Southwestern College junior Tori Fairbank, Garden City, has been accepted to study at the National Theatre Institute located at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center in Waterford, Conn.

“I was speechless when I got the email saying that I was accepted,” Fairbank says, smiling ear to ear.  “I was so excited and then I thought to myself, ‘How am I going to do this?’”

Roger Moon, associate professor of theatre and speech at Southwestern, says that this quite an honor for Fairbank and Southwestern.
“This is an enormous honor for any student and for the colleges that helped her,” Moon says.  “I say colleges because Garden City Community College is a really strong program and two of our students have come from there.  She (Fairbank) has made enormous growth in the process this year but it is really what she has done out of her own character.  It is exciting and a real honor.”

Moon says that this is a rare occurrence for SC students. 

“Eugene O’Neill is really the father of American drama and the O’Neill Center has developed this program,” Moon says.  “The last student we had go there was Seth Bate back in the early ’90s. Tori has a huge range of intellectual capabilities.  She understands history and dramaturgy, she has watched directing, she has been doing a lot of stage management as well as performance and playwriting. She has a large liberal arts foundation but depth in enough areas for them to say ‘This person could put together some really important stuff and move forward in American theatre.’”

Fairbank will spend most of the fall 2015 semester in Connecticut and will have a two-week residence in London.

“This will give me the chance to network with some people and it will give me a leg up on becoming a professional actress,” Fairbank says. 
Fairbank says that she will take 20 credit hours with classes beginning at 7:30 a.m. and lasting until 10 p.m. seven days a week.
“I think my willingness to work hard and my passion for theatre really helped in getting accepted.”

Fairbank indicates that it will be costly to attend but well worth the expense.  To assist in meeting the expense, she has set up a link at www.gofundme.com/GetMeToNTI.  

The Eugene O’Neill Center was founded in 1964 by George C. White, in honor of America's only Nobel Prize-winning playwright.  The O'Neill is home to the National Playwrights Conference, National Music Theater Conference, National Puppetry Conference, Cabaret & Performance Conference, National Theater Institute, and National Critics Institute. 

Writers and directors, puppeteers and singers, students and audiences alike take their first steps in exploring, revising and understanding their work and the potential of the theater they help create.

All focus on the script, as it begins its journey to the stage.  Actors work with simply rendered sets, no costume design, and script in hand, revealing for the first time the magic of a new play or musical, puppetry piece or cabaret act.