The Pollitt Family is reimagining the possibilities for independent student productions by ensuring student organizations now have a permanent home to rehearse in. The Pollitt Family Rehearsal Hall in the new Dramatic Arts Building serves as a classroom by day and a rehearsal room by night. But it’s not just any rehearsal room—it is a space for students rehearsing Independent Student Productions (ISPs). 

The Pollitts are a multi-generational Trojan Family, with Alice M. Pollitt having graduated from the BFA Stage Management program in 2015. The only member of the family who hasn’t attended USC is Alice’s Dad, Byron. Beyond that, Alice’s mom and her siblings all received either undergraduate or graduate degrees from the institution. But Byron was also welcomed as a member of the School of Dramatic Arts’ Board of Councilors. 

The newly remodeled Dramatic Arts Building that opened earlier this year features new classrooms, offices, performance spaces and, thanks to the Pollitt family, a rehearsal space for ISPs.

This is not the Pollitts’ first contribution to the School. Following Alice’s graduation, the family endowed a professorship in stage management and helped upgrade the Bing Theatre to allow for student stage managers to call the show from the wings, rather than the house.

The motivation behind that upgrade to the Bing Theatre came from Alice’s experience interning for Disney Theatrical Group, where she learned from working on Aladdin what it was like to call a show on Broadway. She said that the change to the Bing helps students gain the experience they need to thrive in a variety of different situations and be better prepared for the current realities of the industry. 

This sentiment inspired their gift to the new School of Dramatic Arts building as well. “Everything we’ve done has come out of dialogue with Alice and focused on the ways that we can enhance the student experience,” Byron said. 

A major part of Alice’s experience was not just her education in School of Dramatic Arts classes, but also through ISPs.

In donating the rehearsal room, the family had ISPs at the top of their mind. Alice was heavily involved in student productions with companies such as Musical Theatre Repertory (MTR). At one point, she said she was in rehearsals every day of the academic year between her ISP and school shows. But student groups often struggled to find spaces to not only perform in, but rehearse in, especially when there were students who needed rehearsal spaces for acting, directing and playwriting classes as well. 

“I ended up producing lots of shows…being a production manager and stage managing for them,” she said of her ISP experience. “I think that when I put the producer hat on, it was a whole new level of education that I never got in an SDA show and I never got in the classroom because it literally had me walk through step-by-step, how [to] produce a show.” 

The potential to work on shows in such a hands-on capacity is a big draw for USC SDA students. “This is not a tiny conservatory,” she said. “So you [had] people scattered all over campus and in closets trying to rehearse this stuff—and happy to do so.” 

Despite the challenges, students were able to persevere. USC SDA boasts dozens of student and school produced productions each academic year. “I was really drawn to the fact that USC had so many shows a year and that they had such a healthy presence of student groups that could do more,” Alice said. 

But Byron said that it is not just the number of opportunities that impresses and excites students, but the quality of those productions as well. He and his wife never missed any of Alice’s ISP or SDA Mainstage productions during her time at school. 

Byron ended up learning a lot along the way. Alice’s experience ended up teaching him, a financial executive, about the world of the performing arts. 

“My professional life has focused on learning how different business models and operating environments best fit together across a number of different industries,” he said. “In live theatre, I had no idea how demanding the management skills are and how complex it is to mount a production given the scope of expertise required.” 

Alice is still putting the skills she learned to good use. She is working as a stage manager on the Broadway production of Swept Away, which stars fellow SDA alumnus Stark Sands (BFA ’01). Byron finds that the talent and quality of SDA and ISP shows speak to the power of theatre as an artform and will continue to do so. “The caliber of production that SDA puts on, not just the school-led productions, but the ISPs really engage the audiences,” he said. “It’s why live theatre has prospered for 4000 years, maybe longer—it just affects you emotionally and engages you in ways that [have no] substitute.”