Students in the Fall 2026 Advanced Voice and Movement class (THE 326) will give a public reading of the Declaration of Independence at 9:30 a.m. Nov. 10 on the lawn west of Carrington Hall.
Assistant Professor Karen Sabo teaches the class.
The event is free and open to the public. It is co-sponsored by Missouri State’s Department of Theatre and Dance, Public Affairs Office and the Reynolds College of Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities.
History is “someone else’s now”
Sabo is a self-confessed history junkie, especially early American history. “As a theater person, I realize all that history was just someone else’s now,” she said.
She included the Declaration of Independence assignment to commemorate the document’s 250th anniversary.
“I love being able to vote, and I never miss an election,” Sabo said. “And I want to teach my students to have the same excitement and interest in democracy.”
Because she is only the second generation in her family to be born in the United States, Sabo said she was raised to appreciate living in a democracy.
“I grew up in Albany, New York, [and] both my parents at some point worked for the state government,” she explained. “So that was most of what we talked about at dinner every night. It was government, legislation, politicians, how things worked. And it’s just always been on my radar.”
Declaration a “high stakes moment”
Consequently, Sabo is as fascinated by the Signers’ courage as she is their vision. Both are qualities student actors must understand and embody in their performances.
“Something we deal with as actors is finding the highest stakes possible in a situation,” Sabo said. “One of the most famous things Benjamin Franklin ever said was, ‘we must now all hang together or we will hang separately.’ This was a life and death situation. They could have all been tried for treason and hanged, and that would have been the end of their lives.”
A public reading of the Declaration, such as what the students will perform, captures the sensory experience of that high stakes moment.
“We hope to make it accessible to those passing by, like the town criers that would have read out the document in their communities when it was first written,” said junior BFA Acting for the Stage and Screen major Kathryn Williams. “Our performance, in a way, is a display of how common citizens back then would have received the Declaration.” [Read more…] about Theatre students to read Declaration of Independence on Carrington lawn Nov. 10
