Known by her students as simply Emily, Emily Patton Levickas is a communications professor at Eastern Michigan University. She has a full plate this semester, teaching EMU and doing double-duty teaching and directing plays at Concordia University in Ann Arbor.
This multitude of responsibilities doesn’t get in her way, though, and she gives 100 percent to every class she teaches.
Growing up as the daughter of a man who directed theater and taught communications, you’d think that being in front of an audience would come naturally to Levickas, but she said it’s not so.
“I’m not a good speaker,” she said. “It’s something I still have to work at and it still makes me nervous. But I still love it.”
She participated in her first play at 6 years old, and even though she was shy, she knew it was something she enjoyed doing and stuck with it.
“I was definitely a theater nerd in high school,” she said. “My original major in college was theater at Virgina Tech.”
She later transferred to Spring Arbor University, where her father was a communications professor. She didn’t want her main teacher to be her dad, though, so she studied English. She now has an undergraduate degree in English and a minor in communications. She came to EMU for graduate school and got her MFA in applied drama last semester.
This is her first semester at EMU solely as a professor.
“I love teaching speech,” she said. “It’s exciting to watch students get close and share stories and become more and more comfortable talking in front of each other.”
She said she especially loves teaching the student body at EMU:
“I’m very thankful for the opportunity to teach here.The students here are hard workers, a lot of them come from challenging backgrounds, and they’re still here.”
In addition to teaching, Levickas is also active in the theater program here and at Concordia. She has acted, but right now she’s investing more in directing.
“It’s definitely a completely different experience than acting,” she said.
When asked if she’d like taking her directing to film instead of stage, she said, “I haven’t really thought about it. Though I’m definitely more focused on teaching right now than a career in directing, it could happen someday. I love the immediacy of theater, but it’d be interesting to direct the subtlety that you see in film that you can’t portray in theater.”
Her first bout in directing was a traditional production of “The Glass Menagerie” at Concordia. She’s now directing the 33rd annual production of “Boar’s Head,” the Christian story of Christmas.
“It’s a huge production with over 100 people involved, acting, working behind the scenes and doing the music,” she said. “Everyone knows what they’re doing because they’ve participated before, so it’s fun to be a part of.”
In February, she’ll be directing the musical “Johnny Pie,” a show she acted in when she was in high school.
“I’d love to do a production of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ because it’s so open for creativity,” she said. “It could be either very intricate with an elaborate set and costumes, or very simple.”
She said would also like to do a production of “Anne Frank” or “Dracula.”
