Professor Gordon Reinhart reflects on nearly 30 years at Boise State

Theatre Professor Gordon Reinhart was a teacher long before his first acting role. As a child, he played the violin and taught lessons through college. His mother, a schoolteacher herself, was a powerful source of inspiration.

"I can remember her taking me into her third grade classroom when I was in preschool," Reinhart said. "I can still see the light in the room, the chalk dust, and I just fell in love with it."

Today, Reinhart teaches acting and directing in the Department of Theatre, Film and Creative Writing at Boise State. Though, like any character in a good drama, his path has taken its share of twists and turns before depositing him here in Boise.

Reinhart may have been destined for the stage early on, but not in the sense you might expect. He studied the violin as an undergraduate student before pursuing an MFA in acting. That musical experience paid off in one of his early roles in the play "Amadeus," playing the virtuoso violinist, pianist and composer Amadeus Mozart.

Later, while working professionally as an actor and director, a chance offer from Richard Klautch (now a Boise State professor emeritus) brought Reinhart to Boise.

"He and I were good friends in Detroit and then, years later, he got the gig here in Boise and asked me if I would come as a guest artist," Reinhart said. "I directed a play with the students and had a blast. I thought, 'what a beautiful area', and that's when I got excited about teaching again."

A theatre faculty position opened up, and Reinhart hasn't looked back. He regularly acts and directs for the Idaho Shakespeare Festival and the Boise Contemporary Theater. He has watched his students grow the theatre community here in Boise, taking roles locally and building acting troupes of their own. Reinhart also directs Boise State theatre students in department productions.

Earlier this semester, Reinhart directed a staged reading of Bertolt Brecht's masterpiece, "Life of Galileo," in which Klautch returned to campus to play the famous astronomer with a cast of Boise State students. The one-night performance sold out the Danny Peterson Theatre as part of a collaboration with the Department of Physics.

Reflecting on almost 30 years of teaching at Boise State, Reinhart feels that many of the things that make the theatre program great have stayed the same. "The department functions as a pretty good team," he said. "And the environment is largely positive." Reinhart said he is grateful for the excellent culture here.

Now Reinhart has his eyes on the future. He is working with colleagues to plan next year's production of "A Christmas Carol" and working on his own script with support from a School of the Arts AI Fellowship.

Reinhart's play, called "Dead Week and the Final," follows a theatre professor who has been teaching for many years. Ready to retire, the professor tries to get a generative AI model to teach Shakespeare with, perhaps, predictable results.

You can see Reinhart in the lead role for "Dead Week and the Final" on March 27 as part of the Treefort performances on campus. He will also appear in a Boise Contemporary Theater production of "Ajax" by Habib Yazdi, playing an American diplomat caught up in the 1953 coup in Iran. "Ajax" will run from April 22 to May 9.

Share This

• Share on Facebook
• Share on X
• Share on LinkedIn
• Share through Email