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Stage Combat in the News

This is a reprint of a newspaper article that was sent over the Stage Combat Mailing List. Although the text was given a publishing date of Wednesday, July 5, 2000, no paper attribution was given. Based on the content of the article, it is most likely a Texas-based newspaper.

University Can Be Held Liable for Actor's Onstage Stabbing, Texas Supreme Court Rules

By BROCK READ

Texas A&M University at Galveston can be held liable for an accidental stabbing injury that occurred onstage during a theater production of Dracula, the Texas Supreme Court ruled last week. The court's ruling sends the case back to the state appeals court whose decision it reversed.

Paul A. Bishop, a student at Texas A&M who played Vlad the Impaler in a 1994 production, had sued the university after being stabbed in the chest with a bowie knife in the play's climactic death scene. Mr. Bishop was wearing protective padding, but the actor portraying his killer missed it, leaving him with a collapsed lung and a week-long hospital stay.

Mr. Bishop's lawsuit accuses the play's director and fight choreographer, Michael and Diane Wonio, and two faculty advisers, Stephen Curley and Melanie Lesko, of negligence in ignoring the university's ban on weapons in using a real knife. According to the complaint, all four were, for legal purposes, employees of Texas A&M at Galveston at the time of the incident.

A jury supported that argument in 1996, and Mr. Bishop was awarded $250,000 in damages. But the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed the decision last year, finding that Mr. and Ms. Wonio were independent contractors, and that Mr. Curley and Ms. Lesko were volunteers despite being university professors. On Thursday the state Supreme Court reversed the lower court's decision, ruling that Mr. Curley and Ms. Lesko had acted as employees even though they did not receive pay for their roles in the production.

The appeals court now must reconsider issues it deemed irrelevant in its earlier decision, such as whether the jury was properly instructed. And Mr. Bishop once again has a chance to collect the jury award. "I'm sure he's happy," said Richard P. Logan, one of his lawyers.

The university, which was represented by the Texas attorney general's office, declined to comment on the ruling.