Technically Speaking with...Nathan Leigh

Name: Nathan Leigh

Hometown: Newton, MA

Education: UConn

Favorite Credits: The Convert (Central Square Theatre, 2016), Mother Hicks (Emerson College, 2015), Sealand The Musical (#Serials@TheFlea, 2011 - 2012)

Why theater?: Theatre, at its best, has the power to tell stories that shift an audience's perceptions, and force them to think and feel in new ways. It can make the intimate feel universal in ways no other medium can truly accomplish. At it's worst, it's one of the few quiet places in New York where you can get a decent nap in.

What is your role on Prospect?: Sound Design and Original Music

Tell us about Prospect: Prospect is a play set in the 80's about worlds and communities colliding over the space of one drug-fueled night. It's about the lengths we go to disconnect from ourselves and each other and our own histories.

What is inspiring your design of Prospect?: 80's underground club music is the big thing I've been listening to. This was the dawn of electronic dance, so there's a joy and a weirdness to that music as producers were figuring out what you could do with synths and drum machines on a shoe-string budget. As a result the music has a lot of personality and idiosyncrasies that are often absent from modern EDM, and serve as a great way to access this story that starts with a night out at the club and gets progressively hazier.

What kind of theater speaks to you? What or who inspires you as an artist?: I like a story I haven't heard before. I like stories that aren't afraid to make you a little uncomfortable. But mostly I like stories that have something to say about the society we live in, and push audiences to consider a perspective they might not have before. I do a lot of work as an activist, and the thing that I find hardest in that world is conveying the shades of gray around major social issues. Theatre is better than just about any other medium at articulating those inarticulatable shades of gray.

What makes a design “successful”?: A design is usually most successful if the audience doesn't really notice how complicated it is.

How do you approach your work individually and collaboratively?: I like to think on my toes. Usually I'll spend my time before tech collecting raw material and scraps of ideas that can be quickly assembled, rather than walking into tech with a fully polished completed sound design. This lets my work be more in conversation with the other design elements in real time. Lighting and sound work so closely together, that the more we can be bouncing off of each other during the tech process, usually the stronger both designs end up being in the end. When you walk into a room with a finished and polished piece of music that's exactly 34 seconds long and can't be longer or shorter you're not really collaborating.

What is your favorite part about the collaboration process?: My favorite part of the collaborative process is that moment when you've had an idea you're excited about and someone else presents a totally different idea that you had never thought of and is actually way better than yours.

If you could design any play or musical you’ve yet to design, what would it be?: Revolt of the Beavers would be fun to play around with.

What’s up next?: I'm musical directing a production of Girlfriend at Wellfleet Harbor Actor's Theatre and releasing my next solo album titled Ordinary Eternal Machinery.

Boundless Theatre Company will present the New York Premiere of Octavio Solis’ PROSPECT, directed by Elena Araoz at Teatro Circulo (64 East 4th Street between 2nd Avenue and Bowery), May 19-June 5. Tickets ($18) are available online at www.boundlesstheatre.org

For more on Nathan, visit www.nathanleigh.net

Technically Speaking with...María-Cristina Fusté

Name: María-Cristina Fusté

Hometown: San Juan, Puerto Rico (currently lives in Sunnyside, NY)

Education: MFA in Design for Stage and Film from NYU Tisch School of the Arts

Favorite Credits: Madama Butterfly produced by Opera de Puerto Rico, Fabuloso by John Kolvenbach, The Feast of the Goat by Mario Vargas Llosa in Bogotá, Colombia.

Why theater?: I’m fascinated by the “play” aspect of what we do. We create worlds for character to live in, we study what they do, where they come from, we make decisions on how they move, how they live. As a designer we paint the stage and tell stories. We belong to great stories each time we work on a play.

What is your role on Prospect?: Lighting Designer/ Producer

Tell us about Prospect: Prospect is a story about the search of truth, the search for identity.

What is inspiring your design of Prospect?: Prospect has some “magical” moments that transport the main character, Scout, into the past, into his inner soul, those are moments where he battles his demons. I’m focusing the lighting on Scout’s perspective, how he sees the world and what he doesn’t want to see. Images of traditional Mexican art are a great inspiration that informs Scout’s past.

What kind of theater speaks to you? What or who inspires you as an artist?: I enjoy all kinds of theater and performance art. I particularly enjoy designing for Opera. The theatrical language of Opera is very unique and it presents its own unique challenges. I’m attracted to character driven stories, stories about the human condition, the complications of the human mind.

What makes a design “successful”?: A successful  design starts with good collaboration amongst the creative team. The rehearsal process informs of adjustments that need to be made to the design, designers and directors need to be in constant communication and collaboration in order to serve the play in a cohesive way.

How do you approach your work individually and collaboratively?: I first do initial inspirational research after a detail analysis of the play. As soon as I meet with my collaborators, I study their research, I work on understanding where they are coming from, and start a dialogue where we will discover together the vocabulary of each particular work. All elements of design have to be in harmony with each other.

What is your favorite part about the collaboration process?: I love the discovery process. Finding out how we are going to tell the story, the defining of the space. The story telling.

If you could design any play or musical you’ve yet to design, what would it be?: Pericles by W. Shakespeare.

What’s up next?: In The Heights at Aurora Theatre, Atlanta.

Boundless Theatre Company will present the New York Premiere of Octavio Solis’ PROSPECT, directed by Elena Araoz at Teatro Circulo (64 East 4th Street between 2nd Avenue and Bowery), May 19-June 5. Tickets ($18) are available online at www.boundlesstheatre.org

Technically Speaking with...Sarita Fellows

Name: Sarita Fellows

Hometown: Freetown Sierra Leone

Education: MFA in Design for Stage and Film, NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

Favorite Credits: Fabuloso and Bug, with the Boundless theater Co. Pericles with the Black Theater Co. Spring Awakening and Hairspray with Theater Co. Dirt and Evolution of a Criminal with Darius Monroe.

Why theater?: It is a platform on which I can collaborate with fellow artists and thinkers, telling stories and activating the way we think and reflect about humanity.

What is your role on Prospect?: Costume Designer

Tell us about Prospect: A story about identity. It follows the character Scout, who encounters other characters who are all including himself, masking who they really are. He has to come to terms with his heritage and spiritually connect with how he wants the world to see who he is.

What is inspiring your design of Prospect?: The 1980s and Texas

What kind of theater speaks to you? What or who inspires you as an artist?: All kinds of theater. Life inspires me as an artist. Human beings are fascinating creatures and I am always surprised, inspired, disgusted and awed with how human beings behave towards themselves and towards each other.

What makes a design “successful”?: Communication

How do you approach your work individually and collaboratively?: It always starts with the script. There are always elements, something that inspires and makes it easy for me to latch onto to start the research process. I come to the table with ideas no matter how small or frail they may seem. I stay open and listen to the collaborators in the room.

What is your favorite part about the collaboration process?: I love technical rehearsal week. Seeing how all the elements, the actors, the clothing, the lights, the set, the sound, everything comes together. I enjoy the preparation for the last element, the audience.

If you could design any play or musical you’ve yet to design, what would it be?: A ballet.

What’s up next?: A Winters Tale produced by the New York Classical theater co.

Boundless Theatre Company will present the New York Premiere of Octavio Solis’ PROSPECT, directed by Elena Araoz at Teatro Circulo (64 East 4th Street between 2nd Avenue and Bowery), May 19-June 5. Tickets ($18) are available online at www.boundlesstheatre.org

Technically Speaking with...Jorge D. Dieppa

Name: Jorge D. Dieppa

Hometown: Caguas, Puerto Rico

Education: MFA Set Design from Brooklyn College and a BS In Mechanical Engineering from the University of Puerto Rico College of Engineering (RUM)

Favorite Credits: The Beauty Queen on Leenane by Martin McDonagh, La Celestina by Fernando Rojas, Same Train by Levy Lee Simon

Why theater?: I was an actor in Puerto Rico then decided to mix it up a little bit. End up coming to New York to study Set Design, mostly because I love to be part of the creative team. I love the process of collaboration to make magic happens.

What is your role on Prospect?: I am the Set designer.

Tell us about Prospect?: The world of the play presented to the audience is a fragmented and dislocated one. We are showing everything up front and every audience member will have a different experience with it. The audience will join the characters in a night of excess back in the 80’s in Dallas. Not all is what it seams. We will witness a night of party, alcohol and drugs then we will see what is real and what’s not.
Is beautiful and raw.

What is inspiring your design for Prospect?: Life as broken fragments of a shattered mirror where not all is what it seems.

What kind of theater speaks to you? What or who inspires you as an artist?: The kind of theater that tells the story in a different way using physicality and clever stagecraft. I like to be surprised and I am not interested in seeing a complete realistic representation of a story. I expect to be taken to a different realm. Definitely Art itself. All kind of artistic manifestation.

What makes a design “successful”?: A design to be successful has to complement the play and helps tell the story better. A design that fill out the blanks on the script visually.

How do you approach your work individually and collaboratively?: I read the play several times first to feel the story and then in a more technical approach. I let the story to move me. Making visual research start this entire inspirational journey. Somehow I start finding visual inspiration and start drawing thumb nails sketches to let my ideas guide me. Then I take my ideas and share them with the director and the creative team, they bring to the table their ideas and feedback which then dictates the creative process to follow.

What is your favorite part about the collaboration process?: My favorite part is the part of idea developing the brain storming, when the group is creating without thinking in money and what is possible or not.

If you could design any play or musical you’ve yet to design, what would it be?: I will love to be able to design Martin McDonagh’s The Leenane Trilogy and The Aran Islands Trilogy.

For more on Jorge, visit www.jorgeddieppa.com

Boundless Theatre Company will present the New York Premiere of Octavio Solis’ PROSPECT, directed by Elena Araoz at Teatro Circulo (64 East 4th Street between 2nd Avenue and Bowery), May 19-June 5. Tickets ($18) are available online at www.boundlesstheatre.org

Technically Speaking with...Sarah Stolnack

Name: Sarah Stolnack (Stoli)

Hometown: Seattle, WA

Education: BFA in Theatre Design/Tech, University of Evansville

Favorite Credits: Caryl Churchill’s Fen with Red Garnet Theatre Company, The Evansville Ballet’s The Little Mermaid (world premier), and GIG with Jenna Nicholls (a project that combines live dance with live music from a singer/songwriter).

Why theater?: Storytelling is incredibly powerful, whether it’s through theatre, dance, opera, etc. I can’t imagine working in any other field – theatre provides a unique opportunity to combine that storytelling, visual creativity, and technical understanding. Theatre also attracts me because it exists in time and space – I get to play with pacing and timing as well.  I’m always excited to work with new people and bring our work to new levels, and I absolutely love the fast-paced schedule that working as a freelance designer brings. I never have a boring day.

What is your role on Primary?: Lighting Designer.

Tell us about Primary: Primary is a new play that follows a family as a mother considers starting a political career.

What inspired you to design Primary?: I love working on new works, to be part of a team that is doing something for the first time, developing the piece, and being involved in shaping the story that is being told. This piece especially draws out all of the reasons I love it – being able to directly relate the story we’re telling to current events.

What kind of theater speaks to you? What or who inspires you as an artist?: All kinds of performance speak to me, anything with a strong visual element. I enjoy designing theatre, opera, and dance. I’m inspired by performance any performance that I think is well done. For visual inspiration, I am constantly looking at art and finding new artists that I connect with – right now, I’ve been looking at a lot of paintings by John Atkinson Grimshaw, he manages to capture moonlight and streetlights in a beautiful manner. He uses colors that I wouldn’t always think to incorporate.

What makes a design “successful”?: I don’t have any benchmark for myself that defines “successful”. On every show I do, I learn something. I always have a few things that I wish were better, some timings that could have been tighter, some focuses that could have been sharper. I think that the lighting telling the story and providing the needed visibility is the base of what makes it successful, but there is so much more than that. I want to come away from a design feeling good about the visual elements, feeling that they represented what the design team and I wanted to portray.

How do you approach your work individually and collaboratively?: I think you have to start with the collaboration – that shows the direction that you’re going in. I come into the first production meeting with an open mind – still with thoughts, ideas, and a direction I would approach it from, but I’m there to hear what everyone else has to say. After we’ve talked and I understand the direction the team is going in, I will go off on my own and find the specifics that I think lighting should bring to the show.  

What is your favorite part about the collaboration process?: I can’t think of a part of it I don’t like, so I don’t think I have a favorite part. I love being involved in telling the whole story – talking with the director about the arc of the story and how that affects lighting, with the scenic designer about what the visual language of the space is, with the sound designer about flow and atmosphere of the piece, everything.

If you could design any play or musical you’ve yet to design, what would it be?: I find it hard to choose one – partially because I like working on new plays so much. Perhaps one of Shakespeare’s tragedies, or one of Puccini’s operas. What excites me even more that a script or score that I like is working on it with a creative team that is all on the same page about the story we’re telling and how we’re going to portray it in our respective disciplines.

What’s up next?: I’m designing skinny crazy small at Theatrelab, Gaslight Tango for Axial Theatre Company, and then heading upstate for the summer to work as a lighting supervisor at the Glimmerglass Festival.

For more on Sarah, visit sstolnack.com

Technically Speaking with...Matthew Imhoff

Name: Matthew Imhoff

Hometown: Janesville, Wisconsin

Education: BA in Music and Theatre from Luther College (Decorah, Iowa) and MFA in Production Design from Michigan State University (East Lansing, Michigan)

Favorite Credits: Spring Awakening: A New Musical, Widows, and Cyrano de Bergerac

Why theater?: I always knew it was going to be theatre since I was seven years old. I had no idea I would end up as a designer, but if you ask my family or those who knew me growing up, my career certainly isn’t surprising, to say the least. To offer the short answer, theatre brings together my favorite things: imagination, storytelling, art, truth, people, music, dance.

What is your role on Primary?: I am the Scenic Designer

Tell us about Primary: Primary is a World Premiere play by Gracie Gardner that deals with a mother, her child, and her husband during a local election campaign set against former President Clinton’s impeachment hearings. This play won Sanguine Theatre Company’s new play contest, and working on this production has offered me a glimpse into the writing’s process—something that is so foreign to me. I believe there have been three drafts sent out to the designers, and each time it really is like reading a new play. On a macro level, it has been very exciting to observe Gracie hone certain aspects of the play and abandon others altogether; I mean, that’s the same process as designing—honing and perfecting and abandoning—just the mediums are different. Ultimately, the work of the playwright is leading my work as a designer, and my aesthetic visions of the show have changed as substantially as each draft.

What inspired you to design Primary?: I think like much of Sanguine Theatre Company’s anticipated audience for this show, I grew up in the 90s—a little bit older than Sophie in Primary. This play offers a sense of nostalgia to the styles, fads, and issues of the 90s, but at the same time offers rather pointed moments where you realize how unchanged (politically and otherwise) we are to twenty years ago.

What kind of theater speaks to you? What or who inspires you as an artist?: I find theatre where all parts of the production—writers, director, designers, and actors— come together to create a truthful and striking moment for the audience to be particularly exciting. Playwrights certainly inspire me as an artist—they are the guiding force behind my work, and there are a few that I would be content to explore for the rest of my career. There is also handful of studio-based artists that I find particularly inspiring—those who take a commonplace object or everyday subject and manage to provide relevant and urgent commentary by provoking a visceral reaction in the viewer.

What makes a design “successful”?: I always find designs that accurately depict the world of the play and the characters that inhabit it to be successful. Creating a world that the characters fit into means what you’re creating isn’t always pretty (trust me, I’m designing a show about the 90s!). Sometimes what you discover the characters like and what their world looks like isn’t always keeping with good taste or personal preferences. As a designer, that can be challenging. I also find designs with subtle commentary on the theme of the show particularly stunning—it’s hard to accomplish and you have to have a keen audience to read those visual signifiers. I think what I find to be most successful are sets that have a sense of habitation—that the characters have lived there. It shows their habits and preferences; their likes and life experiences have informed their environment and it is through the human interaction with and the existence within the environment that the set comes to life.

How do you approach your work individually and collaboratively?: I live on this constant pendulum between working alone and working collaboratively. I spend a lot of time on my own in my studio researching, drawing, building models, drafting, and making discoveries about the show. Then I go to a meeting with everyone else, and they share all of their hard work and their discoveries and we figure out how and what portions of what we’re imagining fits together. And then I go off by myself and do the whole thing again with the new information from my collaborators. As a student, I really loved and protected my studio time, and to an extent I still do. Comparatively speaking, spending time in a room or rehearsal hall or theatre with my collaborators is much more exciting and than spending time alone in my studio. When I’m working alone, I have found I am most productive when I am deeply focused and have several hours without interruption to commit to the design. I usually wake up early in the morning to do the bulk of the design work—it’s a combination of being too tired to let an internal voice of judgment quiet discoveries but at the same time not too tired from a long day of work (a habit from grad school that has seemed to transition well). On the other hand, I find the collaborative process works best when it is ongoing, often, and brief—a quick e-mail or text usually does the trick between meetings (of which there are always too many and not enough, oddly).
What is your favorite part about the collaboration process?: I like the moment where I am personally stuck on a particular challenge (in design, in production, in build, in tech, any of the above) and I’ve explored all the possibilities and options that I can think of, and I ask for help from my fellow designers and they come back with the perfect solution. Even though I’m the set designer, all of the designers’ work is influencing and contributing to each other’s and so that distinction or idea of ownership is really arbitrary in my opinion.

If you could design any play or musical you’ve yet to design, what would it be?: Marat/Sade, Macbeth, and Jerusalem are all on the short list. I’d also love to try a show like Phantom or Wicked where the design is so iconic and see what I make of it.

What’s up next?: I’m the resident lighting designer at a dinner theatre in Wisconsin, so I’m flying there right after Primary opens to get a new show up. There are a couple of other projects in the works here in the city, and I’m always looking for opportunities to design.

For more on Matthew, visit www.matthewimhoff.viewbook.com

Technically Speaking with...Elizabeth Frino

Name: Elizabeth Frino

Hometown: Pompton Plains, NJ

Education: Lehigh University

Favorite Credits: Scenic Designer for Romeo and Juliet, Props Master for Peter and the Starcatcher, Scenic Artist for Every Tongue Confess

Why theater?: I love how theater brings designs and creative ideas to life.

What is your role on Primary?: Props Designer

Tell us about Primary: Primary follows the life of a passionate woman who dreams of change, her unsupportive husband and their intelligent little girl during the Clinton Impeachment hearings. Laura Hollister senses a need for change in the government and after a surprising nomination decides to run for State Representative. Arthur, Laura’s husband has trouble believing in her, leaving their daughter Sophie in the middle where she maturely forms her own opinions on the family’s situation.

What inspired you to design Primary?: 90s sitcoms/my childhood. This show is totally the 90s from Sophie’s love of Sailor moon to the Clinton Impeachment hearings.

What kind of theater speaks to you? What or who inspires you as an artist?: Right now I am into more realistic theater.  I am interested in plays that I can easily relate to and that force me to think deeper into my own life. Anything and everything inspires me as an artist. It really depends on the show and the world it is set in.

What makes a design “successful”?: A successful design takes the audience out of the reality of their lives and into a new world.  

How do you approach your work individually and collaboratively?: I read a play three times before I do any research or start designing. Then I like to have several discussions with the design team to see how they perceived the play and to gain a better understanding of the show.

What is your favorite part about the collaboration process?: Working with other creative minds.

If you could design any play or musical you’ve yet to design, what would it be?: Probably Cabaret because it is my favorite musical, and I would love the opportunity to work on a musical.

What’s up next?: More props and more painting. I will be the Props Master for Paloma at the Kitchen Theatre, Scenic Designer for Bad Jews at Lehigh University and I’ll be spending my summer in Maine designing and creating props.

For more on Elizabeth, visit http://www.elizabethfrino.com/. For more on Sanguine Theatre Company, visit http://www.sanguinenyc.com/