Theatre magic isn’t magic at all—it’s the result of months of students conceiving, designing, and constructing the theatre set under the guidance of their mentors. Throughout various stages of the process, UMBC students get to see the world they created come to life—from prologue to final curtain call. All the detailed measuring and crafting to scale pays off, because when the curtain goes up and the lights go down, the audience surrenders to a willing suspension of disbelief.
Prologue
“Attention on stage,” echoed loudly across UMBC’s Proscenium Theatre as Malaak McDonald, a theatre design and production and geography and environmental systems junior, warned the production crew to stop and await safety instructions.
It was a humid summer day, technically the off-season for UMBC’s theatre shows, but not for the production crew. From mid-May to mid-August, the undergraduate production staff set up construction stations across the Proscenium and the Black Box Theatres.
“Mine’s at 16, second electric, flying in, down stage,” said McDonald. The crew of five, in unison, looked up to ensure they were not underneath the second electric batten descending by a manual counterweight pulley system. The batten is a hollow metal bar, about the length of the stage, with electrical cables threaded inside, and rigged with hooks to hang stage lights and scenery. Fully loaded, it can weigh hundreds of pounds and can be flown in (lowered down) or flown out (raised) for seamless scene changes. Once the bar is at eye level and the line is locked, the crew returns to work.
All were trained by Gregg Schraven ’97, production manager for UMBC’s design shop, and Evan McDougall, assistant technical director, to use onsite industrial woodworking tools, welding machines, and behind-the-scenes stage technology. While McDonald tended to the lights, others were hand-painting a set floor. Another group inspected eight long wooden trellises drying on sawhorses, checking for scratches from their move from the paint booth to the stage through one of two 16-foot-high doors connecting the shop to both theatres.
To produce two fall plays and two spring plays annually, the faculty, staff, and students in UMBC’s theatre productions must adhere to a strict cycle that begins in November when the next season’s plays are chosen. Directors develop their script and then share their vision with the set, lighting, sound, and costume design directors. They then pick their student counterparts, all while producing the current season and teaching classes.
Theatre magic is not magic at all. It is the product of extreme organization, hefty technical skills, and commitment to learn, show up, and do the work. Theatre is a community service, explains Gerrad Alex Taylor, assistant professor of theatre and director of the 2025 – 2026 season opener, Shakespeare in Harlem, in celebration of a hundred years of the Harlem Renaissance and part of UMBC’s Arts+ initiative.
“This phenomenon of watching a play is cathartic and an important community service. It’s healing. It’s a service of the heart,” said Taylor, a classically trained Shakespearean actor. “We have to ask, ‘What do the hearts of people need right now?’ and what stories can we be telling to connect with their hearts?”
Act One: Tools of the Trade
That kind of passion needs precision. Three years after graduation, Tyler Brust, theatre, a scenic designer and technical director, is a staple at the UMBC set design shop, where he is often on contract for the build cycle through tech week while also working in local theatre. “Coming back as an alum, it felt like I did not miss a beat as a result,” said Brust. “I immediately felt like I had the tools I needed to effectively lead small groups of student staff where necessary, all while balancing my own personal task list.”
He remembers his first production team project in 2019, building the floor layout for The Turn of the Screw set in late 1800’s England. The students created an illusion, a forced-perspective floor. Wooden floorboards were designed to be widest near the audience and gradually narrow toward the back of the stage, making the stage appear deeper and longer, creating a railroad-track effect. “This was all done by hand, with a straight edge and a router,” said Brust.
“Now, for Shakespeare in Harlem, Evan helped us through a multi-step process to modify the hardboard floor from last fall’s play. I now have the skills to completely fake these lines via paint and handle the complex layout of overlapping ovals and forced-perspective bricks,” said Brust.
McDougall calls this “theatre production with training wheels.” Before the drilling and the cutting commence, he has students start with what he calls the boring part—reading the manufacturers’ manuals. He then reminds students of his number one rule: Don’t trust anything—even if it’s in the manual. “The students say I have trust issues.
You can’t make any assumptions about what is true in theatre production,” said McDougall. As UMBC’s master electrician with decades of experience in woodworking, welding, and blacksmithing, he is indispensable for students to understand the mechanical, manual, and technical aspects of set design, growing in expertise over their time at UMBC.
“I joke with my students that they come in with this preconceived notion of ‘this is parallel, this is plumb or level’—and once we begin installing sets and moving pieces around in the space, those realities don’t exist anymore,” said McDougall. After all, the production director aims to execute the set designer’s vision, while the set designer works to visualize and create the environment the director imagines.
Brust absorbed every lesson alongside McDougall and Schraven, which helped him become a Swiss Army Knife of technical abilities as a carpenter, scenic artist, puppet artist, associate scenic designer, and design and technical coordinator. “The agency and mentorship that Gregg and Evan give students is what makes all the difference,” said Brust. “It allows us to flex our muscles into actual project management, which is otherwise difficult to emulate during a class session.”
Schraven and McDougall’s mentorship helped Brust branch out of UMBC to local theatre production companies like the Strand Theatre, Submersive, and True Penny Productions as a scenic artist, carpenter, general fabricator, and technical director. It is also why he is highly sought after in the UMBC theatre cycle.
“Tyler is a person I trust. I want to know what he’s thinking and can have dialogue about a problem,” said McDougall. “Here’s what my gut’s telling me. What do you see? We can start riffing off of each other. He’s now a coworker.”
Act Two: Metal, Steel, and Wood
In partnership with the Langston Hughes estate, Taylor adapted Hughes’ collection of monologue poems exploring the rhythms of jazz, the blues, Black love, and the daily struggles and joys of life in Harlem into a full-length play, blending poetry, music, and dance for an immersive journey into the world he so vividly celebrated. The only thing left to do was to construct an equally inspiring home into being. To bring the physical world of the Harlem Renaissance to UMBC, Taylor worked with Nate Sinnott, the scenic designer and faculty properties and paints supervisor.
Sinnott found inspiration in the original New York City Penn Station of the 1920s with 150-foot ceilings, granite columns, steel-vaulted ceilings, and an arching glass roof. Enter Schraven, McDougall, Brust, and the summer student production staff: McDonald, Adam Harper, a theatre and engineering and information systems senior, Ann Davies, a visual arts senior, and Abigail Adams, a media and communication senior.
Together, they built the director’s vision creatively and safely—with a unique twist. Taylor, who is a member of the resident company at Chesapeake Shakespeare Company (CSC) and founder of the company’s Black Classical Acting Ensemble, thought through a project that could “uplift the Black students who are about to graduate and have the acting chops to handle the material, and bring some of the Black Baltimore community to UMBC,” said Taylor. “Then take this Black ensemble and bring it back to Baltimore City’s community.” In brainstorming what all that could look like, UMBC theatre developed a collaboration with CSC.
This means that the technical crew designed the set to work for both UMBC’s Proscenium Theatre and Baltimore City’s CSC’s stage. The production team built a forced-perspective floor and 16 faux steel trellis arches constructed from multiple layers of wood and foam. Each trellis was finely carved with intricate triangular patterns using a computer-controlled machine, then glued together in pairs to form eight lightweight units. The arches had built-in break points, allowing them to be disassembled, packed into a 16-foot truck, and reassembled identically at each theatre—even with performances months apart.
“My job is to teach the students to the point where they can do it all,” said Schraven, associate teaching professor and technical director. For Schraven, UMBC is more than where he began studying theatre in 1989 and more than the place where he has worked, off and on, since the 1990s. It is where he gets to pass down the more than 30 years of theatre tech knowledge to students working in a scene shop he helped design.
“When I was a student, I was easily in the shop six to 10 hours a day. I probably did more welding in a year than they will do in their entire careers. That’s why I keep the shop open to students in the summer. That’s why I have a student labor budget and why 100 percent of all show proceeds are for undergraduate scholarships. I want to use every single penny of it on students,” said Schraven. “The more you’re in the shop, the more you learn. When students learn how to weld, I tell them to give it 80 times. Then they’ll be really comfortable with it.”
Act Three: Dress Rehearsal
It’s two weeks before showtime. At 6:30 p.m. sharp, the unspoken hero of the play, Tatiyana ‘Tati’ Terrelonge, an acting and media and communication studies junior, is poised at center stage on the floor designed to look like brown bricks. Terrelonge, who intrepidly served as the entire cast’s understudy, is holding a binder with the lead’s lines at the ready. Looming behind her is the finalized, floor-to-ceiling vaulted arch. Four costumed students sit in wooden chairs recently stained brown by the production crew, while another peeks out of a window, one of several frosted glass ceiling panes below the arch.
In the audience are four crew members managing lights, sound, props, and character lines. Today, the lines are for a scene where a character, Bruce, is writing a letter to his mother in the South, and another character, Leonard, is reading a letter to his sweetheart, begging her not to return to the South.
They represent the millions of Black men and women of the Great Migration, who fled the legacy of slavery and the terror of racism of the South between 1910 – 1970 for the North. Hundreds of thousands arrived at NYC’s Penn Station with the artistic talents and skilled labor that birthed the Harlem Renaissance. Their success inspired others to follow, who were ready to reap all the freedom that the Harlem Renaissance promised, only to be met first with the daily grind of work that made Harlem glimmer with the dreams of its people.
“Langston Hughes was canonizing Black life in America in the same way that William Shakespeare did, of life during England’s Elizabethan era,” said Taylor, who added a personal touch by including some of his grandmother’s stories and kept the show going by stepping in as the character of Simple. “A lot of my research here at the university and as an artist is looking at African American stories and stories of the diaspora that have been forgotten about, misrepresented, and stolen,” said Taylor, “and bringing a new lens and a new perspective of our contemporary consciousness to them.”
Curtain Call
“You are here!” said Lauren Davis, in the commanding voice of her character, Griot—the play’s storyteller, historian, and cultural guide—to the first audience of the fall season. Davis, a guest artist and member of the CSC’s Black Classical Acting Ensemble, is radiant in golden light. Behind her, the arched glass ceiling transforms with a projection of stained glass in rich royal hues, thanks to McDonald, the show’s head electrician, and the lighting team, who hung the lighting designer’s light plot—a map, essentially—a month early to give lighting design students time to learn the process.
“I want to get the acknowledgment well of the ancestors into the space,” booms Griot, lowering a large basket—the well—onto the floor. “I call so that you remember the grandmothers on whose shoulders we stand. I’m no longer accepting the things I cannot change. I am changing the things I cannot accept.”
With that, the set morphs into bedrooms, apartments, and streets, made real by the artistry of UMBC’s theatre students and their mentors. Traveling trunks become an altar, and light posts double as clotheslines. The actors tap in, weaving with the words and sounds—reading, stomping, marching, crying, laughing, inhaling—that syncopate the lives of lovers, friends, entrepreneurs, religious leaders, landlords, family, and a fledgling poet—an homage to Hughes—whose future letters are masterfully projected across the Harlem sky.
Top: The ensemble creates a church with luggage trunks as the altar and chairs as pews. Bottom: The ensemble creates a church with luggage trunks as the altar and chairs as pews. Photos by Kiirstn Pagan ’11.
