Elevating the stage.

Byline: Paul Denison The Register-Guard

On May 29, Bob Barton will take his final curtain call as a director at the University of Oregon, bringing that part of his career full circle.

That will be the final performance of William Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing," which opens its run Friday in Robinson Theatre.

"Much Ado" was the first production that Barton directed here, and it will also be his last, although he will teach for two more academic years before formally retiring as head of the university's acting program.

However, his career in theater will be far from over even then. The author of a highly regarded introduction to acting, Barton is now at work with Annie McGregor of Penn State, once his student, on two books: "Theatre in Your Life," an introduction to all aspects of theater, and "Life Themes," an anthology of plays that will include his adaptations of "Much Ado," Anton Chekhov's "Three Sisters" and several other plays.

He also would like to write a book on acting comedy.

Barton says he "stumbled" into the business of writing books years ago after being approached by acquisition editors who had seen his students perform in competitions. He began to write his first book, "Acting: Onstage and Off," while on a sabbatical at home, serving as primary caregiver for his newborn son. He's now working on the fourth edition of that book, due out in 2005.

"It just escalated," he says.

Barton also has written extensively for academic publications, on a range of topics including "Vocal Emotional Intelligence," "Gogging: A Model for Theatre Pedagogy," "Director Modalities" and "N.L.P. (Neuro-Linguistic Programming) for Actors."

He worries, in fact, that the amount of writing he's been able to do will create unreasonable expectations for his successor as head of the UO acting program.

After teaching theater here for more than 23 years, Barton says he feels that the university "has never supported our art," and he's not the only one who sees it that way.

Look at the buildings that are being constructed to serve other disciplines, he says, and take note of the fact the theater department has the highest course evaluations but the second-lowest salaries on campus.

Theater faculty members find it difficult to publish as much as tenure committees might like, he says, "because they have day jobs and night jobs" to make ends meet. "There's just a lack of comprehension of what we do," he says.

A liberal arts acting program, Barton says, is not as much about "overtly preparing" people for work in a profession with a very high unemployment rate as it is about self-analysis, discovery and personal growth.

"It's about getting people back in touch with the child in themselves so they're able to play again," he says. "It's about undoing the powerful self-consciousness and fear that life always induces, to help people relax and be in touch with their playful side."

Barton says one major placement agency has told him that its staff members love to find jobs for theater students - not just in theater, but in corporate positions.

"They can deal with the public, maintain poise and multi-task," he says. ``All of the qualities desired - discipline, dedication, collaboration - theater students learn of necessity. All the stuff you want to be able to function in various universes - theater has all that in spades.''

Training individuals for the kind of teamwork that theater requires has become more difficult over the years, Barton says.

"The worst students are what we call the high school hot shots," he says, "students who come to us from bad high school programs where they've been rewarded for being hammy and loud and dishonest. We have to take them back to a sense of teamwork and being in the moment and really listening to other actors."

A more general problem, he adds, is that members of Generation Y often have a "really distinct sense of entitlement" that makes it difficult to teach them to be "responsible, accountable and generous" in their dealings with others.

"They're so self-absorbed," he says, adding that he sees it as part of a larger cultural malaise that makes teaching difficult. Voice training is one of Barton's specialties, and this has become more challenging as well.

"As a culture," he says, "we're becoming vocally illiterate because we lead visual lives, with everything including movies, TV, video games and e-mail up there on a screen for us. And students who come in less competent verbally will be less adept vocally."

Barton notes with a chuckle that his own son once had a three-part critical vocabulary: `` `awesome,' `cool' and `that sucks.' '' Eighteen-year-old Drew Barton, who recently played "Hamlet" at South Eugene High School and won top honors in a state high school acting competition, now has a considerably broader vocabulary.

Most actors, Barton says, are quick to recognize their vocal deficiencies and are eager to overcome them. His approach is to break vocal performance down into nine elements, show the students what they're doing now and help them see other choices.

"It just takes longer now," he says, "so many drills. It's long and tedious."

Not all of Barton's students move on to theater careers, but he advises all who seem to be headed in that direction to develop skills and get experience in several phases of theater, not just acting, to enhance their chances.

"I tell them to find four or five things they can do, so they won't just be actor-waiters."

Barton grew up in Holland, Mich., and got his undergraduate degree from Western Michigan University. He earned a master's degree and Ph.D. from Bowling Green University in Ohio. He was teaching at the University of Maryland, College Park, and living in Washington, D.C., before he and his wife, Carrol, came to Eugene. She's a librarian who now works at Lane Community College.

"We were trapped in D.C.," he says. "I was enthralled with the whole idea of being near the Kennedy Center and all that art. But it was a nightmare as a place to live."

Looking for "a place that was green," the Bartons combined a trip to the University of British Columbia with visit to Eugene.

"I was charmed by the environment and by the faculty," he says.

He's been teaching here since the fall of 1980 and has directed 18 University Theatre productions, including 10 Shakespeare plays.

Barton's father was an engineer who worked for General Electric. His hobby was going to flea markets, finding antique clocks, taking them apart "down to their smallest parts" and putting them back together again.

One time Barton mentioned this to a friend and said he himself would have found that painstaking process very frustrating.

``My friend said, `Well, that's just what you do! You break the acting process down into its smallest parts and put them back together again!' ''

CAPTION(S):

Bob Barton, head of the University of Oregon's acting program, works at a rehearsal this spring while directing his final UO play, William Shakespeare's ``Much Ado About Nothing.''