January 22, 2025

Theater 365: Technical Direction class builds a turntable

By Anna-Maria Goossens

When you ask people to picture a turntable, most will think of a table-top size item for spinning LPs.

The painted, finished turntable
The finished, painted turntable. Photo courtesy of Lindsay Forauer

At the UMass Amherst Department of Theater, the students in Theater 365 (Technical Direction) spent last semester thinking a LOT bigger.

Guided by Technical Director Michael Cottom, the class planned and built a turntable for the Rand Theater stage. Students learned technical direction skills by doing, and along the way they demonstrated sustainable building practices.

“I learned a lot about the design and development process, and it was really useful to actually understand and work through how to go from a concept, to a design, to a prototype and finally a finished product. It’s one thing to hear about and know the concepts of how to design and build something, and another to actually be a part of the process,” said Julia Martinez, a theater major who was part of the class. “I’ll definitely be carrying the experience I gained forward into future projects that I work on.” 

Lindsay Forauer, who was also in the class, was among several students who captured video and photos to document the group's work.

“Michael asked us at the end why our first response was to take a video of the final product. We felt that that was the only way to show others how cool it is that we were able to make the final product real,” she said.

Cottom is a proponent of STEAM — adding “art” into the popular STEM acronym to make a point that math, science, and art should be considered together, and not as opposing ideas. Students in a previous TH 365 designed and created a stage elevator to move scenery (and/or actors) from stage level to the trap room below the stage. This semester of spring 2025, students will create an automated counterweight system to allow for controlled movement of scenery from stage level up to 50 feet in the air. 

And while Cottom set the challenge to create the turntable, the actual process was driven by the students. 

“We were working with numbers, geometry, movement, torque. It was hands-on learning and very accessible to the students," Cottom said. “They weren’t given answers, they were given questions."

“It’s honestly baffling how we managed to construct it within three months. On the first day of class, we had no plans or blueprints for the turntable. We brainstormed ideas ourselves then put them into fruition, which is the final product on the stage,” said theater major Haylie Prevett.

Students designed and built the aluminum frame, which looks like a giant pie, with some students adding welding to their skill set. Students figured out how to attach the casters (a heavier-duty version of the type of wheels you might see on an office chair) and how many the piece needed. They set up a motor and programmed the motor to stop and start safely. On top of the frame, they built a platform so people can stand on the turntable.

Students focused on parts of the process that played to individual strengths.

“At the beginning of the semester, the main thing I worked on was the placement for the casters/wheels that make the base of the turntable spin,” Prevett said. “As we progressed, I mainly worked on the construction of the frame for the casters to sit on, and collaborated with my classmates on other aspects of the project that needed addressing.”

Meanwhile, her classmate Martinez focused her attention elsewhere.

Elena Paz (Quin Camacho, a classmate) and I both worked together on the motor/interface between the motor, pivot, and the turntable itself. We worked a lot with troubleshooting and programming using Spikemark, a program used to communicate between a computer and the motor/pivot in order to make sure the pivot turns to exactly the location we want. There were a lot of issues initially trying to get the computer and motor to 'talk to each other' but we eventually got it working,” Martinez said.

The students are clear on the lessons they took from it.

I learned how challenging it can be to work on a big project with a handful of people, especially when nobody knows what to do next. Technical Direction is a class where that is common, but it’s not a bad thing. The way I see it, it allows you to grow and adapt—I am always learning something new in class and in the shop,” said Prevett. “This has also helped me better navigate unfamiliar situations that require a lot of patience and thinking ‘outside the box.’ Even if you don’t know what to do right away, you’ll eventually reach your goal. It’s a great lesson to learn.”

In addition to the challenge of making a moving set piece, the turntable project was a proof-of-concept for sustainable construction in theater, said Cottom. "It will indeed be part of our stock technical resources."

In 2021, a previous iteration of the Technical Direction class built a large aluminum globe, Earth!, which served as an outside installation for Earth Day and the Department’s Monuments of the Future presentations during the Rights of Spring theater festival. Given the connection to Earth Day, part of the intent of the globe construction was to demonstrate sustainability. When the display was taken down, the scene shop kept the aluminum frame and fasteners, and they were re-purposed for the turntable.

"Students modified the existing aluminum frame during this last semester (we had already built it from the Earth! parts. It was always the plan for the Earth! project to be repurposed into a turntable for the stage. Five percent was recycled, and for the rest, we re-used it all,” Cottom said. "The whole point was that we can do that."

All this stage technology is reusable, designed, created and applied by students, thus saving countless hours and potentially significant costs for any given production.

“We really get to take away the experience of the process - figuring out how we would make it move, how we would cover it, taking it apart and putting it back together countless times, and working as a team to do it all,” said Forauer.

Students of the UMass Theater Technical Direction class for fall 2024 walk on the turntable they built during the class. From concept to finished product, the process took 3 months.