This last weekend, I attended the kick-off barbecue for our school's New Works Festival. Free burgers and hot dogs for all, and word was spread about the 2 weeks of new and experimental performances going up.

Last week, I worked two receptions for the opening of two different shows on campus. Free beer and wine, cake and finger foods and snacks for attendees of opening night.

On our student film set, the food tables and snacks provided on set were plentiful and…

In the final week of performance for the show I directed, Wilcox's Shot at Kumu Kahua theatre in Honolulu. I wish I could say it was an amazing experience. I did meet some…

Yesterday, students in my mechanical design class presented final designs for their "cornhole chucker" machines. (For those of you who don't know: cornhole is a bean bag tossing game, similar in play to horseshoes. Two angled target boards with holes in them are placed about 30 feet apart. Players stand at either end, and toss one pound bean bags, attempting to drop them into the hole in the opposite target board. Points are awarded for bags that drop through the hole and for bags that…

Up, sometimes Down, and occasionally at an Angle. We use ladders for many access needs in the theatre, and occasionally, we use them for props and active set components, too. Climbing a ladder seems, at least on the surface, an easy task. Accident statistics, however, seem to tell a different story. In the workplace, OSHA, in 2011, ranked ladder violations eighth with a total of 3,244. The AFLCIO…

Not long ago, my wife and I attended a performance at a mid-sized (but growing) theater not too far from our home. It's a company we visit fairly frequently, not only because we have dear friends on staff, but also because we admire so much of what they do. We had a fine evening -- the story was well-told, the theater was quite hospitable, and we even won a bottle of wine from a drawing at intermission. Not bad.

A few days later -- by which time, given the ordinarily busy run of our…

This last week, I had the pleasure and honor of attending the Kennedy Center's American College Theater Festival, or KCACTF, as a second place recipient of the Stephen Paul Lim playwriting award. Getting to go to DC, attending panels and seminars with amazing playwrights, directors, actors and artists, meeting peers whose work blew my mind, seeing theater…

The Seven Devils Playwrights Conference just announced the playwrights they'll be working with in June up in McCall, Idaho. My time spent there was one of the best theatrical experiences of my life -- a magical couple of weeks discussing…

The past two weeks I've been working (on and off, admittedly) with one of our graduate students, who is designing the set for next Fall's production of The Understudy. It has given me an opportunity to reflect on limitations, "challenges," and storytelling in ways that I don't normally have the chance to, so I thought I'd share.

For those of you who don't know the show, The Understudy takes place on the set of a fictional Broadway-style production, as the…

"Life is what happens to you while you are making other plans." I find myself having to back-up and regroup frequently. Not that this is a bad thing - I just consider it part of the process. How you deal with the unexpected things that come at you in life has a big impact on how they turn-out.

While coming back from the USITT conference…

We were planning our first production in Florence when I had the opportunity to go to an ‘international’ production at Teatro della Pergola. The theatre is one of the most beautiful in Florence. An old opera house theatre where Eleonora Duse performed on the sets of Gordon Craig back in the days of innovative…

“Do you think a life in the arts is of value?”

She was a stranger on a bus. I had seen her at the bus stop at the Golden Gate Bridge. We had both boarded a bus headed north to San Rafael. She was heading to work. I was heading to a theatre workshop. Later I figured she must have seen the Teatro Luna logo on my hoodie (which I picked up on a recent trip to Chicago—shout out to my friends at TL).

I was caught a little…

My final installment of puppets in the making... (click here to see Chapter 1 or Chapter 2) these 5 critters are truly works of love and collaboration... in addition to Charles, Shanley, myself, Jennifer (the puppetry designer) tons of other folks in the…

For me, one of the hardest parts about auditioning is selecting the monologues I want to do. Over the years, I've gotten lots of great advice on how to select pieces. Here's a few tips that I always try to keep in mind:

1) Pick something you love.

I try to pick only pieces that I truly care about. If I'm bored, the auditors are sure to be bored as well. Whether it's the character, the action occurring in the monologue, the poeticism of the text, or any…

Back in August of 2011 there was a collapse of the canopy over the stage at the Indiana State Fair (

http://theatreface.ning.com/profiles/blogs/indiana-state-fair-incident-overview-not-your-average-greek,…

As I mentioned last week, I've been unpacking a sizable shipment of materials that will be used to create a six-station (including one teaching station) automation lab here at Purdue. Each station will be comprised of a programmable logic controller with digital inputs and outputs, relay outputs, and analog inputs and outputs, along with a touch-screen user interface, and a Mac G5 workstation with Max/MSP and QLab software suites. We were fortunate enough to receive funding from our campus…

There’s a restaurant in the town where I grew up that serves Chinese American cuisine. It’s good. It’s so good that I haven’t been able to find another one like it no matter where I go. And one of my favorite things about it is that I can order “the Usual” and the owner of the place knows right away that I want a Diet Dr. Pepper and Chicken Noodles with Gravy. In fact, she sees me coming and sets out the Diet Dr. Pepper without even having to ask…

This post is a continuations of last week's blog: Adventures in Puppetry - Part 1 where I began detailing the construction process for the fabulous puppets that are a part of ASF's in-tech production of The Merry Wives of Windsor.

I've spent a large part of my time during the past few weeks lending a…

Learning about sound, audio mixing, and all the tools that make that possible can be a bit daunting at times. It seems like there are so many aspects of the subject that one can’t learn it all. Like anything you may be…

So, I've been back from Humana now for several days, and a few days' distance is giving me a new perspective on the experience... as a few days' distance is wont to do for almost everything.

(My posts from the festival, in case you missed them, are here and here.)

One thing that's sticking with me is the…

It sounds obvious. It feels so simple. It seems like something really basic, something that people naturally would do. And yet I see actors (and I myself often) forget to, or neglect to, or simply don't take care of themselves, in rehearsal and performance.

There is a negative stereotype of actors being selfish, self important, or egotistical--the diva demanding roses and only red M&M's in her trailer--but the fact of the matter is, many actors I've met are in fact…