Marquette Theatre Finals Week

For Marquette's campus, next week is finals week. Big projects and papers are due and final exams take place. For theatre majors, finals start tonight. 

This semester Marquette's theatre department has offered many interesting classes. Acting 1, Acting 3, Acting 5, Directing, Theatre Management, Stage Craft, Costume Tech, Aspects of Theatrical Design, and Play Analysis are the big ones. Each one of these class finals showcase either a performance or a portfolio viewing. These performances and showcases are presented to the Marquette campus the same way that all of our main stage shows are presented. The classes create flyers, press releases, Facebook groups, and Twitter updates. The performances are made to show the rest of campus what we can do and the kind of work that we are producing. 

I am not an acting emphasis major so I do not have any part in the acting or directing finals, but I will be at the performances to view them and give feedback as well as support. In the past, I have taken stage craft, costume tech, aspects of theatrical design, and play analysis. I will not be a part of any of these finals either but I will be there for support. I will also be helping my professors judge these finals and make sure that everyone is safe while they are taking their final. 

The only theatre final performance that I have a major part in this semester is Theatre Management. For our class final, my class was to gather actors, directors, plays, playwrights, and a production team in order to create an afternoon of stage readings. This project has prepared myself, as well as my class, to act as a professional production team. We had to find the money to fund the production, we had to send out press releases to our local newspapers, we had to communicate with new playwrights in order to get approval to use their scripts, and we had to keep a timeline and budget so that everything goes smoothly. Our performance techs Saturday morning and we perform Saturday afternoon. It is very exciting to finally be able to see our hard work come to life. 

The exciting life of a theatre major's finals week starts tonight. Good luck to all of the well put together performances and well thought out designs. 

The Kid Show

Our next show at Marquette University is If You Take a Mouse to School, also known as the kid show. The build for this show started recently and we have been building and rehearsing like crazy. The kid show every year only has a few weeks to be built and rehearsed and then we all go on Christmas break. Two weeks before Christmas break is over, the cast and crew come back to school to perform the kid show for multiple elementary schools around Milwaukee. It is really a neat experience. Each show has a talk back were the kids can ask the actors questions about the play. It is theatre for young audiences and it really is a special thing to see.

We will be having tech and dress rehearsals this weekend. Once the show has cues, everyone will go home for Christmas break and then come back early to perform.

KCACTF - Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival

     As I have mentioned before, Holy Days, the play that Marquette University is producing as we speak, has completely been designed by students. This aspect of our production makes these performances extremely unique. The scenic design team consists of: Lex Gernon, Raquel Garces, and myself (Carissa Saia), the costume design team consists of: Adriana Saia, Andrea Schoening, and Maddy Yee, the light design was designed by Nic Trapani, and the sound design was designed by Jack Tarnow. It has been an amazing experience.
    America has a festival every year called, KCACTF or The Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival. The festival recognizes actors, designers, technicians, stage managers, and directors. There are many events, awards, and performances that take place at this festival. Every year, Marquette University’s Theatre Department enters a show to compete at the theatre festival. This year, Holy Days was the play that our department decided to sign up for the competition. Because of the uniqueness of this play, we think that we have a great chance of taking our performance on the road.
     What happens when a school chooses one of their shows to present to KCACTF, is that two representatives of the festival’s board comes to the performance, gives the actors, director, and designers feedback, and judges the performance. The festival is split up into regions and the festivals are done by those regions. The judges from each region get together at the beginning of December and they choose so many schools to go on to perform at the festival. This weekend, Sunday, two representatives of our region came to see Holy Days. The design teams took them out to eat before the matinee to get to know them and to explain to them why our production is so unique. It was a great opportunity to talk to people who love theatre and have been doing it for so many years.
     After lunch, they went to see the show and I think that they were very impressed. They gave us constructive criticism and told us what they liked and didn’t like about all aspects of the performance. We all have high hopes for our show to go on to the festival. We are very proud of our production and we want to share that with KCACTF.

Helfaer Theatre Scene Shop

     As a technical theatre student, I work in the scene shop at the theatre. It is a great job but it is a lot of hard work. The scene shop is in charge of building the sets for each and every theatre production. We construct, paint, mend, build, and find scenery. As a scenic emphasis, I am learning more and more about how to do things correctly in order to get the job done correct. Being a junior, I get a lot of authority in the shop. My boss, the technical director, puts a lot of trust in me to make progress while he is away.
     As we are currently working on Holy Days, it has been exciting to have designed the show and now I am building it. There are five main scenic elements in this show. They include: the kitchen of a house, a 25’x85’ back drop, a floor that looks like dry cracked earth with a lot of dirt on it, and two mounds of sand made out of foam. The design concept for this play was to make it look like a sepia photograph. That was done through the paint and texture. We also wanted to make our theatre space look very expansive. The expanse is show through a large backdrop that I, along with my scenic team, took the first week of our Holy Day build, to paint and perfect it. That was a challenge due to the fact that we do not have any space to our availability with the span of 25’x85’. We had to paint the drop in three parts. The house was made to look like a skeleton of a house. With a lot of time and research, we found old time photos of houses and recreated that look with a slightly fractured view. The family in the play was falling a part and the house shows that. The slated walls were built with 1x6. The mounds were very tricky. It took us a while to figure out how we were going to construct these. We decided to buy sheets of foam, glue them together, and carve them with hand saws and distressing tools in order to give them an organic yet realistic shape. We then painted them to look like sand. The ground was fun to recreate. we took pieces of flat material called homasote, drew cracked looking lines on them, then took a jigsaw to them in order to create the cracks. We then painted them to give them an earthy feel. What made the ground get its finished look was adding man made dirt to it. We threw different materials together to give us the right look, crunch and shape.
     It is just as exciting to build the set as it is to design it. They are two totally different jobs and they are both exciting. There are still some tweaks that we are adding to the show, but once it opens, it will be a success. The process of a theatre production is extremely rewarding.

Holy Days - Tech Week

Holy Days is the show I have been working on and set designing for. The show is about a family's life during the Dustbowl in the 1930s. The family shows how hard of a time they had trying to make food, find jobs, and live normal lives.

Our theatre department is doing great work trying to make the world of the Dustbowl come to life on stage with set, props, costumes, lights, and sound. We go into to tech week starting Friday. Tech week is always a long process for theatre students because this is the week when the show gets perfected, criticized, and complimented. It is very exciting but there is also a lot of pressure to get things done on time.

Holy Days opens on Thursday, November 10th at 7:30. Come see it, it really is a wonderfully put together production and it is completely designed by Marquette students. It really is a sight to see.

From Stage Manager to Set Designer

Little Shop of Horrors had a great run but it has been over for a couple of weeks now. We tore down that set on October 9th and started building the set for the next show, Holy Days, on October 10th. In the theatre department, there is really no break for actors or technical personnel. As I have mentioned before, for Little Shop I was the stage manager. For Holy Days I am on the scenic design team. I went from being the go to person for every aspect to the go to person for set, props, and construction. This was a major switch with no break time in between. 

The design for Holy Days was a collaborative effort that began in a class, called CAD or computer aided design, that a bunch of designs students took last semester. Our final project was to design the set, costumes, lights, and sound for Holy Days, which we already knew was going to be in our season for this year. The class broke off into three teams and the whole design was created through use of a computers. 

Now, a few months later, it is time for me, along with my other two teammates, to execute our design. It is a first for all of us and we are all very excited to see our work come to life. It is hard work to work on a team and make decisions as a team but it is also very rewarding. We get to make detailed decisions about what paint colors to use, which specific props well be in the play, what type of wood, where certain pieces are supposed to go, and the list goes on. The technical director, artistic director, chair of the department, director, and stage manager all come to us when they have questions or when they need something changed. It is sometimes hard to make all of these decisions but it is also exhilarating to be able to have power over exactly what the design will turn out to be. 

Both stage managing and set designing are demanding jobs. It is important to stay organized, calm, and informative. In both cases I am in charge of something. As a stage manager I was in charge of the whole production going smoothly and the way that it was supposed to. As a designer I am in charge of making decisions and making sure everything that needs to get done will get done in a timely fashion. 

The exchanging of hats was not a difficult one but both jobs have their ups and downs just in different ways. I am having fun learning about the different things that I can do with theatre and I am getting much needed experience in the field. 

Holy Days opens on November 10th and it runs through November 20th. If you think you would like to see a production that was totally designed by students and acted by students, you should come see it and support the work that we are doing here to change the world of theatre. 

Little Shop - Opening Weekend

This weekend was the opening weekend of Little Shop. Opening week is a crazy and rewarding time for theatre students. This is when you get to see all of your hard work paid off. We opened on Thursday, September 29th. We had one show Friday night, two shows on Saturday, and a show Sunday afternoon.

This week was a success. Wevhad many sold out shows and the audience seemed to love every minute of it. The show runs for about an 2 hours and 45 minutes which is great for the audience. The musical is also well known by a lot of people which helps the audience understand what is going on. The show evolved into a creative and enjoyable piece of art.