The Spencer Theatre- UMKC

Director: Erika Baker

The White Theatre at the J

Director: Damron Armstrong

Lighting Designer: Kelsi Richardson

Costume Designer: Eboni Fondren

Sound Designer: Jon Robertson

Properties Designer: Eric Palmquist

THE WHITE THEATRE AT THE J

DIRECTOR: TIM BAIR

SCENIC DESIGNER: JEREMY SMITH

COSTUME DESIGNER: CHELLI TILLMAN

LIGHTING DESIGNER: JUSTIN DUDZIK

SOUND DESIGNER: JONATHAN ROBERTSON

The White Theatre at the J

Director: Jerry Jay

Lighting Designer: Justin Dudzik

Costume Designer: Justin Gannaway

Sound Designer: Jon Robertson

Wells-Metz Theatre, Indiana University

Director: James Nelson

Lighting Designer: Darrian Brimberry

Costume Designer: Justin Gannaway

Sound Designer: Tony Stoeri

“Machinal, playwright Sophie Treadwell’s masterpiece performed by IU’s Department of Theatre, Drama and Contemporary Dance, and directed by James Nelson, is indeed well acted and directed, and the plot, hauntingly expressionistic, is powerful and pertinent, even these 90 years later. But what everyone seemed to be talking about after the show was Jeremy Smith’s sets, Tony Stoeri’s sound design and Darrian Brimberry’s lights (wait till you see the last five minutes!).

The set consists of white strings making parallel lines at various angles, gracing ceiling, floor and open space. Every element, including Justin Michael Gannaway’s costumes, is black, white or gray. Only during the hospital birth scene do the strings turn color, red. Tightly strung, they relax and sway in one scene only, a love affair.”

-Connie Shakalis, Bloomington Herald-Times

“Scenic designer Jeremy Smith’s set is of a maze of muddy black ramps. Taut sets of strings lit by Darrian Brimberry connect and frame the space. It looks a bit like the inside of a harp and inventive sound designer Tony Stoeri always keep thing on the edge of song.”

-George Walker, WFIU Public Radio

Ruth N. Halls Theatre, Indiana University

Director: Richard Roland

Lighting Designer: Qi’er Luo

Costume Designer: Justin Gannaway

Sound Designer: Jared O’Brien

Ruth N. Halls Theatre, Indiana University

Director: Ken Roberson

Lighting Designer: Darrian Brimberry

Costume Designer: Justin Gannaway

Sound Designer: Macy Kloville

“I needn’t visit any art musums for a while, as i was immersed in what seemed like a Vermeer painting Friday evening while enjoyingh the Indiana University Department of Theatre, Drama, and Contemporary Dance’s production of Pippin. …This Version, directed and choreographed by kenneth L. Roberson with music direction by Terry Labolt and scenic designed by Jeremy Smith, is a professoinal and talent laden enchanter. “

Connie Shakalis - Herald Times

Southeastern Summer Theatre

Director: Ilana Ransom Toeplitz

Lighting Designer: Aaron Bowersox

Costume Designer: Kathy McGill

Sound Designer: Kyle Jensen

“The Southeastern Summer Theatre Institute celebrated its 11th anniversary with a wildly entertaining, unequivocally remarkable performance of “Chicago,” on stage at the Seahawk Cultural Center. “Chicago” brims with the outcome of inspired professional guidance and careful cosseting. A polished production, full to the brim with winning performances by every one of the performing artists. Continue looking forward to more amazing songs, scenes and settings. Watch particularly for the colorful, planned to the gnat’s eyelash, circus and the courthouse, and the brilliant finale. What a show, what a night.”

-Nancy Wellard, The Island Packet

The Wells-Metz Theatre, Indiana University

Director: Liam Castellan

Lighting Designer: Allen Hahn

Costume Designer: Chen Chen

Sound Designer: Scheumais McHenry

“The stage is furnished with five chairs and surrounded by audience members on three sides. The former inmates take turns telling their stories, never leaving their respective disks. Other actors take on an array of minor roles (police officers, attorneys, etc.) to bring some parts of the stories to life.

Director Liam Castellan has led a solid cast through a moving and engaging production. At no point during the 100-minute performance did I find myself wishing for an intermission.”

-Matthew Waterman, Bloomington Herald-Times

CHARLOTTE’S WEB

Cardinal Stage

Director: Liam Castellan

Scenic Design: Jeremy Smith

Costume Design: Kayla Cieslinski

Lighting Design: Bridget S. Williams

Sound Design: Macy Kloville

“Take a novelist, E.B. White, who received a Pulitzer Prize special citation and the National Medal for Literature, along with other awards, and turn his children’s book into a play (Joseph Robinette). Add an immersive hay-and-barn-walls set (Jeremy Smith), and you’ve got a winner, one of the best things I’ve seen at Cardinal.”

Connie Shakalis - Herald Times

Wells-Metz Theatre, Indiana University

Director: Dale McFadden

Lighting Designer: Naomi Gold

Costume Design: Katie Cowan Sickmeier

Sound Design: Macy Kloville

“Director Dale McFadden highlighted Chekhov’s fascination with the human condition and kept the pace active on Jeremy Smith’s appropriately sedate brown and tan set, graced by five bare (one “is dead”) birch trees.”

-Connie Shakalis, Bloomington Herald-Times

Drama Theatre, Arkansas State University

Director: Tim Bohn

Lighting Designer: Cody Campbell

Costume Designer: Claire Abernathy

Southeastern Summer Theatre

Director: Jerry Jay Cranford

Scenic Designer: Robin Wagner

Additional Scenic Designer: Jeremy Smith

Lighting Designer: Aaron Bowersox

Costume Designer: Kathy McGill

Sound Designer: Stephanie Smith

*National tour set and props were rented sans the wagon and laboratory scenery. Jeremy Smith was hired to design the missing scenery.

Drama Theatre, Arkansas State University

Director: Lisa Bohn

Lighting Designer: Jeff McLaughlin

Costume Designer: Claire Abernathy

Drama Theatre, Arkansas State University

Director: Tim Bohn

Lighting Designer: Cody Campbell

Costume Designer: Claire Abernathy

Sound Designer: Virginia Hirsch

Paper Project, Advanced Scenic Design II

Design Statement

This opera by Mozart is a frothy delight. The characters float across the stage in circular, carefree pattern that help tell the story of two young couples getting caught up in the schemes of a bored old man and an attention seeking housemaid.

The general color scheme is of a light pink ice cream sundae. The pink marble texture covering the majority of the classically-inspired set gives the audience the impression that the owners of the house are wealthy but don’t take life too seriously. The white legs aid in giving the set an austere presence.

The set is minimally designed to call back to classical architecture and give the impression that the world of the play is rooted in the upper-class tier of society.

The columns, balustrades, and sheer show curtain give the idea that the far upstage portion of the set is outside. While the downstage is the interior.

Paper Project, Advanced Scenic Design II

Design Statement

Giselle a romantic ballet staged in two acts.

In the first act, the setting is a provincial town outside of a larger city. The lush, realistic style of the design evokes the feeling of nostalgia through pleasant warm colors and rich textures. The immense attention to detail provides a since of repetition, regarding the character’s and their lovely uneventful lives.

The physical setting of act one is Rhineland Europe around the fifteen hundreds. Research shows many lower to middle class citizens building half-timber homes allowing for personalization. This further evokes a nostalgic feeling for the audience because it’s obvious, through slight flaws and charming tick, the main architecture of the set was built by the common status characters inhabiting it.

The warmth of the colors provides a sense of comfort and hearty stability to the audience. The grandness of the main unit gives the audience the impression that, while we are experiencing the lives of lower to middle class peasants, this is the middle of some type of community. Further enforcing how comfortable and care free the characters of the ballet are in the first act.

The second act differs greatly from the first. While the first pays very close attention to realism through naturalistic composition, colors, and textures, the second act’s scenery is highly theatrical and utilizes the full space of the theatre to aid in dwarfing the characters when they enter the great forest. The tree like structures are too serpentine to feel like the naturalistic trees we saw in the first act. The colors are much more off putting and, while they remain in the earthy color mood established in act one, they skew more towards green, giving off the mood of broodiness or give the impression that sly forces are lurking just around the corner.

 As it does not change looks between acts, the floor of the set is a non-descript abstract painting that uses a collective of colors and textures seen throughout the rest of the design. Aiding in establishing a cohesive composition from top to bottom.

Paper Project, Advanced Scenic Design

Design Statement

Cabaret is a play about oppression and desperation. Cabaret is also a play about freedom and bravery.

 I set the show in the world of the Kit Kat Klub with the furniture of the other scenes spinning and appearing out of different areas around the set. This is to let the audience know that the Emcee is really running the show thorough the entire performance. This makes him interesting to the audience and helps them understand his omnipresence is his power. 

The aesthetic of the show is much like a distressed, grungy metal that resembles a mirror. Not only is this mirror effect relevant to the history of this show, it also helps the audience reflect on their actions throughout the play. There is literally a song entitled “What Would You Do?” Many of the instances in the show call on the audience to be present in the moment and engage in the story telling. 

The other locations beyond the Kit Kat Klub are much more warm and comfortable. They are modest and unassuming. The Klub has much more of a veneered look to it. Regarding the glitz and glamour that attracts its many patrons. The club for the most part however, has lost its shine. I made this choice because this musical set about eight years before German Kabarett Klubs are abandoned.

The Act One Finale will feature gun props filled with red and white confetti to represent the viscerally violent blitzkriegs enacted by the Nazi armed forces. The Brick that is supposed to be thrown through Herr Schultz’s window will be thrown through the wall of the set. To represent a break/divide/tear in the fundamental lining of the relationships between the Nazi’s and the Jews. That is a terrifying moment and it will be much more impactful if it is breaking the entire convention of the set rather than just one small window.

Paper Project, Advanced Scenic Design

Design Statement

Billy Elliot is a coming of age story about a young boy who overcomes his lower-class circumstances to become a ballet dancer. The musical is set in England during the 1984-1985 coal miner’s strike. The strike, while not being the main source of plotted action in the play is extremely prevalent throughout the play.

 Many of the characters are frustrated with their current standings in society and spend most of the play raging against it. The set has a richness to it that helps illustrate the metaphor of poverty literally being a heavy burden that seeps into your life and is hard to shake off. This pairs nicely with the beautifully wispy ballet sequences wherein Billy expresses his passion.

The design is much like film noir in quality. Many of the scenes, while taking place in realized locations only have a few furniture pieces to help establish setting. The floor and portals have this saturated smokey texture that helps signify the ever-present pollution and smog coming from the small town’s only source of sustainable work. 

The colors are vibrantly rich. Helping with the saturation and the grime of the world these characters are living in. There is a certain weight to the burden of being below the poverty line that the richly saturated colors help with. The textures of the set are just as important in illustrating how grimy and sticky the set is. This is all to really illustrate how hard it is for Billy and anyone else born into a blue-collar family business to break away from the mold that generations have built for him.

Paper Project, Advanced Scenic Design

Titus Andronicus is about the vicious cycle of revenge.

 By creating a domino effect of revenge, Shakespeare puppeteers one of the bloodiest revenge tragedies in the history of drama. Not a single character is spared from some sort of grief brought about by a ruthless plot.

 The characters in the play are incredibly transparent in their objectives. Most of them want power or to avenge a wrong done by someone else who wanted power. Half way through the play, the world seems to function like a well-oiled machine, wherein every single part (the characters) is working to achieve their own personal goal to make the worlds go round.

 By utilizing a simplistically industrial aesthetic, I can illustrate the cyclical effect of revenge, betrayal, and wrath.

Paper Project, Advanced Scenic Design

Design Statement

The Cherry Orchard demonstrates that before one starts a new life, one must forget their old one.

The family cherry orchard is the backbone of this play. With its harvest, came the wealth that has nurtured this family for generations. Chekhov uses many instances in the play to remark on it’s great beauty and how important it is to the family. Without the orchard, this family’s life would cease to exist.

To show how symbiotic, the relationship between the family and the orchard, the walls of the house are covered with hundreds of apple blossoms. This not only makes the inside/outside transition easier, it also shows just how vast the cherry orchard is and that it surrounds the home on all sides. The floor of the home is a thin slice of wood, taken from the center of a tree, so when the characters walk across the stage, they cross over the many rings of bark that the tree has grown over the years. Further highlighting the fact that the family’s fate rests on the theoretical shoulders of the orchard.

 Hung just behind the playing space and in front of the upstage blossom wall are many cylindrical objects representing tree trunks. This helps in creating the abstracted cherry orchard but also helps clarify the fate of the family’s old life on the grounds of the orchard at the end of the play. While they look like tree trunks at a distance, they are made of wire and fabric, so that at the end of the play, when the sounds of broken string and chopped wood drown out the sounds of Firs’ death, the audience will see many of the trunks gently fall from their positions to the ground. This gentle process is meant to call to mind the idea of a memory gently fading away.

Paper Project, Advanced Scenic Design II

Design Statement

Good People is a play about luck. So many of the characters ended up in the way they did because of random failures or successes throughout their lives. 

The world of the play is ever moving; constantly changing. Therefore, the legs of the play function in a way that creates an accordion effect so the audience can clearly delineate between characters who’ve amassed careers and livelihoods wherein they can enjoy lots of open space to characters whose lives aren’t so lucky. The accordion effect also personifies fate to further stress that humans have no control over their futures. 

The paint is a generalized marble/concrete texture to serve the wide range of locations the characters visit during the play. The darker spaces help set the tone of claustrophobia with the world dark and small. While the lighter tones in the paint can be highlighted to emphasize the openness of the space when the legs are fully retracted. 

The play cycles between a sleek modern aesthetic of upper class and the homely aesthetic of the lower middle class. This is shown through use of cool and neutral tones in the modern scenes and warm, relaxed color tones in places like the kitchen and the basement.