Wheaton student wins prestigious German theater scholarship

German major Laura Jones '03, of Freedom, Maine, has been awarded a prestigious DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) award in support of a directing and dramaturgy internship at Hamburg's Thalia Theater next year. The $2,000 undergraduate scholarship is modeled on the U.S. Fulbright scholarship program.

''My work in German is part sincere interest and part that I just found myself on this incredible path,'' said Jones, who speaks German, Italian and some Finnish.

''My mother is from Finland. Language has always been very important in my family,'' said Jones, who has a minor in Italian and studied in Bologna in fall 2001. But it's Jones' extraordinary work in German theater that has earned her accolades on campus and from DAAD.

As a freshman at Wheaton, she wrote, directed and acted in Berlin, Berlin. In German, the dialogue was written in rhyme and featured as protagonist an artist and her boyfriend, a soldier.

But, asserted, Jones, ''I'm a pretty bad actress. I don't have any formal training in theater. I really come at it from more of a literary perspective. Everything [to do with theater] I have learned has come directly from experience.''

Bolstered by Jones's dramatic experience and drive--and with competition from such colleges as Connecticut College, Wellesley and Middlebury--Wheaton won Mount Holyoke's German theatre festival in 2000 and 2001.

In spring 2002, Jones produced another play, Publikums Beschinpfung (Insulting the Audience), also performed in German. ''It's very anti-theatre,'' she said. ''It's an extremely challenging piece in terms of language. There are four speakers, no plot and no characters. I'm interested in very weird, unconventional theatre.''

In preparation for her coming internship in Hamburg and funded by a Mars Faculty Research Grant in summer 2002, Jones and Assistant Professor of German Eric Denton researched contemporary German theater, focusing on perceptions of the theater, life backstage and how dramaturgy influences content. ''It's about how the way you perform a play affects how it's interpreted,'' Jones explained.

Next year will see the culmination of Jones's scholarship and creative efforts: ''I'll begin my senior thesis, which will be a full-length play in Germanit looks like it may be a bilingual play. Then over January break, I go to Hamburg, where I'll work with a really interesting young playwright, John von Düffel.

''Germans really appreciate the arts,'' Jones said. ''And the arts tend to flourish there.''

Jones, who studied in Paderborn, Germany, for a year while still in high school, credits her high school German teacher, Anne Lambert, with fostering her love of the country's language and theatre. In fact, Jones co-wrote her first play, Fraust (a takeoff of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust), with Lambert.

''My high school served 11 towns, and my graduating class had 99 students. My school was really remarkable in that it offered Spanish, French and German,'' Jones said. Jones is a graduate of Mt. View High School in Thorndike, Maine.