Lindsey Walko remembers back in the sixth grade, when she saved the day while playing one of the orphans in a production of Annie.
“During the preset, our stage manager forgot to put the laundry basket on,” Walko says, and she and the rest of the cast quickly noticed that the key prop was missing. “While everyone was freaking out on stage during ‘It’s The Hard-Knock Life,’ I calmly walked off stage and brought it on.”
At the time, she says, some people suggested that her future as a stage manager—the person who makes sure that everything in a play happens when it’s supposed to—was a lock. But Walko needed a few more years to come around. Now, as she approaches her senior year in high school, Walko says, “Stage management is my true passion.”
This summer, the five-week-long Boston University Summer Theatre Institute for high school students, known as BUSTI, offers a new program for those who, like Walko, may want to work behind the scenes.
“The new design track means that the BUSTI program even more closely mirrors the first year BFA experience at the College of Fine Arts School of Theatre,” says Jim Petosa, director of the CFA School of Theatre. “Incoming students can now choose either a performance or design and production core curriculum.”
Most theater productions require many more people offstage than on. There’s a stage manager, a lighting designer, a set designer, a costume designer, a sound designer, and more. But most theater education programs are weighted toward the performers who act and sing and dance, and toward those who want to direct.
Lindsey Walko, a student enrolled in BU’s Summer Theatre Institute’s design program, started out as an actor in junior high but has since found that her real ambitions are backstage.
The reason, says BUSTI Academic Program Head Emily Ranii (CFA’13), is that the great majority of young people who get into theater want to act. This year, for example, there are 70 students in the BUSTI performance track and four in the new design program.
“A lot of people go into theater first as an actor, and then discover other things,” Ranii says. “Some discover it in high school and some discover it later.…[But] there are very few high school summer programs that have a design component. So those students who have already figured it out don’t have a lot of places to go for training.”
“For a long time, there’s been a notion that those who are on stage don’t mix with those who are backstage,” says Jon Savage, CFA assistant professor of theater and BFA Programs head, Design & Production. “We reject that flatly. We’re collaborators, and we really try to bring those two worlds together within the BFA programs, so we wanted BUSTI to reflect that.”
On a recent afternoon, students in the new program made collages under the supervision of teaching assistant Fiona Kearns (CFA’17), an undergraduate in design and production who attended BUSTI in 2011. They’d read Melancholy Play by Sarah Ruhl, and they were finding ways to illustrate its underlying meaning and emotion.
Katey Christianson, a high school senior from Seattle, says she started out in theater as an actress but “grew to feel more at home within the backstage elements.” She has designed lights and sets, been on stage crews, written plays, and done hair and makeup, and in the fall she is going to direct her first play.
Jon Savage, CFA assistant professor of theater, teaches the new BUSTI design class.
“I love that,” she says. “Through theater, I can create a whole world in my mind and be able to show it to others.”
The students’ collage project connects directly to the “vision boards” often used by designers and directors to help conceptualize a production, and uses clippings about everything from broad emotional subjects to specific suggestions for costumes and props. Each student next develops a design for Melancholy Play, and later collaborates on a comprehensive model.
The program is also considered a recruiting opportunity for the University’s theater program, and, in fact, all four design students have shown interest in coming to BU next year as freshmen. As they work on their collages, they pepper Kearns with questions about students’ workload, responsibilities, and role in productions.
Ranii notes that Kearns and another member of her BUSTI class are among current BU undergrads whose future on the design side first became clear during the summer program.
The four design students also act in the BUSTI summer performances, whose theme this year is the famous Isabella Stewart Gardner art heist. The four 20-minute original theater pieces on the subject take place tonight and tomorrow. The design students play onstage roles and also help out with production duties like running lights.
This year, all BUSTI students attended morning classes together, and the design track students broke off for separate classes in the afternoon.
“We didn’t know exactly how that would pan out, but we’re finding that it truly is one big ensemble,” says Ranii. “The design students are pushing themselves…and becoming stronger designers through that.”