UMass Amherst Department of Theater Year in Review

By Anna-Maria Goossens | Wednesday, November 16, 2022

In Feb. 2022, in the wake of the twin upheavals of COVID and the Black Lives Matter protests, and with new artistic director Jacob G. Padrón at the helm, the Board of Directors of New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre announced that it was time for a change:

“Long Wharf Theatre, like many regional theaters across the country, has had to balance artistic innovation and the desire for deeper community engagement with the ever-increasing costs of maintaining physical venues, a model that has failed to evolve alongside the shifting landscape. Long Wharf Theatre will break this cycle and marshal its resources to become a catalyst for community-wide connection, conversation and growth.”

In real terms, this meant that instead of producing in its own spaces, the company would move into office space that was more central, and would henceforth create partnerships with community organizations to produce its events in their spaces. It was a move designed to make organization more nimble and responsive to the community, and its work more accessible to the audiences it’s trying to reach.

One of the folks making this all happen is UMass alum and Locations Operations Manager Katrina Lewonczyk ’10, whose job is evolving throughout the different phases of this planned move. ...

Lewonczyk’s job has traditionally entailed a lot of facilities management — making sure spaces are accessible, dealing with custodial — and office administration. It also expanded to include COVID compliance during the pandemic. (In terms of employees, Lewonczyk said the company contracted during the initial COVID lockdown, but has not laid anyone off as a result of the new operations model, although some folks are taking different positions.)... Lewonczyk has worked at Long Wharf almost continuously since graduating, when she snagged a props residency. After a brief time away she’s cycled through a rotation of much of the company’s production and operations areas, including the shops as well as front of house.

“I’ve worked in every department other than artistic at some point or other, so I have the bigger-picture perspective of needs from different departments,” Lewonczyk said, something she feels has helped throughout the transition.

One of the most visible parts of Lewonczyk’s job recently has been a series of sales she’s called Dock Deals, to get rid of supplies that aren’t needed any longer. “We filled in really every nook and cranny on that side of the building,” Lewonczyk said, and while some stock remains, the company’s new, more centrally located space can’t accommodate

“58 years of stuff.” ...

“It’s definitely a flex for pretty much everyone,” Lewonczyk said of the new model. “But if I learned nothing else from UMass, I know that if I show up and pay attention, I can kind of do anything in theater at this point.”

That attitude is of a piece with her time at UMass. Her first 110 (Backstage Practicum) as a first year student was working front of house for The Reincarnation of Jamie Brown. She saw stage manager Anna Norcross at work during the show “and I was like, ‘What do you do? And how do I do it?’”

From there Lewonczyk met Production Manager Julie Fife, who quickly moved her into stage managing, first as an assistant and then into running her own show. ... She cited the value of simply being around: “I just showed up for a lot of things, and then I got to do stuff, like when I was Assistant Master Electrician for Hungry Woman, despite knowing very little about lighting, but because I was willing to try.”... “Obviously all of my little bits and bobs within the department have really helped me generally, but I do think stage management and the interpersonal part of it has made everything I’ve done easier. Because once you get comfortable talking to people, then everything’s easier,” she said.

By Anna-Maria Goossens | Wednesday, February 15, 2023

On the Lincoln Center home page, there’s a design of a wheel with Lincoln Center as the middle, and 10 organizations radiating out as spokes.

That image serves as a short-hand for what Jess Gill ’16 does for the center. Over nearly ten years in production management, she has helped execute and plan the logistics for events of all kinds: music, dance, spoken word, outdoor movie screenings. She has managed a private corporate event for Moët-Chandon, which included an appearance by Mariah Carey and the installation of a 40-foot outdoor sculpture. She’s helped mount swing and jazz music festivals. She’s put together a family-day hang-out with Kermit the Frog. (“I don’t care how many times you see him — when you see that green frog in person, it’s awesome!”)

As of January, she’s stepped into a leadership role as the Associate Director, Event Production, which means she’s gone from working event by event to managing the big picture for all of Lincoln Center.

It’s the latest step in an affiliation with Lincoln Center that began when Gill became a student intern in the summer of 2014, and part of a journey that began when she came to UMass Amherst to major in theater.

“It’s all a process, you know,” she said, reflecting on that journey. “I didn’t get here yesterday. This is almost 10 years in the making — which is scary to say now out loud.”

Finding Stage Management at UMass Theater

Gill, who had a background in dance and performance, chose UMass because, “I didn’t have to pick a track. When I was applying to schools, a lot of the theater programs wanted you to declare right away. But you don’t know what you want until you experience a lot of things.”

Once at UMass, a friend who was on the Casanova stage management team asked her if she was interested in being an assistant stage manager. “He was like, ‘Hey, you’re really organized, you’re always on top of things. Would you be interested in trying this?’ And it turns out I was pretty good at it,” Gill said, cheerfully admitting to being a “type A” personality who thrives on tackling logistics challenges.

Gill has fond memories of many instructors in the department. Production Manager Julie Fife, who teaches stage management, quickly became her mentor.

“She was instrumental. Her door was always open. Plus, with all of her history and her resume and her background (as a stage manager for professional theater), she always had an answer or a story for anything, which was very comforting,” Gill said. Fife talked her through the panic as she was about to call her first big show, The Merchant of Venice, helmed by renowned director Tony Simotes. Gill also recalls the jubilation of successfully calling the sequence set to Madonna’s Vogue that opened Marie Antoinette, when it finally felt like the whole show had come together. “Everyone was super excited. The cast was excited. All the designers were excited.”

Gill also worked in the electrics shop, including a stint as master electrician for Peter Pan, and did a bit of carpentry and a smidge of sound design as part of Theater 110, the one-credit Backstage Practicum course.

She applied to a plethora of internships for the summer between her sophomore and junior year and landed the one at Lincoln Center.

“At the time we had 2 festivals, called Midsummer Night Swing and Lincoln Center Out of Doors. It involved learning a lot about the festival circuit and live events, which is sort of a stark contrast to theater,” she said. “The biggest shift, I would say is, you have to think on your feet a lot more than with a show that you’ve rehearsed, where you sort of know what’s coming.”

With live shows, she said, “Despite all of your prep, despite all of your due diligence, you know once that artists hit the stage it’s their show now, and you’ve just got to roll with it and make the best of any situation that they come up with.”

That internship led to summer job offers for 2 years. Once graduated, Gill freelanced as a production assistant, electrician, stage manager, primarily in Off Broadway theaters as well as in event spaces like the Barclay Center and Brooklyn Academy of Music (she’s a proud member of IATSE Local 4), while shifting back to Lincoln Center for its various summer series.

Among the early high-water marks was a gig running one of the lights for an Ed Sheeran show, which she remembers as an “I’ve made it” moment.

When the pandemic hit, much of the industry shut down, but Gill worked some remote jobs and crewed the Video Music Awards which were presented in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Lincoln Center experienced a fair bit of turnover in 2021, and that opened an opportunity for Gill to step into a full-time position as a production manager. ...After a year in the production management position, the Associate Director slot opened up and Gill was offered the position. While her work still includes a lot of hands-on event management, she’s now also managing teams who are running their own events.

She’s been on hand for some impressive and moving moments during her time at Lincoln Center like the ones cited earlier, and noted one that took on additional significance recently: “It actually means more now, since David Crosby just passed away. He closed out what would become our final season of Lincoln Center Out of Doors prior to the pandemic and that was just a really special show. Working with seasoned touring musicians like that at a point in my career when I was still arguably very young was really cool, and I so appreciated his touring team; they were incredibly respectful.”

By Crystal Maldonado | Wednesday, May 17, 2023

On the fourth floor of the Randolph W. Bromery Center for the Arts, students in the TH240 class are involved in an icebreaker exercise, led by guest speaker and award-winning Cuban American writer, director, and California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) faculty member Marissa Chibás.

To get students warmed up for the class ahead, they’re asked to share both a story and a physical movement, like a hand or arm gesture, related to their name. Fellow classmates then reflect the speaker’s name and movement back at them.

Chibás goes first, followed by assistant professor in the Department of Theater Elisa Gonzales, and before long, the atmosphere in the class is transformed by warmth, movement, and laughter. It’s proof of how a small connection can go a long way. That’s especially fitting given that Gonzales and Chibás—both Latine educators and artists working in theater who have developed an easy, natural rapport with one another—were only recently connected through the HFA Faculty Networking Initiative, a new program within the University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Humanities & Fine Arts (HFA).

Launched in spring 2022, the initiative invited new, tenure-track assistant professors to work with distinguished scholars and artists at institutions beyond the local academic community. Through these mentorships, faculty further their professional network, creating relationships and resources they can draw on throughout their career.

“Inspired by [HFA] Dean Barbara Krauthamer’s call to reimagine faculty mentoring, we came up with this program to respond to faculty needs to foster a sense of connection,” says Jason Moralee, HFA associate dean of research and diversity, equity, and inclusion and member of the team behind the program. “It’s been especially useful for those who were hired during the pandemic when so many opportunities for networking weren’t available.” ... Seven faculty members were selected from the departments of Music and Dance, Theater, Art, Judaic and Near Eastern Studies, Linguistics, History, and English. They each chose a project to collaborate on with their mentor, ranging from developing research articles to completing grant or fellowship applications to creating artistic or scholarly works. ...From there, faculty members were paired with mentors from institutions across the country, including CalArts, Yale University, Tufts University, University of Connecticut Storrs, and New York University. Duos worked on their project across periodic meetings throughout the academic year, as well as an optional in-person visit to the UMass Amherst campus.

Gonzales, who is one of the seven selected faculty members involved in the inaugural cohort, says this provided a great opportunity for her.

“For those of us who were new faculty members hired in 2020, we had missed out on a whole year of research and connection,” Gonzales says. “This was meant to give us back some of those opportunities.”

In addition to her work as an assistant professor, Gonzales is a professional voice and dialect coach, actor, and writer. When it came to finding a mentor who understood all the roles and identities Gonzales embodied, Chibás was a natural choice.

Like Gonzales, Chibás is an educator, and her esteemed screenplays, films, and theatrical works explore Latine identity. She also serves as director of Duende CalArts, an initiative of the CalArts Center for New Performance that produces innovative Latine and Latin American artists. ... “There are so few Latines in the academy, so to have a mentor exist in both of these spaces—education and theater—means a lot,” she explains. “It has been hard for me to connect with other creators like me. This has been life affirming.”

For her project, Gonzales chose her original play with music, Olvidados: A Mexican American Corrido, which was a 2022 semi-finalist for the O’Neill National Music Theatre Conference and was workshopped at UMass Amherst as part of the 2021-22 season. The piece explores her family’s experience being repatriated to Mexico during the Great Depression.

As part of the mentorship, Chibás reviewed Gonzales’s script, which Chibás described as “beautiful,” to offer feedback and help her navigate how to move forward with it. One suggestion that emerged from their talks was to workshop the performance in front of designers, who may offer insight on the visual aspects of the performance.

As a selected mentor, Chibás recalls being “honored” when she received the invitation from HFA.

“A lot of my artivism has to do with supporting and guiding Latine artists and aesthetically adventurous artists, so this was a perfect fit,” she says.

“Marissa is so intuitive. I was so moved when we met,” Gonzales says. “She read the script... and she understood it. I felt seen as an artist. I think that’s a vital quality as a mentor—they see you and understand your voice.” And that feeling is mutual.

“‘Olvidados’ is a beautiful and important work, a familial story and cultural piece,” Chibás says. “In mentoring, I, too, feel like I’m being seen. This has been wind in my sails.”

The two say their newfound connection doesn’t just serve their personal creations, but the larger community of Latine creators in the academy as well. Both artists will even contribute chapters to a forthcoming book about Latine theater.

“It feels like there’s this whole movement bringing to light Latine stories in theater,” Chibás explains.

Gonzales adds, “And bringing to light the lineage—”

“That’s very much alive and thriving,” Chibás finishes. “I think this is a wonderful initiative and I’m really excited— both for the work Elisa is creating and for the connections this program creates.” ... Now in its second year, the HFA Faculty Networking Initiative will be funded entirely by HFA. Nine faculty members have been chosen from the departments of English, Music and Dance, Architecture, Philosophy, and Theater. Soon, they’ll connect with their mentors with projects kicking off in fall 2023.

“We hope that we’ll continue this program for years to come,” Moralee says.

By Pedro Eiras | Friday, June 16, 2023

Editor’s note: After completing the first year of the Department of Theater MFA program in dramaturgy, grad student Pedro Eiras spent the 2022-2023 school year on leave in his home country of Brazil to be there for the birth of his daughter and her first year of life. You’d be sorely mistaken, though, if you thought this was a year “off ” for him.

Over the course of his leave, he developed two huge screenwriting projects: one is a 26-episode show about Brazilian history airing next year on Brazilian television (he wrote all 26!), and the other is a film script based on the life of a woman who opposed the Brazilian military dictatorship and was tortured for it, which is now in development.

Researching and writing both projects called upon his dramaturgical skills as well as his training as a writer. “I’ve always known I wanted to tell stories, but it took me a long time to figure out how. ... I’m always interested in a thousand different things: literature, theater, TV, film… I started off as a journalist, telling story in a very straightforward way, and what I’ve come to figure out is that I love telling real stories,” he said. Eiras answered questions for us via email to tell us more about his projects.

Question: Can you tell me what the TV show you wrote is about?

Eiras: It’s called Histories of the Brazilian People, and it’s based on a series of books by a Brazilian historian named Mary del Priore. In it, she chronicles the daily lives of ordinary Brazilian people through the centuries, with a focus not on the big historical moments, but on how our people lived in between those. It spans a huge amount of time, starting with the Portuguese invasion in the 1500s going all the way to the first republic in Brazil in the early twentieth century.

What’s so interesting about the project is that it is a mixture of documentary and fiction. We interviewed dozens of scholars on varied historical topics, but each episode also contains a fictional monologue coming from a character of the time. So I was able to write pieces of fiction from the point of view of a dozen different people, from different centuries, with different occupations and life stories, and that was an incredibly challenging but rewarding task.

...Question: Can you talk a bit about the process?

Eiras: Since the series is based on existing books, the first stage was reading all 3 volumes, each with about 400 pages. After that, and in partnership with the director, researchers and producers, we started to select what we would approach in each episode. I had to find the essence of what we wanted to say and explore it in the questions we would ask the specialists, based on biographies that were provided to me by the amazing researcher we had working on the project. It was really a collaborative effort, which, as a theater guy used to creating collectively, I really loved.

Question: What appealed to you about the project? Is the topic a particular interest of yours?

Eiras: I was immediately drawn to this show because of the opportunity it provided to work on both fiction and documentary, exploring several different areas of dramaturgy, journalist research, and screenwriting. But my absolute favorite part, and the thing that got me really excited, was to write the fictional monologues. I got a chance to do research and try to bring to life so many different people, many of them real people who lived centuries ago. It was an enormous responsibility, of course, particularly because many of these characters lived lives I could not possibly imagine. But that’s where the dramaturgy kicked in, and extensive research allowed me to better understand each of these people and give them voice in a way that felt authentic and responsible.

...Question: Do you expect it to be made available for folks in the US?

Eiras: Probably not, because it will air on a Brazilian TV channel only. But hopefully it can be licensed to a US channel in the future! Even though it is very much about Brazilian history, there are universal themes that everyone can be of interest to everyone!

Question: Tell me about your film project: what is it about, and how did you come to write it?

Eiras: It’s for a movie called If I Die, which tells the real story of a woman named Inês Etienne Romeu, who was the only survivor of a torture and murder center kept by the military government during the military dictatorship in Brazil. This torture center, known as the House of Death, is only a few miles away from the house in which I was born and raised here in Brazil, and I’ve long wanted to tell this story, because I think it is fundamental that more Brazilians know about Inês and the horrors she endured, in particular to fight a very dangerous recent rhetoric that paints the military dictatorship as non-violent and beneficial to Brazil. It was not. It was a horrendous dictatorship that took hundreds of lives and hurt thousands of others. So I wrote this screenplay in the hopes of telling this story so it is not forgotten. I also wrote it for my grandfather, who was arrested and tortured during the military dictatorship, because I don’t want anyone to ever forget how terrible that period was and how people suffer to this day because of the traumas endured on the hands of the military government.

Question: Can you tell me more about Rio2C, which was where you successfully pitched the film to producers — what is the conference like, and what was your pitch process like?

Eiras: Rio2C, or Rio Creative Conference, is the largest Creative event in Latin America, and brings together, every year, thousands of directors, screenwriters, producers and creative people from all over the world. My project, “If I Die,”, won a contest called Creative Journeys, and I was invited to attend the event and pitch my movie. Pitching is tricky, but again, my training as a dramaturg helped me to focus on the important aspects of the story and to tell my own personal connection to it. The process was very successful and it was due to a meeting I had at Rio2C that a production company optioned my script.

Question: We know you are at UMass as a dramaturg for theater, and yet during your leave you have done a lot of writing for TV and film — how are those two things related to each other? Are there tools or skills from dramaturgy that you use in screenwriting, and vice versa?

Eiras: The two things are so incredibly connected to me that it’s hard to even tell them apart. In both cases, as a dramaturg and as a screenwriter, the focus is on the story and on the characters, it’s on doing it justice, on making sure that you are telling a story that is compelling, but also that is historically accurate. Particularly since both projects I worked on dealt a lot with historical characters, the skills of a dramaturg (research with an eye towards story and characters) really paid off.

Question: You’re coming back to UMass next school year — do you anticipate bringing any of the work you’ve done during your time away into your graduate studies here?

Eiras: The movie project will still be very much in development while I continue my studies at UMass, so I’ll definitely still be thinking about that and maybe even bringing some of that into my classes. I also have an idea about a play set during the military dictatorship in Brazil that I hope to explore. As usual, I’ll probably be working on a dozen different things at once, dramaturgy, screenwriting, playwriting… it will be fun (and a bit scary)!

Question: Are you working on any theater projects?

Eiras: While all of this was happening, I continued to work on my playwriting. I wrote a full new play and have continued to work on The Other America, the piece I wrote for the Fringe Fest at UMass in 2022. I’ve been attending a few online reading groups in the US, particularly focused on Latinx writers, so I’ve been able to maintain a close connection to the theatrical experience in the US even while away on a year off. The UMass Theater Department is a source of continuing inspiration, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I’ve had one of the most productive years of my life after attending a year of the MFA program at UMass. Being around creative people, and being around so much theater and art being done, inspired me to do more, even while away, and I can’t wait to see what the next two years (now back at UMass) will bring!