UW Whitewater Theatre/Dance Department

At the annual USITT conference yesterday and today, in Milwaukee. I was on a panel discussing Teachers vs. Zombies and Vampires. It went well — always nice to trade stories with fellow teachers and see what solutions to common problems are out there. You are not alone, even in the face of the zombie student onslaught.

On the Expo floor. Always a good time.

Here’s our student Jayson Winslow and his friend from Stevens Point, after we all found ourselves at the panel discussing the future of projections.

The set up for the first act of “Our Town.” Again, we have chosen to not go beyond what Wilder asks for, though as you may note, I have decided against a cyc (even though some cyc effects are noted in the script, the photos of the original production show a bare back wall. I like the idea of the back wall ensuring that we don’t suggest we’ve left the theatre). The Foley table off house left will be joined by the organ (when I get dimensions and a picture I will probably add that to the image).

Adding the ladders.

The set up for the church in Act Two.

And Act Three’s graveyard. We will be closing the main act as noted at the end of the act, opening back up on a stage empty except for the ghost light.

Today is the first rehearsal of “Our Town,” with designer presentations. Here’s the Sketchup rendering of the first act placement of furniture, etc. I will be closing the main act a couple of feet to help frame the space a little more cleanly. . .

My Whitewater colleague Tracey Lyons (costume design) and friend Dr. Tim Good of De Pauw University having some coffee at the Mid-American Theater Conference in St. Louis this past weekend. We were there to present a panel on Intersections with the Liberal Arts in Design Pedagogy. It went well.

Now that “The Drowsy Chaperone” has closed and been struck, attention now turns to “Our Town.” I’m finishing up the Sketchup Model of the Young Auditorium — there are a few architectural features I’m tracking down scale drawings for — after which I will start arranging furniture to give us some snapshots of the various set-ups. As mentioned before, we’re staying pretty traditional with the staging, though we will have live sound effects on a foley table off on the house left walkway.

We’re starting to think about the Fall already, and the first show up will be “Dracula,” directed by Angela Iannone. Angela’s a director who always comes into the process with a ton of visual research and a pretty firm sense of how she would like to use the playing space. This image is a very preliminary consideration of where her thoughts about how the space might work meet my thoughts about how the space might work. She knows she wants to have a playing space through the audience, though she wants to go diagonally across the theatre (we’re in the black box for this one); this means that audience on the far side has to walk through the set to get to their seats. I asked her to consider a more traditional stadium seating arrangement. We’ll see where we head next!