Underneath the stage at Chicago Shakespeare, there’s a mechanism called the sunroof. It drops down, slides away, and opens a hole for a lift to rise through. Both The Winter’s Tale and A Midsummer Night’s Dream use it, and this season there’s something built into that same mechanism that’s never existed on that stage before.
That’s the territory of Tyler Metoxen, Chicago Shakespeare’s technical director. Tyler talks about getting into theater in ninth grade, never wanting to be on stage himself, and a career path, from the Santa Fe Opera to the Utah Shakespeare Festival to Milwaukee, that ran almost entirely through repertory companies before he ever landed in Chicago.
He explains what a technical director actually does, why the line between his department and props is blurrier than you’d think, and why “it works most of the time” isn’t nearly good enough on a live stage. He also covers why Winter’s Tale and Midsummer were never treated as two separate builds, down to the shared floor both productions had to be planned around together.
Bringing Up the Lights is an original series from Sound Concept Media, written and narrated by Keith Conrad.
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