West Liberty University theater professor Michael Aulick, fifth from the left, said his program is built to prepare students for adulthood as much as it prepares them for the stage.

One of the things that drew Michael Aulick to become a theater professor at West Liberty University was the fact that, he said, there wasn’t a theater program at the university until he got there.

The opportunity to build the program from scratch was intriguing. It also allowed him to form a curriculum that didn’t just prepare students for success on the stage, but for overall success as adults.

Aulick, the director of the university’s Kelly Theatre, enjoys teaching those tenets to his students, and really enjoys how those lessons are leading to major accomplishments on stage.

Aulick was teaching at a theater program in Tennessee when he was hired at West Liberty to kickstart its theater program. After growing up in Huntington, he relished the opportunity to return to the Mountain State. Aulick considers himself a small-town guy, so life in Ohio County was a draw. So was the opportunity to build something from the bottom up.

“Sometimes programs are set and the faculty doesn’t quite fit,” he said. They want you to be something, maybe, that you’re not. They have this other agenda. So getting the ability to establish the program so that I can utilize my strengths and minimize my weaknesses was one of the big draws.”

Aulick’s goal since arriving at West Liberty has been to focus the program on what it can do well and not spread itself too thin in terms of curriculum. The pillars of the program lie in four areas: teaching and facilitating creativity, critical thinking, teamwork and hard work. If a show or a project doesn’t lend itself to those four categories, they don’t bother with it.

Those four subjects, when done well, make better theater artists, Aulick said. But they also do much more.

“If you leave here and decide, ‘I’m not going to do the 10-year grind (in theater),’ and you just go out into the world and say, ‘I’m one of the most creative, critical thinking, hard working, and best to be able to work in teams,’ I think that’s probably something that any employer would want to hear,” he said.

Aulick said he has not designed West Liberty’s theater program to chase awards. He wants to promote hard work and dedication that hopefully will be award-worthy. What he really wants the program to do is earn his students careers in the theater. He wants that work to lead to a job or a spot in a good graduate program.

That doesn’t mean that West Liberty’s students don’t collect awards for their hard work.

At the most recent American College Theater Festival regional competition, WLU students picked up several accolades. Their performance of Animal Farm won them a Certificate of Merit for Outstanding Ensemble, and they also picked up several individual awards. Aulick attributes that not just to talent, but to the hard work put in to get there.

“It’s the person who is putting their nose down to do the work, to get better, that ultimately gets the recognition,” Aulick said. “I think that our success and the growth and the sustained growth of this program is because people in the area recognize that we’re doing things right.”

Feelings of accomplishment don’t come just from awards, Aulick said. He gets excited when a student comes up to him to talk about a play they read not for a class, but simply as a gatherer of information. He loves giving students opportunities they may not have been able to enjoy otherwise. A student performing in front of 100 people at a regional competition may be performing in front of the largest crowd they’ll ever see, but the opportunity for the work they’ve put in to be validated means more than any crowd size.

“It’s a wonderful thing to see them have these watershed moments that they’ll never forget,” Aulick said.