Episode 5: Matt McWilliams

[Pipe and Drape theme plays.]

STEPHEN FALA: I’m Stephen Fala, and you’re listening to Pipe and Drape, the only podcast that spotlights the creative minds behind the theatre for young audiences industry. Every two weeks I sit down with a theatre professional to hear their stories about the audition, rehearsal, and development process of theatre for young audiences. Each of them have bridged the path from youth to adulthood while living in worlds created for children. My guests have mounted shows small enough to fit in a minivan to productions so big they travel by caravan. You can join the conversation by emailing PipeAndDrapeStories@gmail.com or messaging @PipeAndDrapeStories on Instagram.

This is Episode 5 of Pipe and Drape, and also it’s my birthday! [Out of tune “For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow” plays in the background] Rather than Venmoing me $4,000, you can give me the gift of a review and rating on Apple Podcasts. Your stars and comments do something with the algorithm that helps future listeners find the show. Your gift would help me share these pipe and drape stories with a wide range of aspiring industry members, seasoned professionals, and curious people. If you are unable to rate and review, please share a Pipe and Drape episode with your loved ones, liked ones, or okay ones. I’m so grateful that I can celebrate another trip around the sun by bringing these fresh perspectives to you. Birthday cake for all.

On this episode you’ll learn how my guest stretched into new roles while rehearsing Shakespeare alone in the woods and performing it in a barebones setting for a young audience. Yes. Performing Shakespeare for kids. Through broad, physical, vaudevillian style comedy and an intense course of study my guest opened a window into the world of Shakespeare. Thank you for listening with me today.

S: Today's guest is actor Matt McWilliams, a lover of Caravaggio whose recent credits include work with Theater Under the Stars, the Little Theater, and the Scioto Society. They appeared in numerous Shakespeare productions, including a tour of Romeo and Juliet with Madness Most Discreet Theatre Company (a group of which they are a founding member.) Their Philadelphia credits include MMF, which received rave reviews, puppeteering with a wild snowman in See Amid the Winter Snow, Eugene Ionesco’s The Lesson (another classic), covering productions at Arden Theatre Company, and a virtual production/experience Ignite with the Strides Collective. If you have not guessed already, Matt is incredibly cultured and well-read. Matt is my little and the Temple University chapter of Alpha Psi Omega and my former co-star in the Emmy Award-winning web-series One of the Guys. We are currently in my Washington Heights apartment discussing their experience touring A Midsummer Night's Dream. Matt, welcome.

MATT MCWILLIAMS: Stephen, thank you so much for having me. It is an honor to be here. This feels very natural for me, you know, sitting in front of a microphone with you—it's bringing back pleasant memories of our time together on One of the Guys.

S: In college, after we were done filming One of the Guys, we would go to a party with a jar of Nutella and lock ourselves in another person's bathroom and eat it in the bathtub. We had lots of fun back then. “Back then,” that wasn't that long ago.
 
M: No! We're still pretty fresh, we’re spring chickens. 
 
S: We're still kids. 
 
M: Yeah, we’re still kids. I mean, we're child sized adults. That's something.
 
S: That’s true, that’s true. That's how we ended up performing kids
 
M: That is true. 
 
S: We look like kids.
 
M: Little boys.
 
S: Yeah. When you were an actual Real Live Child, what were that you were doing as a kid to entertain yourself?
 
M: When I was a kid, I was averse to all physical activity, but I loved to read. And for a long time, I actually thought I was going to be a writer. And I sort of stumbled into acting backwards just through Shakespeare, which I loved reading. And then I figured out that Shakespeare was a lot more interesting if you yelled at your friends instead of inside your own brain.
 
S: Do you remember seeing theatre as a child, either in your school or an arena spectacular?
 
M: I do. My family would go to Disney World once a year and so I saw a lot of Disney productions in that vein and also my middle school and elementary school. We did a lot of field trips to see theatre. One of the first things I saw live was actually a production of Twelfth Night and it was very dramatic. One of the actors had gotten sick right before the show and was recuperating in a back room somewhere. And his understudy went on and I was like, ‘[Gasp] The drama’s real.'
 
S: And then you actually had the pleasure of doing Twelfth Night eventually as an adult.
 
M: I did, I did, which was like a, a real sort of like full circle dream come true moment.
 
S: You ended up studying theatre.
 
M: Mm-hmm.
S: Was theater for young audiences a thing on your mind? Was that even covered in school? 
 
M:Yeah, that's a great question. So my first ever time acting: I was sixteen and I was cast in my school's production of Les Mis (I was Student Number Three) and I kind of caught the bug. And I had…the summer before that I did a Shakespeare camp where you would study Shakespeare. And then at the end of the camp on the last day we performed small snippets of scenes and that's, I guess, kind of where I caught the acting bug. And then I decided to major in theatre in college. And my first professional job was the summer after I graduated high school doing a production of Rapunzel for a children's theatre. And so that was sort of like the first professional credit I had (that was with The Little Theatre.) And I went into my time at Temple University studying theatre with just like that little bit of TYA under my belt, but it never came up again until I graduated and started booking gigs professionally.
 
S: So then you had this interesting merge of two worlds where you're taking your little bit of TYA background and your experience with Rapunzel and your love for Shakespeare as a child. And these two things came together when you worked for Theater Under the Stars touring Midsummer and performing it in-house. So how did you come about doing this job?
 
M: Yeah, that's a great question. So my relationship with Theater Under the Stars actually started when I was like nineteen and I went to UPTAs to audition and I got a summer internship working for them. And then I went back to work with them two summers after that. And so that turned into this sort of like, I don't know, creative partnership. A lot of us would let go back year after year and A Midsummer Night's Dream was sort of like this flagship production that I interned. And then they brought it back a year after that. And a year after that, and it became this, that this touring sensation.
 
S: What was the rehearsal process for this like?
 
M: So, this is actually an interesting fact about the rehearsal process: one of the conceits of the show was that it was original practice style Shakespeare, which entailed sort of…we only learned our lines and the three words that cued us in, and the blocking was loosely structured. So we would know where to stand while we were saying our lines, but not what anyone else was doing, which they think is potentially how they did productions in Shakespeare's time when they were so pressed for time that they wouldn't gather everyone in one place and rehearse cohesively. So that's how we were rehearsing and that's what that process looked like. The expectation was you show up off-book and then you have…we had about twelve days to sort of block it, stage it, put all together. And we would just sort of like rehearse dusk till dawn. And I was living in a church at the time, like a little tiny church. And I would just like walk around in the woods at night, practicing my lines ‘cause I was so terrified. I learned two different role tracks and the audience would randomly choose every night who me and all the other actors were playing. So I learned the Hermia track and then I also learned Flute was my second one. And that would rotate night by night. But in the version we toured, I was just playing Flute. So that's what the kids saw.
 
S: A lot of people study different ways to get into a character. There are so many schools of acting I feel keep hearing about new ones and I’m like, ‘Who's that person?’ And Matt and I went to Temple University together and Temple is very Uta Hagen heavy. And so you're asking a lot of questions about character history and your relationship to people, places, and things. And so we have this…what’s called Uta’s Ten Questions which are the foundation of every character. And playing multiple characters…that can be a lot of things. So did you end up using your Uta training for Midsummer or did you go another route to get into the minds of all these people that you played?
 
M: Something I was introduced to through this, this job was Viewpoints. We played a lot with the idea of status and how that affected the way the characters moved in their own bodies and also how they interacted with each other. So if you were the highest status person on stage (if you were the king of the fairies) you carried yourself in a way, and if you were Puck you sort of were always aware of where Oberon was and if you could stand at full height and if you could like move at full speed when someone of a higher status was around you. And that was a really useful tool in terms of orienting myself with other actors. And then I also used a lot of Michael Chekhov—placing things in different centers in my body to distinguish characters as well as like an immediate way to tap into them differences.
 
S: It's interesting that you mentioned status because it has to do with everyone around you, but you're not rehearsing with anyone. You rehearsed the show without other actors and so you're making these characters with certain statuses without anyone else around. So what was it like the first time that you did this (whichever track you did) with the other actors?
 
M: That was probably the most exhilarating moment of my life was like stepping on this stage for the first time and looking at someone in the eye and hearing these words sent back to me after just being that voice in my head this whole time. It was so different than what I pictured. And I think the point of an original practice production like that is it forces these natural reactions out of you because you've literally never seen it happen before. And so it creates this crazy frenetic energy where you're just sort of like living moment-to-moment trying to hang on to all these things that are new and happening for the first time. And then, because we were playing different iterations of these characters every night, it's like every production was different in some way, which I think works for TYA ‘cause like the kids are getting this incredibly high-stakes version of the show and that really makes things clear. You have to know what you're saying because the other people who've never heard you say it before have to get it clearly as well. 
 
S: What were some of the major differences between the version that you did at the theatre and the version that you did on the road?
 
M: On the road it was even more abridged than the in-house version and the in-house version we had a stage and everything was exactly there for us when we needed it. And when we were touring, we would sort of just take the most essential props and the pipes and drapes and put them in the van and drive him around. So everything was reduced: the runtime, the number of lines, the set, the props, it was all just a scaled down a little bit. Picture (for our pipes and drapes) the smallest, the most bare bones, teeny tiniest set. You can imagine. ‘Cause also inspired by Shakespeare's day, it was like you had a bench, you had a second bench and then you had some swords. And if you were lucky, there was a level to play with somewhere. So we would do pipes and then just one single curtain to make entrances and exits. And then the bulk of what we brought with us were costumes. And that was sort of how we would differentiate character. We were all running around, playing for different people. Like for instance, Flute was my primary character, but I was also three different fairies. I think I was Theseus, too (a role I would never play in real life.) A lot of what I would do on the road was just carry giant plastic bins full of hats and wings and wigs and makeup. And that was how we sold the show to the kids was with costume.
 
S: Had you experienced driving any sort of van around before with a set and other actors in it?
 
M: Absolutely not. Absolutely not. I am not known as the world's best driver, and there were (it was a pretty small company) there were eight of us and I rarely did the driving. There were people who felt much safer, more comfortable being in control of the vehicle. And I was not one of those people. I prefer to be driven around, to be perfectly honest. So I would do a lot of lifting and someone else would do the driving, which is how I like it. 
 
S: Strong bones.
 
M: Strong bones. 
 
S: What are some of the tools that you and your colleagues had to make this material resonate with this younger audience who, maybe, this was their first experience with the Bard? 
 
M: It was sort of two-pronged. We, as the actors had mandatory text that we were required to read and we had to bring our like two-part or giant Shakespeare lexicons with us. And if it wasn't clear to the director and the stage manager what we were saying, we would like have to go back, read our books, translate everything into modern English so we knew each thought as clear as possible. And then it was very broad physical comedy, like very sit-com style, slapstick interpretation of A Midsummer Night's Dream. When we were touring this production, we would do a couple things, like get the kids, you know, amped up jazz before the show, like gently let them into the world of Shakespeare. And so we would head out into the auditorium in our costumes and those of us who could play instruments would sing little madrigals or we would try to joke around with the kids in old timey “Ye Old Shakespeare.” And it obviously never went over well. But I do think that there…it breaks the ice a little bit. Even if no one engages with you, they're sort of braced for the experience of like, this is going to be a little bit funny and it's okay to laugh and it's okay to laugh at us. ‘Cause like, this is funny. It's funny stuff. Even when it's not supposed to be.
 
S: It's hard to interact with any audience and kids are so brutally honest or sometimes mean. If you're dealing with high schooler students, it's tricky.
 
M: Yes. They're old enough to know what they're saying, so when they say something you're like, ‘Oh, they really mean that.’ Also in the style of Shakespeare's day, we encourage the kids to boo characters when someone was doing something mean or chime-in when they had a thought about it while it was happening. So it was a bit like doing stand-up or something. You're up there doing your work and someone's heckling you while it's happening. So it was fun to stop and occasionally be like, [Vaudeville impression] ‘Yeah, kid, you're right!’ like just acknowledge what they were saying was a valid interpretation, we loved hearing it. And I remember one of the longest, most uncomfortable stage pauses I've ever heard was a scene where we were all on stage and someone forgot a line and it felt like we were all just standing there silently for fifteen full seconds. And I don't even remember how it ended. I think I blacked out, but it was the most uncomfortable moment of my life on stage. I was like, ‘There's no worse feeling than this.’ I was like, ‘Is this my fault? Is it all of our faults?’ It was just absolutely terrible.
 
S: Did you have an extended talkback with the students after the show where you got to discuss the process with them? 
 
M: We did. We would do a question and answer after the show and a lot of the questions would be related to how we made sort of the gags happen. But I remember very specifically, one of the most, I think one of the most profound things I've ever heard was an older student saying that Shakespeare's words sounded the same coming out of my mouth when I was playing Hermia than it did when they'd seen it before and a woman had played that part and they were like, ‘Wow, that sounds just the same. Everyone should do it this way.’ And this was such an incredibly enlightened and moving thing to hear a child say, and I was like, ‘Wow, this is why this is so important because interpretations like this can reach people before they go out into the world and make their own creative choices and shape their lives in their own way.’ You know, Shakespeare is one of those things that we introduced to children in such a belabored way. I don't know about you, but the first time I learned about it was in school as if it was literature. And I had this fear when I took this job I was like, ‘Do I even know what I'm saying? Will the kids understand what I'm saying if I don't even get it?’ And I learned that the way to reach people with Shakespeare is to perform it like this. It's vital and it's worth saying, and that it can be adapted in new and unexpected ways and there's still meaning there, there's still meat. And I guess this is me popping up my soap box: but show kids Shakespeare, take them to the show, show them the movie, have them listen to it on a podcast instead of making them read it. I think all of the wisdom in Shakespeare would reach kids a lot more effectively that way. So teachers out there: take your kids to the show.
 
S: Do you have any recommendations for Shakespeare that should be watched or listened to? 
 
M: That's a great question. There's a book (I believe we've talked about this) How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare, that as an actor I read and learned a lot about. And then in terms of like productions to watch, I would say (especially right now) you can watch the National Theater’s website. You can rent productions of their shows and that's the highest quality Shakespeare you can access. And it's so fun. So that's what I would say. 
 
S: Did you have any other duties besides loading in your own set, driving your van, and communicating with the audience before the show and after? 
 
M: Yes, I was the Wig Mistress. I was in charge of maintaining the integrity of our wigs. So every night (and there were so many wigs, I've never worn more wigs in my life. What a treat) so every time we would take down the show and we would drive it back to the theatre, I would put them on their stands, I would tidy, brush, take out the hair ties, whatever needed to be done, wrap them up, and make sure that they looked show-ready for the next time we would have to take them back out. It was like tending to a garden of artificial hair, which was a satisfying experience. I'm not a gardener, but I do think I could be a Wig Mistress in this lifetime or the next.
 
S: Is that on your Special Skills now? 
 
M: It's actually not because no one told me what to do. They were like, ‘Here's the shape of how you maintain these wigs,’ and I was just sort of free-balling it. So I don't know that I'm professional, but could I be? With some training I think it could.
 
S: And anything fun offstage?
 
M: I was living in a church. And it was…we developed like a sense of comradery and also sort of like every day I felt like I was trespassing on a place I really shouldn't be. So I remember staying up late at night and we were all so nervous about this process of doing original practice Shakespeare, and there's something so profound and beautiful just sitting around saying beautiful words to people who also like love hearing those things. I think that's where I developed the ability to really digest and like process Shakespeare was just this endless back and forth with other people who wanted it to to mean something when they were speaking it. I kind of fell in love with Shakespeare doing this. He's my boyfriend.
 
S: A summer of love.
 
M: A summer of love. 
 
S: How did your work performing Shakespeare for a young audience propel you forward either as an artist or as a young adult?
 
M: Yeah. That is (looking back on this time I would say it's) probably one of the most formative things I've done in a training sense, but also because it gave me the clarity that has become like a, sort of like a guiding light for me in my career. I really only want to be putting things out into the world that I believe have value. And for me that is representation on stage. And I'm particularly passionate about re-claiming classical stories and like giving those to minority voices and minority populations. And I did my own very small version of that with these Shakespeare shows. But that was where I saw firsthand that children internalize that. And if you normalize a production of Shakespeare where race and gender don't necessarily mean anything in terms of what you're seeing, it's that anyone can do anything. That is lasting change. That's how actors can like shape the world. And that's really the power of art as I see it. And that's what I want to put into the world. 
 
S: Matt, thank you for speaking with me today. How can our listeners find you? 
 
M: My website is mattmcwilliamsactor.com. You can also find me on Instagram @timoteecalamari. •~*Should I spell that out?~*•
 
S: Be sure to check out more of Matt’s comedy and pipe and drape story on Instagram.

[Pipe and Drape theme plays.]

You can also find Matt studying a good book or glass of wine at Book Club on the Lower East Side. You can join the conversation about theatre for young audiences and find more Pipe and Drape content including photos, quotes, and TYA news on Instagram @PipeAndDrapeStories. And please be sure to rate and review Pipe and Drape wherever you listen to podcasts! Each star given or review submitted helps future listeners to find the show. Be sure to tune in every other Tuesday to hear theatre for young audiences creatives share their pipe and drape stories. Pipe and Drape is created and hosted by Stephen Fala and distributed by Anchor. Artwork for Pipe and Drape was created by Stephen Gordon and music was composed by Stephen Fala. Thank you for listening with me today.

Find Matt McWilliams:

WEBSITE: ⁠https://www.mattmcwilliamsactor.com
INSTAGRAM: @timoteecalamari

Connect with Pipe and Drape:
INSTAGRAM: @PipeAndDrapeStories
Host: Stephen Fala
Artwork: Stephen Gordon
EMAIL: PipeAndDrapeStories@gmail.com

Introducing Dinky Pipe and Drape! Dinky Episode 1: TYA Auditions and Theatre Conferences

STEPHEN FALA: I’m Stephen Fala, and you’re listening to Pipe and Drape, the only podcast that spotlights the creative minds behind the theatre for young audiences industry.

[Pipe and Drape theme plays.]

Every two weeks I sit down with a theatre professional and learn how their experience in children’s theatre helped them bridge their path from youth to adulthood. I’m here between my bi-weekly interviews to share what I’m calling a “dinky” episode of Pipe and Drape.

[The Dinky Pipe and Drape theme plays.] 

Every once in a while I will pop in with a short, “dinky,” episode to share information that is relevant to the topics that are discussed with my guests. Thank you for listening today.

Right now I want to give y’all the run-down on theatre conferences. If you’re seeing theatre for young audiences in the United States, there is a good chance that the actors on stage booked that job from a theatre conference. A few of my guests have mentioned theatre conferences (namely UPTA which is the UnifiedProfessional Theatre Auditions and SETC which is the Southeastern Theatre Conference) and I wanted to give a brief summary on their purpose and function. Theatre conferences are audition/interview/networking opportunities for union (Actors Equity) and non-union actors, stage managers, and production personnel in the United States. One of the most attended and most organized of these conferences is UPTA, so I will be using my experience as an attending actor as an example. 

About a thousand theatre-makers from all over the US attend UPTA in Memphis, TN each February to audition and interview with eighty theatre companies for seasonal work. The conference takes place over a long weekend (the first Friday-Monday in February), and during this time actors complete an initial ninety-second audition for all eighty companies at once, and then are invited to a group dance call or smaller callbacks with the companies. It’s a fun and hectic weekend for everyone involved.

The conference has room for about a thousand attendees, all of which sign up online at noon central time on September 1st. The UPTA site server crashes every year because hundreds of prospective attendees go to the conference’s website around the same time to try to get an audition/interview slot. Once that’s done, the audition/interview sign-up form prompts each person to re-type their resume, upload a headshot, select the type of work they want to get from the conference (i.e. touring, theatre for young audiences, theme park, cruise line, internship, apprenticeship, musicals, plays, Shakespeare, outdoor drama), audition/interview date preference, and credit card information. The fee is under a hundred dollars, and it does not cover food, lodging, or travel expenses, and credit cards are only charged if the prospective attendee receives a slot. College students are required to submit a pre-screen video audition (viewed by a committee of UPTA representatives) and a letter of recommendation from the head of their university theatre department. 

 The UPTA team distributes audition/interview slots within a few weeks of the sign up date. A majority of the conference (interviews/callbacks/the dance call) takes place at the Sheraton Downtown in Memphis, TN, and out of convenience most of the attendees book a room there once they get a slot.

The only portion of the conference that is not at the Sheraton is that initial ninety-second audition that actors do for the eighty companies. This occurs at Playhouse on the Square, which is just a short shuttle ride away from the Sheraton (that is a tongue-twister.) A few weeks before the conference, the UPTA team sends out an email detailing all the information there is to know about the conference including a picture of the set that will be up at Playhouse on the Square. This is so that actors can pack an audition outfit that wont blend into the set. Besides audition clothes, the only thing actors really have to pack are headshots and resumes. Each company viewing these initial auditions has a sheet of paper including the resume, headshot, and interest information performers entered into the UPTA website in September, but companies will ask for a high-res copies of headshots and resumes during callbacks. There’s no telling how many callbacks each performer will get. They can get zero or maybe forty callbacks. In theory anyone could get eighty callbacks but like…

There are no assigned audition times during UPTA, just days and numbers. This means that the only way to know how far along auditions are is by calling into the UPTA hotline. Someone will answer, say the number of the auditioner that is on deck, and then hang up. So if the actor on deck is number 105 and I’m number 205, I should maybe hurry up and get to the theatre. After that short shuttle ride to the theatre the actors gather in a holding room with hundred people, all singing, all talking about their friends from Jenny Wiley. Someone is playing the piano, someone has a steamer, someone is pouring an entire bottle of honey down their throat, and at least seven people will do a full outfit/make up/personality transformation in the corner. Ten audition numbers are called at a time to sit on-deck in the hall outside the theatre. Just before auditioning, the actors have time to discuss their audition song cuts with one of the two accompanists before doing the ninety-second audition. The first time I went to the conference my package was over ninety-seconds, so the monitor called “time” before I finished my monologue. It happens.

Then it’s over! Just kidding. Callback lists for each company are posted every hour in one of the second floor ballrooms at the Sheraton. If called back by a company, actors are responsible for signing up for a time to meet with that company’s representatives that evening in that company’s hotel room. Scheduling can be tricky depending on the number of callbacks each actor has and the available times the company has. Companies are very understanding if someone is late and needs to reschedule their time. If an actor is asked to dance by one or more companies, they attend the one dance call that evening in one of the ballrooms that all companies attend. Three combinations are taught at that time, and it is up to each performer to decide if they should do the very easy mover combination or the nearly impossible jazz/tap call.

From dance calls to individual callbacks, actors spend the night bouncing around the hotel. Some callbacks involve learning new material, sometimes performers just re-do their ninety-second audition package, sometimes they present something different from their rep, sometimes they read sides or sing, and many companies just want to sit and talk. They want to know if they’re gonna hire a nice person, and this is especially true with theatre for young audiences companies. They saw who can perform, but they need to know that their employees are nice and wont murder their coworkers while traveling cross-country in a van. There is no time to eat dinner on this evening. Some companies realize how wild and unusual this experience is, and they give out snacks. 

Then it’s 1AM and attendees end up at Westy’s with an ice cream brownie sundae bigger than your face, or two or three glasses of wine, or immediately go to sleep.

I’ve interviewed and auditioned with a number of companies while at UPTA, and after a few conferences I picked up on a few trends. Every TYA company will tell you, “We don’t talk down to kids like other companies” and “this isn’t dinky pipe and drape” regardless of the quality of their product or how well they treat their employees. Know what shows are “hot” in the non-union circuit, because many companies at the conference will be doing them in their season, and they will ask you to prepare material for those shows for callbacks. For example, Catch Me If You Can was the hot show one season, and when I was called back for one of the many companies doing Catch Me If You Can I was asked to prepare two songs from the show to sing for them when I came in later that evening. Thank goodness I had a roommate who sang the score so often that I had memorized it, because if he hadn’t I would have looked a fool in that callback. Some companies will call you back every year because they remember you. Sometimes they will hire you and sometimes they will not. One company kept me in the room for forty-five minutes and ended up asking me to perform every monologue I had learned over the last five years, learn a tap combination, dissect the ups and downs of my college theatre experience, and sing two songs.  If I am interested in a company, I will always reach out to let them know that I enjoyed meeting with them. While I normally encourage actors to hand-write letters of interest, the companies casting from UPTA are usually looking to line up their season employees pretty quickly, so I always send an email with my interest, contact and reel information, and news about what I’m working on (professional or personal) as soon as the weekend of the conference is over.

[The end of the Dinky Pipe and Drape theme plays.]

Thank you for tuning in for this first "dinky" Pipe and Drape installment. For more information about UPTA you can visit upta.org. I have included links that can help further your research about theatre conferences in the US in the episode notes.

[Pipe and Drape theme plays.]

You can join the conversation about theatre for young audiences and find more Pipe and Drape content including photos, quotes, and TYA news on Instagram @PipeAndDrapeStories. And please be sure to rate and review Pipe and Drape wherever you listen to podcasts! Each star given or review submitted helps future listeners to find the show. Be sure to tune in every other Tuesday to hear theatre for young audiences creatives share their pipe and drape stories. Pipe and Drape is created and hosted by Stephen Fala and distributed by Anchor. Artwork for Pipe and Drape was created by Stephen Gordon and music was composed by Stephen Fala. Thank you for listening with me today. 

Popular theatre conferences:
https://upta.org
https://www.setc.org
https://strawhat-auditions.com/public/
https://www.netconline.org
http://matc.us
https://www.a1-auditions.com

Connect with Pipe and Drape:

INSTAGRAM: @PipeAndDrapeStories

EMAIL: PipeAndDrapeStories@gmail.com

Host: Stephen Fala

Artwork: Stephen Gordon

Episode 4: Holly Breuer

[Pipe and Drape theme plays.]

STEPHEN FALA: I’m Stephen Fala, and you’re listening to Pipe and Drape, the only podcast that spotlights the creative minds behind the theatre for young audiences industry. Every two weeks I sit down with a theatre professional to hear their stories about the audition, rehearsal, and development process of theatre for young audiences. Each of them have bridged the path from youth to adulthood while living in worlds created for children. My guests have mounted shows small enough to fit in a minivan to productions so big they travel by caravan. You can join the conversation by emailing PipeAndDrapeStories@gmail.com or messaging @PipeAndDrapeStories on Instagram. On Episode 4 of Pipe and Drape, my guest shares the secrets behind the podcast’s namesake. Our conversation reveals the reasons many children’s theatre companies use a pipe and drape set model when touring shows out to their audiences. My guest bridged the gap between earning her MFA and entering the gig economy by transforming small, ordinary spaces into big extraordinary worlds for young audiences. Thank you for listening with me today.

S: Today’s guest is scenic designer, Holly Breuer. Holly’s design work has been seen across the country, be at a national tours with TheaterworksUSA and the Barter Players, or regionally at the Adirondack Theatre Festival, Hangar Theater, Birmingham Children's Theatre and the Nebraska Shakespeare Festival. She has taught students at a middle school, high school and collegiate level from the edge of Kansas to Pennsylvania. She created and built the worlds in which I played during my time performing in Barter Theatre’s summer repertory in the Appalachian Mountains. And today Holly is joining me from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to discuss her work designing the three show touring rep for the Barter Players. Holly, welcome. 

HOLLY BREUER: Thank you, Stephen. It's nice to be here. 

S: I am so glad to have you on this because there is so much magic that you have made for all of these companies. And having had the opportunity to play on the sets that you built…I just…specifically like the way that they move, be it physically the way that pieces are moving or the movement that you have painted into the structures, or even at one point (it was during the Sleeping Beauty set) you had these spools, these threads that went up and down from the stage and they twisted, and the way that light would hit them, they completely transformed the space. And it was like moving the audience around and revealing things. It was just, it was so spectacular and people have had the pleasure of seeing your work across the country. And so they need to know how you got to this point where you are making magic for kids in this way. What were you doing as a kid to entertain yourself as far as games or doodles you would draw or things that you would make? 

H: So what's really interesting for me in my journey is that I did not formally self-select technical theatre or anything like that until very late in high school. And I always thought it was a sort of random path to go down. And as I've gotten older and looked back at my childhood mementos and photos from my mother's house and things like that, I have found this through line of activities and projects that make it sort of so that how could I have ended up in anything other than technical theatre and design? So for example, my little sister and I used to set up a fake restaurant with all of my grandmother's canned goods in the basement and we had a play photography studio and we would write and perform skits in the backyard at my grandparents’ gazebo. And I never at the time, or as a teenager…you don't really look back on the games that you play as having any kind of serious impact, you’re just like, ‘Oh, I was just such a silly child.’ But looking back on those as an adult I came to this realization that, ‘Oh, I was making preps and I was painting cardboard scenery.’ And I was doing all of these things that ended up becoming so intrinsic to my artistic lifestyle as a grown human. Creativity has always been a part of my existence. My parents, when we were, probably late middle school, we were the family on the block who put a haunted house in our garage for Christmas (or for Halloween. I mean.) So like we didn't go trick or treating. We charged the neighborhood kids a piece of candy to come into our garage and stick their hand in cold spaghetti, that kind of stuff, you know? So it was, it was always, the creativity was always there. One of the things that attracted me as a high schooler to theatre was the comradery of being backstage. And what took me then down the path of design was the way that it combined all of the things that I was interested in. So fine, art, architecture, construction, green construction, which is a whole new thing in the last fifteen/twenty years: the idea of trying to use recycled materials and found objects and materials and things like that. There didn't really seem to be a career path that would allow me to do all of those things outside of theatre. 

S: Do you remember seeing theater as a kid? Of course you were doing it on Halloween in a way. But as far as seeing shows, either in your school's gymnacafetorium or an arena, spectacular?

H: Elementary school experience was very STEM focused. This was not a time when steam was a thing that you talked about in elementary education. So the idea of the science, technology, math, all those sorts of things, the arts hadn't been integrated in into that yet. And so much of my primary school focus was not theatrical or really artistic. I think I maybe had one or two art classes in my particular elementary school, we didn't have touring shows that came through. We had science fairs and things like that. My earliest experiences with theatre were through my family. My grandparents were members of the community theater in our town in Pennsylvania. And so I spent my summers going to see community theater versions of Anne Get Your Gun and Oklahoma and all…The Music Man and all of those, the great American songbook. And I always found it fascinating. I was never one of those people who wanted to be on stage performing. So for me, I was always intrigued by the idea that they were creating worlds that were both very real and very fake at the same time. And I found the dichotomy of that really kind of intriguing. And even as a kid sort of, ‘Oh, is that, is that a real door or is that door made of cardboard or wood? Like how does that work? Like, does it really lock when the actor goes out of it? When the actor flips the light switch, are they really turning the light on in the room?’ and learning that no, they weren’t; the actors just touching the wall near where the light switch is, and a technician at a lighting board is pushing a button making a light somewhere else to go on. I liked that trickery and the idea that most people in the audience weren't thinking about that or weren’t paying attention to that. And so theatre was always there. I didn't really think about it as a career that people picked or that I would pick for a while.

S: What propelled your decision to focus on it in college? 

H: I did the very practical thing when applying for colleges and I applied to several schools for science-y nerd things and several schools for random theatre arts things sort of thinking, ‘Oh, you know I'm not that great. Like, no, one's going to look at my high school theatre portfolio, and it's going to be fine I'm going to go to science school and be an environmental scientist or something. It'll be great.’ And I ended up having fantastic interviews and portfolio reviews, and I probably over-prepared as an eighteen year old. But I got into all of these theatre schools and was fortunate enough to get very generous offers from several of them. And I guess I just realized I would never be as happy doing anything else as I was when I was creating things in a team. It seemed that other adults agreed with me so I went off on the path. 

S: So when you were in school and you were taking these classes in building and designing, was touring something that was covered in any of your classes…building shows for tour? 

H: No. And since graduating both undergraduate and I have a MFA in scene design and education as well, one of the things that I have worked to do is incorporate it into the curriculums I create because it wasn’t. When I was in undergraduate, there was a group of students…there was a class that the actors took that created a show, toured it to the local schools, but the scenery, the designs were all done by the professional staff, not by any of the students, and the idea designing shows to be able to move in such a small way…it was never something that was part of my curriculum. Now that's changed a lot at a lot of colleges nowadays, partially because of the way the Broadway touring world has become so large. So there are a lot of technical theatre programs that are starting to incorporate more education on moving scenery, on programmable scenery, on the way things go into a truck. But the way Broadway puts things…I mean, they're putting things into an eighteen-wheeler or fourteen eighteen-wheelers and they have a lot more leeway in how they build things. When you're trying to cram six human bodies and three shows into a van and a half, it's a very different set of parameters from a design standpoint. And like, ‘Oh, there should also be costumes. And like, maybe they might want to bring food with them.’ It was definitely something that I had not experienced. And then even at the graduate level we did a couple of theoretical projects that were sort of ‘how might you fit stuff in a mobile unit,’ but never anything truly experiential. When I got to the Players, the first summer was a challenge because I had an anticipated things like, ‘Oh, the interior of a van is not a perfect rectangle.’ So the height only exists at the center of the van. As you move out to the edges, it gets smaller and things don't fit. So my first year with the Players was just a lot of trial and error and really great support from the technical carpentry staff at Barter who had been doing this for years and had a much better understanding at that point than I did of how things might go together. I've taught at several colleges. And one of the things I usually incorporate into my first year scene design class is about a four week project where the students designed a show for a small space (like a black box or something like that) and then two weeks into the project, I say, ‘Hey, guess what, friends, the producer decided this show's going to go on tour. So how are you going to adapt everything to fit into a van?’

S: I love that because I've seen your work in doing something like that, where you have a show in a black box theater or a small stage and then also by the way, it's going on tour. I love that you're incorporating that into your teaching. When you were starting out in doing this and creating these sets that were going on tour (and sometimes also being performed in Barter’s smaller theater) what was the design process and the timeline for that s far as your, your inspiration and balancing your design work with other projects that the theater had you doing?

H: Barter was incredible for me. I jokingly refer to it as my post-doc work. So most students who do a doctoral, then go do a postdoc study somewhere where they're doing some kind of research project or they're working for another university, or that's the academic parlance for it. And for me, going to Barter and being so creatively trusted by the directors and artistic teams that were in place there was liberating and terrifying. So when you're in graduate school, you are supposed to be being creative as a designer or even an undergraduate, but there are all kinds of other things that are being thrown at you, right? Like you don't get to pick the shows,  you don't usually get to pick the space or who you're working with, and there might be budgetary constraints or timeline constraints. And I experienced that at Barter, but it was also different because a lot of that was something I was putting together myself. So we would, as the resident, we would attempt to look at the entire year, not just one touring season. So we would say, you know, you remember this at Barter, we refer to things as seasonal reps, right? So you have the spring rep, the fall rep the summer up: you look at those as units within and of themselves, but you're also looking ahead to what's coming next. And so timeline-wise, I would be able to say, ‘Okay, this part is going to be smaller so I can spend more time on this other part. And therefore I can make that other part more complicated because I know what's impending.’ And so that had a level of freedom, structurally, just to be able to find the time to do different things. Granted, that also meant that I had to think as I was designing, ‘Wait, that's a very cool galaxy backdrop, but that's gonna take me three and a half weeks to paint and I only have four days.’ So there definitely were times where I would make adjustments knowing that I was also doing a good chunk of the painting and specifically with some of the props work. During my time at Barter also, there were a variety of different…staffing changes. So sometimes I would be building, painting, and propping. Sometimes I had a carpenter dedicated to the Players so I had another human who would be doing most of the building and I would just do the finished painting. By the last year I was there someone from the prop department was helping us do props as opposed to just me in the basement making props. So it was never just me, but it was always different combinations of where I was getting help and not getting help. Artistically, I couldn't have asked for a better place to go, because…it’s funny that you mentioned the Sleeping Beauty with the strings going up and down. So that was a project directed by John Hardy, who is an incredible giving artist and human. And that was literally a sketch that I had laying on my desk, and he came in for a meeting and went, ‘Oh, what's that?’ I was like, ‘Oh, it's like this preliminary, I don't know. I was playing with an idea.’ And he was like, ‘Cool, let's do that,’ and I was like, ‘Wait, really? Okay. But now I have to figure out how to do that and make it work for Sleeping Beauty, which is, you know, a show about weaving and there is string in it. And so it was a very bold, broad metaphor of the strands of her life and that sort of thing.’ But it was also for, for TYA, it was a very symbolic set. It wasn't the fairytale castle that we're accustomed to seeing. It was three step units and a lot of string. And you wouldn't necessarily expect that either in that type of theatre for children or out of someone coming from a more traditionalist background. And it was just something that we played with and were like, ‘Oh yeah, like this, this can work.’ Like you said, it did really cool things with the lighting and you could both see through it and not see through it. And the actors had to be able to move around it in a way. One of the things that John said to me is like, ‘I want this to be difficult for the actors to exist in.’ And I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I can do that.’ 

[Laugher]

S: Of course he would say that! Having worked with him on that show… I was so fun to play with. Just seeing Carabosse, the character, being able to play, and it's their gossamer dream. And me who…I was just like a weesnaw with a sword walking through and being like, ‘Well, these stairs are rocks now, that's trees.’ It's so much fun for my grownup imagination to make that. This is the world, this is what it is. And it just makes sense. 

H: Kids don't need anything else. I mean, I think we get bogged down in this idea that because everything we're seeing on our screens is now in 4k four thousand zoom made by Netflix that everything has to be 120% complete in order to be believable. And I don't think that's true. And more specifically, I think it's less true with children. And I think when you give a group of children just enough of a hint of what the world is, they each finish the world's details in a way that is so unique to that child—that they're getting their own experience out of the performance. 

S: So then you had the challenge of creating those individual pieces for these three shows that were taken on that road: Anne of Green Gables, Velveteen Rabbit, and Julius Caesar. What kind of work did you do either with the directors or your own personal research to find: what are the most important pieces that make sense in this world that are going to represent everything for these characters in this story? 

H: Practically speaking, at that time the Barter Players were using a pipe and drape. We had purchased an aluminum frame, so it was a box, basically, that the drop/painted backdrop would hang on. And it was either eight by eight or ten by ten. It’s not very large. It's just enough for maybe two actors to hide behind and change their costumes. So the through line for when when you're doing something like that, where the three shows are not necessarily in repertory but living together, you know that you're going to have that backdrop as your base. So when designing those three shows, the first thing I did either in digital rendering (which I was doing with those shows) or in a physical model is take that little square shape that is the backdrop and go, ‘Okay, well that goes here.’ And then you have to build out the world from that, because that's the core when you're doing this particular type of design and this particular type of touring, right? You know, in the middle of a gymnasium or gymatorium, there is no backstage, there's nowhere to run. So you have to have some kind of physical design element to hide people behind when they're not on stage. And so with these designs, I always started with that. With this particular repertory, both Anne of Green Gables and Velveteen Rabbit also had lives in the second stage at The Barter, ao they did have fuller iterations of themselves. And so the question for tour became how to maintain faithfully the design choices we had made for the fuller productions on a much smaller scale. So in some things, Velveteen Rabbit, for example, in the stage space had a series of wall panels to indicate where the house was when we were inside the little boy’s room or inside the living room or things like that. And in the touring version, the backdrop (the quilt) had panels built into it that mimicked the blue of the walls. So if you saw both shows, you would see those connections. If you only saw one show you, in theory, never felt like you were missing anything. When you're building out from a backdrop then, the question becomes how much stuff do you need in front of that backdrop to create the world? And that really comes from discussions directors talking about what are the relationships between the actors, between the characters that they're trying to create? So, for example, Velveteen Rabbit again, the biggest thing that we knew we had to have is this bed, because for the child in that show their bed is their safe space. They turn it into their ship and their mountain, and all of those. So we knew we had to have that sort of central element. The challenge, of course, then being, for tour, it had to come into pieces and be able to be also sturdy for everyone to jump on and those kinds of practical challenges. For Julius Caesar, one of the iconic images is Julius Caesar on the steps getting stabbed. So you have to think about how in the center of a gymnatorium are you creating some kind of height for actors to interact with. And stair units are very hard to travel with, like an actual five-step or something like that. They're an awkward shape; they don't stack or nest neatly with anything other than other stair units. So we very rarely sent any kind of traditional step thing out on tour. And instead we ended up with…so for Julie Caesar it became a series of columns. And so there was a two-step column round unit that the actors could actually kind of roll into place and not have to lift and things like that. But that was just about trying to create height. These three shows (this rep in particular) was actually pretty minimalistic and didn't have a lot of crossover pieces. So sometimes when you do a rep you have (you are fortunate enough that) maybe two of the shows can use the same chair. And because the audiences are changing as the tour goes out, the audiences aren't noticing that that’s Grandma's chair in one show and the Pirate King's chair in another show. Sometimes you are fortunate to be able to do that. This particular rep, I don't think the shows share… I was trying to think about it this morning. I don't think the three shows shared anything, which is great stylistically, not so great when you're trying to pack a van. 

S: Was there a moment when it came time to do the pack (the “van Tetris”)—did you know beforehand it's all going to fit or was it a surprise? 

H: I know this is a podcast so your viewers, your audience can't see that I'm shaking my head. Absolutely not. Um, okay. So you can, as a designer and a technical team, you're going to lay out the best plan that you can. And you're going to make sure that all of the bigger elements definitely fit within the parameters of your van, right? So if your van is four foot eight, you're not going to design anything that has an eight foot tall piece that can't come apart. So there are things that you're going to do ahead of time to protect yourself and prevent those kinds of catastrophes. But when you do the van pack…so what we would do at Barter is you pull the van in and you literally lay out on the floor everything that had to go into the van. And then as a team, we try to make it fit. And that would be the first time as a designer or technician team that we would actually see all of the stuff together. And I'm not going to lie: every first Tetris day I would walk in and see that pile of stuff on the floor, not in the van and go, ‘Oh, we're going to need a second van.’ A lot of things would be consistent from your year in tour. So like there's a wardrobe box, there’s certain things that no matter what are going to fit, there's the sound system, there's things like that that are the same size that generally fit in the same place. And I would take that into account when designing each of the shows. And you know that some things are going to nest together and you're just going to throw a suitcase in the middle and it'll be fine. But no, I was never sure that it was actually going to work, and until Tetris day, you're never really sure.

S: As a designer and someone with such a passion for science, is there any way that you incorporated some eco-friendly things, recycled material, sort of things in your design for this tour?

H: In Player land (or in any TYA) if you have resources, usually the resources tend to be a room full of stuff that no one knew existed. So yes, there are oftentimes when I would be trying to repurpose materials. To a certain extent, theater is (it’s getting better but it’s) generally terrible when it comes to environmental things, both in the paints and adhesives and chemicals we use. and also in the just temporariness of everything. You build a set, you do a show, and then the set generally goes away, which is not a great environmental impact story. And it's something that we're working on as an industry and individual companies are working on. A lot of times with the Players we would be reusing repainting shapes, right? Rehearsal cubes become a crate on a ship, but then they also become a bale of hay and painted a different thing every year, and five years later, it has twenty layers of paint on it but it still functions. So reusing things was always going to be a part of what we were doing. So I would come up with a design and think about what I might want, and then I would go into the storage unit and say, ‘All right, well, I designed a twenty-four inch cube, but look there's a twenty inch cube sitting here that will totally work.’ For this rep in particular, I took on the task of building a quilt as the backdrop for The Velveteen Rabbit. One of the conceptual approaches for Velveteen from the directing team was the idea that we were setting it in Appalachia instead of…Velveteen Rabbit is actually a British story, and so we (it’s not really a translation but) transcribed it in into the Appalachian world. And so the idea of the quilt backdrop is connected to this idea that when you're a kid, when you're sad and you're sick, Grandma comes over and wraps you up in a blanket that she made and it makes everything better. And so we wanted the world to have that feeling of, ‘Oh, like the kid’s in bed, and he's really sad and he's got his bunny and like this backdrop is this quilt thing,’ which all sounds well and good until you've never built a quilt before. And you go into the Player storage area and go, ‘Oh, here's a bunch of boxes of random scraps of fabric. Here's some that are blue and here's some that are green that'll work.’ And so (like many things I designed for the Players) it was great in theory. And then I had to make it happen. And it was less great mainly because it just meant long hours, but the design got tweaked a little bit because I was using the found fabric materials. So it was just bits, you know, like in the design, I was like, ‘Oh, it's going to be this shade of blue,’ and then in the scrap box I found a different shade of blue so it morphed a little bit based on what was available. It ended up being a really cool project. It was not a traditional quilt. It didn't actually have batting or anything in it, so the backside just was a mess of seams and scraps of things flying off of it. But I think it turned out really interesting and it was just one of those things that if you can't paint it, how else does a backdrop come into existence? 

S: Do you have any fun stories from your time working on these shows down in the Appalachian mountains? 

H: I think one of the greatest experiences I had would be the first time we would let kids come in to see the show. You'll be doing all this work and you'll be in tech and you're so in your adult theater-person zone, and you're stressing about, ‘Should the lights be at 10% or 15%?’ and ‘Did I pick the right shade of red for that object?’ and you get so lost in the technicalities and practicalities of that. And then you go to the first performance and there are tiny humans watching and they don't at all because they are so excited to be there. The best part would be sitting in the audience in the midst of all of these kids and hearing their reactions because kids don't edit, kids don't have a filter yet. They are just the most pure reaction to what they are seeing. And sometimes it would be worry for a character like, ‘Oh no, don't, don't go that way!’ That sort of thing. Inevitably, there would be some storyline that involved romance and you get some kid going, ‘Oh no, don’t kiss her! Ew!’ right? Like the art kind of thing. And it just helped you remember why you were doing this whole thing in the first place, because the kids would just come in with pure joy and it made everything okay. 

S: How did your experience working on this propel you forward?

H: Working at Barter changed my entire outlook on TYA and what that means. I think sometimes that (I will speak for myself as well), I think sometimes there's a dismissiveness that we have like, ‘Oh, that's not real theater. It's just for kids,’ or, you know, ‘Kids aren't going to get it,’ or, ‘Oh, we don't have to work that hard. You know, like the kids won't notice,’ and one: that’s B.S. and two: it's completely outdated—there have been so many studies in the past twenty/thirty years (mostly in Europe because American TYA is behind admittedly, it will say that itself), so I went into this, not really having done TYA, and what I realized is that you don't have to dumb anything down for children. In some ways you can do more complex and intriguing designs because they don't know anything else. And so they just see it and go, ‘Oh yeah, cool, that's what that's going to be.’ There are companies that will say it is just silly entertainment for a forty-five minute assembly for children. There are a lot of companies emerging that firmly believe that we can get kids interested in the arts earlier than we ever had before; that interactive theater performances, like what Imagination Stage in Maryland does with six-month-old children on stage interacting have been proven to be incredibly beneficial to the development of children. I don't think TYA is something that we should dismiss at all, and I think that it needs to become part of our core theater training in the way that we bring up theater artists so that we’re creating a recurring set of people who are ready to do this work and help get that next generation ready to experience art in whatever that means for them. In my time after Barter, I joined several commissions on SETC, which is the Southeastern Theatre Conference and was an active member for a couple of years while I lived in the area in discussion panels of what does it mean to be TYA?/What is that?/What are our obligations?/What can we do to be better? And there are programs (friends of ours run some of these programs) where you take your arts training and you go into schools and you work not on a performance level but with core curriculum, and you use art skills to develop core curriculum. And that sort of idea of how to connect all of this together—it was never something I had thought about before. I also am a firm believer in undergraduate students graduating with their undergraduate degree, going out into the world and working for a bit before they go to graduate school. I think having spent the time I did with the Barter Players (oddly enough after my graduate work), I think it's a great and nurturing ground for young theatre artists to experience their own sense of creativity and impact on the world around them. 

S: Holly, thank you for speaking with me today. 

H: You’re welcome, Stephen, this was lovely.

S: How can our listeners find you and see more of your work? 

H: So, I believe you are going to be linking to my website and there is a contact form in there. So honestly, if anyone has questions, it's really…the contact form on my website is the easiest way to get to me. Honestly, if anyone were to have questions about anything practical or stylistic or how weird can you get with a design before a kid just says, ‘No,’ I would love to have those discussions with anyone.

S: You can find more of Holly’s work and her contact information at hollymbreuer.com.

[Pipe and Drape theme plays.]

You can join the conversation about theatre for young audiences and find more Pipe and Drape content including photos, quotes, and TYA news on Instagram @PipeAndDrapeStories. And please be sure to rate and review Pipe and Drape wherever you listen to podcasts! Each star given or review submitted helps future listeners to find the show. Be sure to tune in every other Tuesday to hear theatre for young audiences creatives share their pipe and drape stories. Pipe and Drape is created and hosted by Stephen Fala and distributed by Anchor. Artwork for Pipe and Drape was created by Stephen Gordon and music was composed by Stephen Fala. Thank you for listening with me today.

Find Holly Breuer:
WEBSITE: https://www.hollymbreuer.com

Connect with Pipe and Drape:⁠

INSTAGRAM: @PipeAndDrapeStories
EMAIL: PipeAndDrapeStories@gmail.com
Host: Stephen Fala
Artwork: Stephen Gordon