This week I have two "brush-up" rehearsals - tech runs of two shows we opened earlier in the year, and that have been on hiatus. Wednesday and Thursdays, they are getting back on their feet to get ready to run in a three show rep.

In January, we staged and opened Macbeth. In late February, it went on hiatus, and we staged…

I'm in a good place.

I've had lots of exciting things happen for me this year. I'm about to graduate with my masters degree. I won a few accolades for my playwriting. I am working on some very exciting creative projects. I got to work for some really cool companies. I had interviews and meetings with people I really hope to work for and with someday. I have a core group of fellow artists who I feel utterly privileged to work with, to…

It's that time of the year again: end of semester evaluations. At the end of each semester, my design and production colleagues and I all get together for a couple of hours and take time to share our experiences with each others' graduate students over the last 16 weeks. Ideally, this is an opportunity to celebrate the many good experiences while discussing those times when we've perceived opportunities for growth and development.

I'll confess that I approach these meetings…

Note that if you have a High-Def screen, this is available in High-Def!

Every year we advance the sustainability of our world by planting more trees. We can also advance our personal sustainability by making sure that we don’t get annihilated by flying rigging parts. Use Arbor Day as a calendar reminder to inspect your arbors. In the US, Arbor Day is officially the…

Earlier this month, I went to see all the plays at the Humana Festival of New American Plays at Actors Theatre of Louisville. (Happily, they’re only forty minutes from my house, so this is not out of the ordinary.) I’m not going to talk about the plays per se, as I’m not a critic and never wanted to be--maybe if we meet and you buy me a beer, I might talk more about that. But I do want to talk about one of the plays in particular.

Each year,…

The bulk of my professional career has been spent at Shakespeare Festivals, which are also (as a whole or in part) repertory companies. That means designing doesn’t just take in to account the needs of a single show, but all those that will be performed in repertory -- usually two or three shows, every now and then more.

This may or…

I'm feeling a little overwhelmed.

I just got back from a week at the Kennedy Center's American Colleges Theater Festival. It was my second year attending as an award recipient for playwriting, and it was an amazing week of workshops and meeting fantastic writers and other theater artists.

But that's not why I'm overwhelmed.

I…

We've had an explosion of student-driven workshops over the past year at Purdue. It has been truly amazing to see so many young theatre artists exploring their craft, trying out new things, and generally being excited about our art, and I'm proud to say we've been fairly successful at making room for these projects that are not part of our main production season.

However, as one might imagine, these workshops create inevitable tensions; the greatest of these center around…

• The 2013 Spring play at William Jewell College was Arcadia by Tom Stoppard. For the set we built 12' walls. I was asked by Professor Nathan Wyman to figure out how to build 3 of the 7 walls. The other 4 we had in Stock. I w as told to build two frames that would be 10' x12' with an 4'x8' door opening in the…

You know the phrase: “Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.” It’s a catch-all for our frustrations in life. Most people focus on the "will go wrong" implying that we are helpless against it. Maybe we should reconsider the implications. What we believe to be true, consciously or unconsciously, can become what we live.…

This, dear reader, is my final TheatreFace blog post. That is, my bi-monthly feature is coming to an end as I finally realized that I had too many proverbial balls in the air. Juggling said balls has been taking a toll on me and I’ve decided to stop spreading myself too thin.

I’ve truly enjoyed the thirty-six (this is thirty-seven) blog posts that TheatreFace has featured on my behalf, allowing me to navel gaze as well as highlight national conversations in our field.

I asked…

When I started as a sound designer, the idea of hiding a speaker was finding a space for a 5" x 10" box somewhere off set or behind a wall - somewhere as close to the action or object (breaking glass, magic trick, radio) as I could get it with the assistance of the carpenters or - if I was lucky - hiding it in an oversize piece of furniture. I did a little bit of experimentation with smaller home or computer speakers,…

This week, I have a smorgasbord of random thoughts and observations. None of them make up an entire blog, so I thought I'd toss them all into the mix. (This may or may not be how I tend to cook food... to varying degrees of success.)

Always Follow Up

I've gotten to meet some awesome people over the course of my career thus far. From playwrights, to actors, to designers, I've…

One of my sisters is getting a masters degree in geography, operating ground penetrating radar on Yucatan pyramids, and designing map databases. My other sister is the assistant technical director on Odysseo, a touring Cirque du Soleil-esque show that features acrobatics and horses -- yep, horses! Trick riding, precision riding, jumping and more. And when it turned out that both of them were going to be in L.A. over the same weekend, a short 4 hour car ride away, I pretty much…

When last we left our intrepid hero, he was writing something he couldn’t talk about, but couldn’t wait to share…

The folks behind The Incomparable! podcast invited me to write a show for them. Normally, the podcast is a pop culture roundtable whose topics range from tv to movies to books to games. But every year for April 1st, they go off format and have some fun. So this year, they thought about doing a radio play and fortunately knew a…

This past week, I had the opportunity to read a new work written by an acquaintance. Specifically, he was interested in a realistic response to what he had written, and wanted as much constructive criticism, comments, and other feed back on the work as I was willing to offer. I hope he was REALLY looking for that - because I gave him what he asked for. Truthfully, I enjoyed the piece - but that said, I did write and…

Yesterday I got to take part in a student film. It was a cute little short film; I played a small supporting role. While on set, I really admired how organized, well put together and timely the whole shoot was. There were several complicated shots outdoors, through and around traffic, and there was a scene with 10+ extras. The director and director of photography successfully wrangled everything and kept the shoot moving along.

The whole project was for a community college class…

Yesterday I got to take part in a student film. It was a cute little short film; I played a small supporting role. While on set, I really admired how organized, well put together and timely the whole shoot was. There were several complicated shots outdoors, through and around traffic, and there was a scene with 10+ extras. The director and director of photography successfully wrangled everything and kept the shoot moving along.

The whole project was for a community college class…