I suspected that when I would start working in the shop I would be lifting heavy boards and nailing things together, but that wasn’t the case at all. Sonya, our lovely set designer, and the rest of the staff in the shop had already completed most of the heavy duty work. I can only imagine how many hours they spent building the set that became “the estate” that we as actors all came to love and that our characters all despised. My work in the shop consisted of painting the stairs. The work was not hard or confusing in any way. I simply painted what needed to be painted. In painting all of the staircases as separate pieces, it was difficult to see how everything was going to come together to become the design that we saw on the first day of class. I knew that those pieces would come together. Every time I walked into the shop, Sonya would be working on a larger piece of the set which made the over all vision of the design easier to foresee.

The next time I walked into Shaefer Theatre, the finished product, minus a few pieces like lamp fixtures and the door collage in Vanya’s room, was complete. I could see all of the things that other members of the cast had helped paint and sand, but the most exciting part for me was seeing the stairways that I painted. Seeing them integrated into the rest of the set was fulfilling. The first thing I did was to go around and touch pieces of the set, to get a feel of the tarnished atmosphere of the whole estate. Then, I walked it. I heard the creaking floor and felt splintered wood and smelled all of the paint that was used to develop this world that we came to inhabit. Being a part of that process was humbling and rewarding. As an actor I think it’s easy for me to isolate myself from the rest of the developing process, but this let me know how important it is to be a part of everything, from assisting with light cues to building the set. Working on a production is a communal effort that requires help from everyone in that community. I am blessed to have been a member of the family that was and will forever be Uncle Vanya. Thank you everyone.

Coming out from the single dimension of performance and participate in the material creation of the play helps on the acting level. Working in the shops undeniably creates between the actor and the fictional world played in a intimacy and familiarization that can’t be catch up later by any means. My character, Maria, has a book that follows her all along the play. This book is full all pamphlets, letters and old papers she collected through out her life and deliberately stick in this it. I (Aurelia as much as Maria) arranged my book so when I play with it on stage it is way easier to appropriate the object. In addition, I painted purple the piece of the stage you can’t see and doors that none are used in the traditional way. I was working in the scene shop the first day the stage was put together. The bits and pieces I was painting not long ago pilled up in the corner in the time of a morning became the stage of the arc room, where so much have happened since…

Aurelia