Students Teach With Skits
By Jesse Baer

The Office of Student Health is forming a new student theater troupe, which will produce and perform a series of scenes and audience participation to inform and start dialogue on issues of concern to Oberlin students.
The skits will cover a wide range of issues, including alcohol and drug abuse, diversity, and sexually transmitted diseases.
The theater troupe plans to hold its first meeting on Sunday November 3rd at 2 PM, in Wilder TBA. Planners are also seeking approval to create an Exco, so that students can get academic credit for participating in the production of the new skits.
“I’m confident we can get a good number of people to do this, essentially volunteer,” said Aaron Mucciolo, one of the people organizing the new troupe. “But it would be much better to get some kind of credit with people putting in the amount of time they’re going to be putting in.”
The troupe was born out of the ashes of Sex at 7:30, an Oberlin tradition that had RA’s perform educational skits for new students during orientation.
It was a popular event, but even its partisans concede that it could have done a better job of educating students.
In response to this problem, this year Student Health Services took over the job, previously handled by ResLife, of educating students on sexual issues. Rather than have “Sex at 7:30,” they treated new students to “The Date,” a skit that is used at several other colleges and universities.
The masterminds behind “The Date” believe that it communicated its message more effectively than Sex at 7:30 had. However, they also feel that “The Date” failed to address some of the issues that Sex at 7:30 had dealt with.
According to Mucciolo, who also worked on “The Date,” Sex at 7:30 had become “a joke.” He added, however, that it “covered a wide range of topics, and was very connected with the Oberlin student body.”

The new theater troupe, and the skits it will perform, will represent an attempt to cover those issues, picking up where “The Date” left off.

“We want to do programming that is relevant to Oberlin students,” said Mucciolo. “This is one of the best ways we can think of to get that done.”