Gregg Henry, associate professor and director of ISU Theatre, is taking on new responsibilities as chairman of the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival’s fifth region and a member of its national committee.

“I’ve got the bags under my eyes to prove it,” Henry said of his new position.

The region he is responsible for includes Colorado, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North and South Dakota, and Iowa.

In terms of time on the road, Henry said things won’t change much because he is away most weekends, anyway. However, he said he will now devote the first hour of each day to taking care of assigning respondents for productions.

Respondents are theater faculty from the region who screen about 160 productions in the region annually. They watch productions and do response sessions with the casting company, designers and others involved in the production, and give them feedback on a “sort of one-on-one basis,” he said.

Assigning respondents, he said, “is a geographic thing.” If there is a production in St. Louis, for example, he needs to find someone as close as possible to that area to go in and do a response to the production. Sometimes, for cost effectiveness, a respondent will also take up a loop of productions, perhaps viewing and responding to three productions on one trip.

Of all the productions screened, they choose the six strongest to be performed at the regional festival, a five-day event attended by about 1,000 people.

Henry will also be responsible for organizing the festival, which will take place in Kansas City during the third week in January.

He said he needs to “make sure the six productions we invite are, in fact, the best in the region.”

Other festival events include about 50 workshops by regional theater faculty, theatrical design expositions and competitions, readings of student-written plays and a national acting scholarship competition.

“It’s a jam-packed five days,” Henry said.

He said one of his festival responsibilities is to “make sure there is a good mix of professionals to offer workshops to students.”

The scholarship competition, which Henry will coordinate regionally, is named for the late actress Irene Ryan, who played Granny on “The Beverly Hillbillies.” Ryan provided $6 million for the scholarships.

The scholarship provides two student-actors from each region with $750 each and two student-actors from the nation with $2,500. The money is to be used for training and development, usually as tuition at a university or conservatory.

At the festival, approximately 200 nominees in the region will perform five-minute auditions. Those 200 will be narrowed to 35 and then to 16 finalists, from which the two regional winners will be chosen. The winners from each of eight regions will then go on to compete for the larger national scholarship.

Henry started working with the Kennedy Center during his first year on the Iowa State faculty, when he was asked to work as a respondent.

“The more you do it, the more they ask you to do it and I signed my life away,” he said.

He was elected vice chair of the region three years ago. “I’ve known I was going to be chair since I was elected as vice chair,” he said. He just needed to be approved by the Kennedy Center.

Henry will serve as chairman for three years.

“I just care about educational theater; I care about what students are getting in their undergraduate and graduate training programs,” he said.

Henry first became involved in theater during grade school, but stepped away from it for a while.

He said he got back into it during high school. He started college as a physical education major, he said, but changed to theater during his freshman year.

“I just decided what was more important to me,” Henry said. He said his decision terrified his parents.

He said the reason he became involved in theater “wasn’t to get more attention.”

Henry still acts occasionally and directs productions away from ISU every year, he said.

“If you can give [theater] the time, it’s worth the experience,” he said. “It does take a lot of time, though.”