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| WABASH MAGAZINE | SUMMER/FALL 2004 | |
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| | September 28, 2004 Sharing a Passion for Theater | Pacheco and the actors of "Peter Pan" warm up for dress rehearsal.
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Wabash junior Reynaldo Pacheco has performed in his home country of Bolivia in national productions of “Cats,” “Oliver,” and “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”
He sang and played the part of Pontius Pilate in Filharmonic de La Paz’s production of “Jesus Christ Superstar.”
He has also performed in productions at Wabash; his thought-provoking play, “The Doll,” was staged here last fall, and he was invited to audition for the Juilliard Conservatory before he came to Wabash.
So why did he agree to direct 44 young actors, ages 4 to 19, in a relatively small-scale production—albeit an unusually energetic and imaginative one—of “Peter Pan” for the local Sugar Creek Players?
Pacheco is surprised by the question.
“You always learn new things when you direct, and these people are very open to new ideas, to creating something fresh,” he says. “It’s been a great experience for me—it’s always great to do theater like this.”
Pacheco says many of his most important lessons in theater have come from small ensembles.
“I was in theater with gypsies in Bolivia, and we performed where ever we could,” he recalls. “We didn’t have a building or many costumes—we had a mat we’d lay over the floor to keep from getting splinters. But I learned more about practical theater there than anyplace else. They are so passionate; they do this because they love it.”
Pacheco, whose first English-language play was performed at the high school in Brilliant, Ohio, where he was an exchange student four years ago, hopes to stage and act in more of his plays here in the future.
But following the “Peter Pan” performance, he jetted off to Chiapas, Mexico to work for a second summer with the Indigenous Theater Project founded by Smithsonian scholar Robert Laughlin and supported by Nancy and Dave Orr ’57. We’ll include an essay by Pacheco about that experience in the next edition of WM.
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