Special Collections opened “Spotlight on Tradition: 125 Years of Cap & Bells” — a new exhibit that celebrates the 125th anniversary of the student theatre group — on Tuesday Jan. 16. From show programs to photographs of crew members, the exhibit showcases a wide range of archival materials, bringing visitors on a visual journey through Cap & Bells’ long and storied history as the oldest continually running student theatre group in the nation.
The collaboration with Special Collections was organized by students on the Cap & Bells board: An offshoot of archival work they had conducted as part of Professor of Theater Amy Holzapfel’s course, “Performing Archives: Global Theatre Histories From Antiquity to 1900.”
“In the class, we went through the archives to learn about the history of theatre at Williams, how theatre in general has been preserved, and how whitewashed it is,” co-artistic director of Cap & Bells Casey Monteiro ’24 told the Record. “When the Cap & Bells board was deciding what to do for the anniversary celebration, a couple board members and I who had taken the class brought up the idea of working with archival materials. We reached out to Special Collections and went from there.”
Cap & Bells board members worked primarily with Head of Special Collections Lisa Conathan, who played an integral role in making their vision for the exhibit a reality. “I supported the board members as they selected the materials and gave them some structure to help them learn how to prepare an archival exhibit,” Conathan wrote in an email to the Record. “But they made all the selections and wrote all the text themselves.”
“She was super amazing in terms of being a leader, but also letting us take the lead on what we wanted to do,” Monteiro said of Conathan. “She taught us everything — from the fact that you need to wear gloves if you want to handle photographs that aren’t in plastic cases to how to clean the inside of the boxes.”
Members of the Cap & Bells board sorted through a wide array of material before deciding what would be displayed at the exhibit. The group started with Cap & Bells’ most notable alums, such as renowned composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim ’50. “We wanted archival material related to him on display,” Monteiro said. “From there, we looked up specific people’s names or specific years in the archives to see, for instance, what Cap & Bells was like before women were at the College.”
“We wanted to make sure that the archival material at the exhibit was holistic,” production manager Sari Klainberg ’25 added. “For instance, there is a section of the exhibit highlighting crew members — such as metalworkers and light board operators — so that it does not just acknowledge the actors, directors, and writers of the productions.”
Board members expressed particular enthusiasm for the exhibit’s display of the score of Sondheim’s original senior thesis musical Phinney’s Rainbow, which was on display at the exhibit. “After Cap & Bells put on the musical, it got produced on Broadway, so the sheet music we have in the exhibit is the actual sheet music after a Broadway licensing company bought the rights to it,” Monteiro said. “It’s crazy that all these years later, students of Cap & Bells are still writing musicals for their senior theses and then putting them on at the College.”
Cap & Bells board members also said that they learned new information about how the theatre group has changed over the years. “It was really cool to find things about how Cap & Bells used to do work that was written and directed by professors, which would never happen today because the group is an entirely student-run, separate entity,” Klainberg said.
The archives also grappled with darker points in the history of Cap & Bells. “Some of the material we found was really upsetting, and we knew it was going to be there — we knew that there were likely going to be really offensive moments,” Klainberg said. Some of this material included photos of performers in blackface and programs with racial slurs in them, according to Klainberg. “Most of this material we did not include in the exhibit, because some of it was harmful, and we wanted to focus on things that we could use to move forward, while acknowledging that the past has not been pristine and that theatre still has a lot of work to do.”
Monteiro added that the exhibit serves as an important reminder of Cap & Bells’ history, and a point of reflection for its future. “I think it’s important to not forget the legacy that we came from, even though each of us are only here for a short four-year period,” she said. “The exhibit helps us realize how many years of theatre came before us at the College.”
“Spotlight on Tradition: 125 Years of Cap & Bells” will be on display in the Special Collections Gallery on the 4th floor of Sawyer Library through the first week of March.
