Horace Robinson, Professor Emeritus at the University of Oregon and theatre education pioneer died October 13th, 2009 in Eugene, Oregon. Mr. Robinson joined the University faculty as technical director and scene designer in 1933, and served as the director of the University Theatre between 1946-1970. In 1949, he designed a new, innovative theatre building for the campus. It was named for him when he retired in 1975, after 42 years of teaching, and directing over 100 productions. 

It was in 1946 that Mr. Robinson started hosting the Northwest Drama Conference on the UO campus in Eugene. In those initial years he was the drama conference and he invited productions, scholars, workshop leaders and keynote speakers to convene in Eugene during the winter to share their work and expertise with one another and with the colleges and universities in the Northwest. From that beginning he slowly built an organization that supported and carried on those ideals and later joined with the KCACTF to present the conference at different campuses in the region in much the same way that we have today.

During four decades at the University of Oregon he always taught a full class load, took students on USO tours to entertain troops, directed most major university productions, ran the speech department, helped in civic organizations, served on numerous theater boards and associations and even published a book on theater architecture. He once passed up an offer to head the theater department at UCLA, but he never was tempted to chase a career in professional theater.

“I love to teach,” he told Eugene’s Register-Guard in 1998. “I have no regrets that my career, by decision or by accident, has been academic as opposed to professional. No regrets that I’m not a professional director, a movie director or movie actor, something like that.

“I found working in an academic situation — particularly working with enthusiastic young people, who are highly absorbent — as very gratifying, in part because a great deal of the sense of achievement is not necessarily in the product but in the people, because you’ve touched, and hopefully influenced in one way or another, thousands and thousands of young people.”

Joel Rubin, USITT Co-Founder and Past President remembered Horace clearly, “He had always seemed to me to be a giant in educational theatre. He was already President of AETA when I met him and unlike most of his predecessors, took great interest in the theatre architecture and technical development committees. I also remember Horace in Board Meetings of AETA.  He had a stentorian voice that commanded attention, and he was normally brief and always very logical.  Horace was a great mentor to those seeking to make theatre our profession, and particularly helpful to those of us who wanted to work in the more technical areas.”

USITT recognized Mr. Robinson’s contributions to the field in 2008 with a Special Citation for his, “pioneering and enduring contribution to the establishment of educational theatre in America and prodigious efforts advocating for design excellence in the theatre architecture for these programs, … and an extraordinary lifetime of leadership and inspiration for generations of theatre students and faculty.”

In 1991, after 16 years of retirement, Mr. Robinson started The Reader’s Theatre Group that gave performances in hospitals, retirement homes, and other places where residents had limited access to getting out to see theatre. Over the next 15 years the group gave over 2,500 performances in Eugene and Lane County, Oregon, culminating in a final performance in 2006 at the retirement home where Mr. Robinson was living. He had booked, organized, directed and acted in each of those performances but decided, at the age of 96 that it was getting to be too much for him.