DC Theatre Scene article.

“This writing experiment, THE MIXTAPE, as it’s now titled, is me shouting out my window and yearning for human connection.”

Colleagues commend Bartlett

Teaching and theater colleagues supported Bartlett’s award.

“Life as a playwright is challenging,” writes Tewodross Melchishua Williams, chairperson, BSU Department of Fine and Performing Arts (DFPA).

“Only a few in this country work regularly and solely in the professional theatre; most writers have day jobs, such as teaching. Bartlett, who describes himself as a teaching artist, is both a prolific writer and networker. Most impressive is the way he has utilized his skills as a writer for the stage and screen during COVID. Our students are fortunate to be able to study from a working artist such as Professor Bartlett, who models every day the tenacity and resilience required to work as a writer.”

Bartlett says he hopes the Regents’ Award recognition brings visibility to what Bowie State University is doing in the performing arts.

“We’re just coming out of COVID (knock on wood) and I don’t believe the campus community and the theater-going community know yet how to come back. We have got to let folks know, ‘Hey, we’re here. It’s safe. And we’re doing interesting, compelling, urgent storytelling.”

As if on cue, he notes that BSU Theatre students will be doing a production of “Dreamgirls” this semester that he believes will be “off the rails fantastic.”

He shares with students some great advice he’s picked up from teachers and mentors: “You have to write every day. And writing every day doesn’t necessarily mean sitting at a computer. Writing means taking a walk by the river. Writing is going to the gym. So I’m always working on a story, whether I’m in front of a keyboard or not. And I’m always thinking about my characters and their lives and struggles.”

Bartlett uses one of his favorite books, “A Director Prepares,” by Ann Bogart, to teach seniors preparing to leave the university. In it she cautions, in Bartlett’s words, “We cannot wait for someone to knock on our door. Because no one is going to knock on Bob Bartlett’s door and say, ‘I hear you write plays.’

“That’s not going to happen. So we’ve got to take it to them. We’ve got to find our audience and let them know what we do.”

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About Bowie State University
Bowie State University (BSU) is an important higher education access portal for qualified persons from diverse academic and socioeconomic backgrounds, seeking a high-quality and affordable public comprehensive university. The university places special emphasis on the science, technology, cybersecurity, teacher education, business, and nursing disciplines within the context of a liberal arts education. For more information about BSU, visit bowiestate.edu.