PSU Magazine Spring 1993

Toscan stops to talk with students in his Introduction to Playwriting class. University, an experience he admits shaped "the belief that you can have first-rate artistic effort side by side with careful budgeting." His academic interests eventually drifted back to the arts, and he entered graduate school at the University of Illinois to pursue his primary interest in theater. After a two-year teaching fellowship at Fresno State, he landed a job at USC, where he eventually became Dean of the school of theater-a position he likens to being president of a small college. Along with overseeing faculty and curricula, Toscan was responsible for fund raising, balancing budgets, recruit– ing students, you name it. "It was sink or swim," he says. The experience should prove help– ful as he faces funding cuts dictated by Ballot Measure 5. Budget shortfalls have already forced the shutdown of PSU's dance department, yet Toscan is cautiously optimistic about Measure S's overall impact. "It strikes me as a very 12 PSU serious management problem, but still just a management problem. While there will be a lot of unpleasant fallout in terms of what we'll end up being able to offer, I believe that we can solve the problem somehow." Toscan is reviewing ways to refocus the dance program in the absence of a formal department, such as having the Contemporary Dance Season support dance activity for students. What sort of climate does Toscan expect for the arts in the future? One that, with any luck, will acknowledge the tremendous impact art can have on how people approach the world. "There's a growing understanding that the arts really provide a different way of looking at the world, that it's not just a leisure-time activity. It has to do with the way in which the arts move us out of a conventional verbal approach to thinking about issues, to concentrate more on things that are not expressed in simple language or simple words." Toscan cites studies that link study of the arts to high SAT scores, reading ability, and mathematical competence. "I think it's not an accident that some of the world's great scientists and researchers tend to have a great inter– est in the fine arts or music, sometimes theater or dance. That's an integral part of their lives and probably has a lot to do with how they see the world and think about their work." The same could be said for Toscan himself, who continues to keep his hand in theater when time permits. His current project, which he hopes to devote more time to this summer, is "a rather odd stage adaptation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter involving the use of Japanese Bunraku puppets." Certainly not a conventional approach, but Toscan enjoys taking risks. "I'm much more willing to explore a lot of different ways of doing what we do." D (Leslie Cole is a Portland freelance writer .)