DAY 044– DESIGNING DANGEROUSLY
Go Deeper
Ty Burrell - The First Time I Met with an Agent, It Was Messy
This article prompted me to sit down and write for the first time in a couple weeks. It feels like it has already slipped out of my hands a bit, but let me circle around it and see if I can refind it. Ty is probably the celeb I have the fewest degrees of separation with: He is up on the wall of portraits at Utah Shakes, posing with Leslie Brott. I’ve been to his bar in SLC, and Oregon Shakespeare Festival was formative for both of us.
Returning to Oregon Shakespeare Festival as a designer has been a goal of mine somewhere in the back of my head for a long time, as if that’s when I will have “made it.” I realize how incredibly naive that is--after all, it’s just another place made up of fallible people. There’s something my designer/storyteller brain likes about that circularity. OSF could be considered the start of my interest in theatre as much as anything else, the shows I saw there in high school captured my imagination for what theatre could be. I suppose I’ve moved closer to the potential of designing there, having worked at Great River for five years and working currently at Utah Shakes. I’m certainly familiar with designing sound/music for Shakespeare at this point.
Truth be told, I think what I’m really chasing is the same thing I experienced in that seat in the dark at OSF while I sat through productions of King Lear (title role was Jim Edmonson, who I have had the privilege to work with several times), Othello, and Comedy of Errors. I’m looking for the magic, looking to crack the shell of our daily reality to get to the meat of the Mystery.
I truthfully, without hyperbole, worked somewhere between 80 and 90 hours this past week. I have kind of been living like an animal, crawling into my burrow at 3am to crawl back out at 8 or 9. It’s been tough to stay connected with Beth and Lucas, let alone connected to myself enough to write anything coherent. The reason I’m in Cedar City, the reason I was hired by USF, is to design these three shows best as I can, and I’m choosing to keep my eggs in that basket. I hope to create some of those liminal, transformative experiences for someone in the audience, fertile soil for the seeds of question and mystery to be planted.
The question I’ve been asking myself recently is, “so...have I made it?” Twenty year old Matt would look at the opportunities I’ve had and say, yes, without a doubt I’ve made it. Soon-to-be thirty five year old Matt has a very different answer. I think I am making it, I think we’re all making it all the time. The question becomes what is “it?” There is no one way to answer this query, there are dozens of metrics that are as fractured and contradictory as we and our experiences are.
This decentralization (or centering depending on your perspective) is what gets us through what Ty describes as “a deeply personal rejection from the one thing I loved and could do--knowing that we were going to meet down the road” (emphasis mine). I’ve had these experiences, and I expect you have as well if you’re swinging for the bleachers. I’m expecting to pick back up with this project July 12th once my contract is wrapped and we are in Oregon. Until then, dear reader, all good things to you. Come see me in the theatre. Continue walking, as Ty puts it, “into...the new world.”