Professor of Theatre Arthur Horowitz, who retired last spring after 14 years on Pomona College’s theatre faculty, passed away suddenly in New Orleans on June 16, at the age of 73.

Students who took Horowitz’s classes or took part in the plays he directed described him as kind, generous, funny, inquisitive and always creative. At Pomona, he taught theatre history, playwriting and dramaturgy and was an expert on the dramaturgy of Anton Chekhov and Carlo Goldoni. He also had research interests in the performance vocabularies of commedia dell’arte, Russian biomechanics and Shakespeare in performance, with particular emphasis on international, non-English-language adaptations of the Bard’s work.

In 2011, Horowitz was awarded a grant from the Folger Institute for Shakespeare Studies National Endowment for the Humanities Institute Project, “Shakespeare from the Globe to the Global,” which culminated in the “Shakespeare in Performance Syllabus,” a prototype for courses in international Shakespeare. During his 2017–2018 sabbatical year, he conducted research on the common dramaturgical and emotional threads linking the characters and relationships in Chekhov’s works and those in the late plays of Goldoni.

A graduate of Hofstra University, he earned his Ph.D. from University of California, Davis, in 1997 after 20 years teaching high school English. Before joining the Pomona faculty as assistant professor in theatre in 2004, he taught at CalArts, UC Santa Barbara and Cal Poly Pomona. Serving 14 years on the Pomona faculty, he was named associate professor in 2010.

His writing was published in such publications as The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, Contemporary Dramatists, New England Theatre Journal, The Journal of Beckett Studies, and Western European Stages. His book Prospero’s ‘True Preservers’: Peter Brook, Yukio Ninagawa, and Giorgio Strehler—International Post-World War II Directors Approach to Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” was published by the University of Delaware Press in 2004, and his chapter, “Scrutinizing the feminine in Waiting for Godot,” recently appeared in In Dialogue with Godot: Waiting and Other Thoughts.

Horowitz was involved in numerous theatrical productions in Southern California, working as dramaturge for several companies, such as the Unknown Theater and the Bootleg Theater in Los Angeles and A Noise Within Theatre in Pasadena. He directed a production of Macbeth for the Ojai Shakespeare Festival in 2004, and was on the Board of Directors of Unknown Theater from 2005 until 2011.

Judge Stephen Reinhardt ’51, a stalwart of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco who wrote the ruling that ultimately legalized same-sex marriage in California, died March 29, 2018, two days after his 87th birthday.

Known as the “liberal lion” of the federal circuit courts, he was fiercely passionate about the law and protecting the vulnerable. His rulings in defense of criminal defendants, minorities and immigrants were often overturned by the more conservative U.S. Supreme Court.

Among his rulings that the high court overturned were decisions that would have struck down Washington state’s ban on doctors providing aid in dying and a federal law prohibiting a type of midterm abortion that opponents labeled partial-birth abortion. Once, when asked if he was upset by these reversals, he replied: “Not in the slightest. If they want to take away rights, that’s their privilege. But I’m not going to help them do it.”

Born March 27, 1931, in New York as Stephen Shapiro, Reinhardt changed his name after his parents were divorced and his mother remarried. His stepfather was Gottfried Reinhardt, a screenwriter, director and producer whose films included The Red Badge of Courage. His grandfather, Max Reinhardt, was a theatre legend who fled Germany during Nazi rule and gained acclaim in the U.S. for his production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Hollywood Bowl.

Reinhardt once said that the horrors of the Nazis helped shape his conviction about the need to be vigilant in upholding human rights.

A graduate of Yale Law School, Reinhardt was appointed to the federal bench in 1980 by President Jimmy Carter. He remained in that role until the time of his death. Previously, he had served as a first lieutenant in the legal counsel’s office of the Air Force, clerked for a federal judge, practiced entertainment and labor law in California, been a member of the Democratic National Committee from California and served on the Los Angeles Police Commission.

“We have lost a wonderful colleague and friend,” said Sidney Thomas, chief judge of the Ninth Circuit, which oversees federal courts in California and eight other Western states. “As a judge, he was deeply principled, fiercely passionate about the law and fearless in his decisions. He will be remembered as one of the giants of the federal bench.”

Two Supreme Court justices were among the many national voices that spoke admiringly of Reinhardt in the wake of his death.

“As a person and as a judge, Stephen Reinhardt was devoted to protecting the powerless and the oppressed,” said Justice Anthony Kennedy, “In my 43 years on the bench few, if any, judges with whom it has been my privilege to serve were more dedicated to the cause of justice.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor called him “one of the greatest legal minds of our lifetimes.” She went on to say, “We have lost one of the giants of our federal judiciary—one who cared deeply about the way the law could shape our society and impact our pursuit of justice. Someone like Stephen cannot be replaced. He set an example for judging that anyone with a passion for the good in the law should follow.”

It’s safe to say that no Pomona faculty member has ever been more beloved among students and alumni than Emerita Professor of English Martha Andresen Wilder, who died on March 24 from multiple myeloma at the age of 74. Over the 34 years of her Pomona career, she was honored by the students themselves seven times with the coveted Wig Award for Excellence in Teaching, setting a record in the 60-plus-year history of the award that is unlikely ever to be surpassed. If she hadn’t been ineligible for four years following each win, she probably would have garnered many more.

Former students remember her for her contagious enthusiasm, her love and thorough knowledge of the material, her always strikingly creative presentation and her deep warmth and kindness. “I can attest to the most luminous, powerful, soul-searching teaching I have ever seen,” one student commented. “She awakens the heart,” said another. “She gives the students a lesson plus the reasons for taking that lesson to heart.”

She is remembered and revered in particular for her legendary Shakespeare classes, in which she was known for her “page to stage” approach, urging her students to experience the Bard’s genius from every possible perspective—as readers, scholars, spectators and actors.

Inspired by the phrase “only connect,” the epigraph from the E.M. Forster novel, Howard’s End, she sought to make the works of Shakespeare relevant to the lives of her students. She would often take an ordinary phrase, like the first line from Hamlet—“Who’s there?”—and lead her listeners through the process of parsing its many levels of meaning, transforming it into something profound, personal and unforgettable. She described the core of her approach as asking students not only for close textual and linguistic analysis of the Bard’s words, but also “to ‘take another’s part,’ to understand and inhabit the Other, always a leap of empathetic, theatrical and moral imagination.”

As each semester came to a close, members of the college community would keep an eye out for her class’s signature culminating exercise—a series of pop-up performances in which groups of students would present a scene from one of the plays, staged in a site of their choosing—from the likely (dormitory balcony) to the unlikely (among the dumpsters behind a dining hall). Many of her former students have called the process of interpreting, conceptualizing and performing a scene from one of Shakespeare’s plays, under her inspiration, one of the seminal experiences of their college career.

Referring to the fact that her Shakespeare classes were always waitlisted as students vied for the privilege of studying with her, Emeritus Professor of English Thomas Pinney once dubbed her “the Pied Piper of the Pomona College English Department,” remarking that, “we joke that she’d have to turn away students if she were teaching the minor poems of John Lidgate.”

A noted scholar of Renaissance literature with a special love for and expertise in the works of the Bard, she was the author of numerous published articles in scholarly journals and was a consultant for such projects as the BBC/TV series “The Shakespeare Plays” and the reconstruction of the Globe Theatre on its original London site. In addition to her famous Shakespeare classes, she taught a range of other courses through the years, including Milton, Major British Authors and the English Lyric Before 1700.

Born March 7, 1944 in Minneapolis, Minnesota to Karl and Elizabeth Andresen, she graduated from the University of Minnesota, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa; and went on to receive her master’s degree and doctorate in English from Yale University. She came to Pomona in 1972 after a two-year sojourn on the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh. For the final 16 years of her career at Pomona, she held the distinguished title of Phebe Estelle Spalding Professor of English.

In 1992, she was chosen by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education to be the California Professor of the Year and by Baylor University as the recipient of the Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching. In 2000 she was elected a Fellow of the Radcliffe Center for Intellectual Renewal.

A compelling public speaker, Martha was sought after by groups across the country and over the years presented well over 500 public lectures. She was in demand for alumni events throughout her tenure and after her retirement. Although her subjects were drawn primarily from Shakespeare and his plays, three of the talks she gave in the last years of her life illustrate her remarkable range: at the LA Arboretum, “Shakespeare’s Gardens and Green Worlds;” for the American Association of University Women, “Isn’t Wonder Woman Still Among Us?” inspired by her reading of Jill Lepore’s recent history; and at a Gala for the City of Hope Foundation, a personal meditation on the transformation and transmutation she had experienced as a patient, and the way she had come to understand it and to take solace from Shakespeare’s explorations of those states.

Mark Twain at Quarry Farm

I HAVE A PICTURE of myself as a child, sitting on the very porch where, 30 years later, I am writing these words. Quarry Farm hasn’t changed much since my last visit, although most of my life has.

As a kid, I spent a couple of summers at Mark Twain’s Quarry Farm—the house in Elmira, New York, where Twain lived and wrote books like Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Life on the Mississippi, and Tom Sawyer—because my father, Wilson Carey McWilliams, was a great teacher of Twain’s work and a scholar-in-residence here. During the days, my sister and I romped around the grounds while Dad held seminars.

At night, just as Twain had done for his own daughters, Dad made up stories for us based on the pictures on the fireplace tiles in the parlor. And he read us Twain, of course: the stories and the novels and the bull’s-eye critique of James Fenimore Cooper that always made me laugh, even though I’d never read anything by James Fenimore Cooper.

Susan McWilliams in her office with her father’s manuscript and files

My father dropped dead 12 years ago, on a sunny Tuesday morning, leaving behind notes on the manuscript about Mark Twain that he’d been working on for decades. His friends and colleagues mourned the lost book, but of course the manuscript was not the main thing. The more pressing concern was just getting through the day; Dad, a big-hearted, big-hugging, big-thinking man, left an absence that felt even bigger than his presence. Grief had me by the throat.

I got my dream job, teaching at Pomona College, a few months later.

I tell my students, sometimes, that grown-ups are not lying to you when they talk about how fast life goes. You wake up and really do wonder where it all went—which is why one of the great luxuries afforded Pomona students is the freedom to sit down on Marston Quad or in a dorm room and to talk with friends, or to think for yourself, about where you want to be and, more importantly, with whom you want to be there. Your job isn’t just to learn a subject. It’s to learn to live a good life.

And so it is years later, and I have my own children now, and they are almost the age that I was when we spent that first summer at Quarry Farm. And they love stories that are the stuff of Twain: kids getting in trouble, kids being sneaky, kids in danger, knights, tricks, grownups who do stupid things, those rare acts of true bravery and courage that make you believe human beings might be worth something, after all.

Perhaps all that storytelling has something to do with why I finally picked up those old manuscript notes—and why this summer, I’m the professor working at Mark Twain’s house, as a fellow of the Elmira College Center for Mark Twain Studies, trying to finish a book that my father was writing before I was born.

One of Twain’s great themes was that the American myth of individual autonomy and self-creation is a lie—a lie that enabled the great moral evil of slavery, for one thing, but that also impoverishes our lives in subtler ways. Huck Finn has a lot of adventures, but other Americans are always trying to get one over on him, and Huck feels “awful lonesome” most of the time.

The truth about us humans, Twain taught, was that we are social and political creatures who are inextricably bound to other people. Love calls us and can ennoble us, and Twain was “confident,” my father wrote, “that the comradeship of honorable love is the clearest human instance of what is divinely right.”

Twain knew that we have to admit our connection and indebtedness to others if we are ever to know ourselves. And we have to be willing to dedicate ourselves to others, and to do so out of love, if we are ever to be truly free, to smile in the face of our certain deaths.

My father wrote this: “Love, particularly when it is linked to the rearing of children, can nurture and sustain the spirit, even in a gilded age, just as a great storyteller can help us to hear the music in our souls.”

And so it is that here I am, on this front porch looking out at the hills of upstate New York, at home again with my father, and at home again with Mark Twain, with the abiding refrain in my ears.

Susan McWilliams is associate professor of politics and chair of the Politics Program at Pomona College. The author of Traveling Back: Toward a Global Political Theory, she has two books in the publishing pipeline ahead of the Twain book.