Lani Skelley Yeatts pops into the craft room of the prop shop on the campus of UNC School of the Arts. Inside, surrounded by artificial flowers and hot glue guns, a properties student is gluing fabric onto the rim of an ornate wooden chest so that it closes quietly. After chatting briefly with her fellow student, Yeatts walks over to the costume shop, where a pair of actors are being fitted in 17th-century European attire. She checks in with the wig and makeup department, where an actress sits in front of a large mirror rimmed with vanity lights while the team scrutinizes her hairpiece, deciding to give it more volume to match the poofiness of her costume.
Lani Skelley Yeatts assesses the production to ensure tasks are completed on time. photograph by Wayne Reich
Next, Yeatts strides down the street to Catawba Theatre, where, beneath dim lights, she speaks with the technical director and the scenic and lighting designers. Their conversation is punctuated by the sound of drills as technicians construct the set of The Rover, a play based in Naples, Italy, in the mid-1600s.
As production manager, Yeatts’s job is to make sure that these tasks are being completed on time, under budget, and according to the vision of the director and designers. And the clock is ticking: Opening night is in a couple of weeks.
Wig and makeup student Khepra Hetep styles Ferin Bergen, who plays noblewoman Hellena in The Rover. photograph by Scott Muthersbaugh
The days leading up to a performance at UNCSA — the only arts conservatory in the UNC system, consisting of high school, undergraduate, and graduate programs — are organized chaos. There are thousands of moving parts that are meticulously planned and scheduled, then executed by about 100 students in the School of Design and Production (D&P), one of five conservatories on UNCSA’s 78-acre campus in Winston-Salem.
D&P performs behind-the-scenes support for the School of Drama, the A.J. Fletcher Opera Institute, and the School of Dance. Except for the director, most productions are entirely student-run and -created, from production managers like Yeatts, who oversee the scheduling of each department, to members of the wig and makeup department, who painstakingly tie individual strands of hair onto each wig. A look behind the curtain offers insight into how a production comes to life.
• • •
Second-year graduate student Christina Lu took a winding career path before studying scene design at UNCSA. She grew up in Texas, studied business administration at New York University, and dabbled in several fields after graduating. While working in film, the lifelong artist realized that she thrived in a collaborative and creative environment. But as a production assistant — the bottom rung of the ladder — she didn’t have the authority to make creative decisions. She decided to go back to school to change that, and UNCSA was the only program she found where she could pursue scene design while getting film production experience. The Rover was her first production as scenic designer.
Director Carl Forsman shared with Lu his vision for the set, which included a wall of doors and a raked, or inclined, stage. The play takes place during Carnival, a time of “very joyful, effusive liberation,” Lu says. “That’s the mood that we wanted to capture.”
Christina Lu oversees the set design for The Rover. Photography courtesy of UNC School of the Arts
With those ideas in mind, Lu began making computer and physical models. She designed elaborate frames for the doors, with embellishments like a bull, a lion, and snakes. And she decided to paint all of the doorframes a bold pink to represent feminist themes in the play.
The set required a few custom props, the most notable of which were a chest and a bed. The chest contained disguises that allowed the female characters to evade their male relatives so they could participate in Carnival. “The chest is supposed to represent imprisonment, constraint, so that’s why it looks like a crypt,” Lu says.
The bed belongs to the main courtesan in the play, so Lu wanted it to be seductive and inviting. She designed it to look like a corset and used red and gold to make it bright and vivid. The properties team suggested that the headboard be filled with a sheer fabric, and the lighting team cued up lights to shine through.
The Rover play was written by Aphra Behn, the first female professional English playwright, which inspired the set’s pink doorways. photograph by Allison Lee Isley
Despite how much she enjoyed the experience, Lu says that designing the set was like working a full-time job in addition to the full-time job of being a student. The Rover consumed her thoughts, and anytime friends outside of UNCSA would ask her for life updates, she would always tell them about how things were going with the production.
Still, seeing her design come to life is worth it. She describes her role as “imagining what the world of the author is, and then trying to respond to that in my own way, through my drawings and my designs. It’s a way for me to engage with the soul of something in a way that’s also generative.”
• • •
Inside a warehouse, with garage doors on either side open wide for ventilation, Henry Beard uses a pair of tongs to pull a cylindrical piece of steel out of a forge and place it onto an anvil. As the metal glows a yellowish orange, he hammers the piece into a rectangular shape with flat ends, then twists it with a pair of wrenches to create a spiral. The piece, and another one like it, will become a pair of handles for one of the five doors on the set of The Rover.
Beard was the properties director for The Rover and completed UNCSA’s stage properties graduate program in May. He grew up in Texas, where his mother was a theater historian. He started acting in high school, making props on the side, he says, “because no one else seemed to want to do it.”
When actors Jack Zubieta Elliott and Abigail Garcia take the stage for The Rover, the set, costumes, and props — like the elaborate bed — complete the scene. photograph by Allison Lee Isley
He went to Baylor University as a performance major but switched to theater design and technology during his second year. “I really enjoyed making things,” he says. “It feels like you’re giving a gift when you’ve created all these things that the scenic designer has asked for or envisioned and didn’t think could be real.”
Beard was attracted to the creative freedom that UNCSA allows its students. Although he enjoys being an artisan, for his role as properties director, he tried not to make things himself, choosing instead to trust his team. The door handles were an exception because he has experience with blacksmithing: He took an introductory course at UNCSA, designed an independent study to explore it further, and demonstrated the skill as a living history interpreter at Old Salem. His graduate thesis was on blacksmithing techniques as they apply to theater.
If you were to turn a house on its side and shake it, everything that fell out would be a prop.
“It’s an old skill, but we still need it for new reasons,” he says. “And that’s what we do. Props people rebind books. We do seat weaving. We use old skills all the time.”
Beard explains that if you were to turn a house on its side and shake it, everything that fell out would be considered a prop. For The Rover, the props that Beard’s team created included candelabras, chairs, the chest, and the bed.
The bed required a lot of creative thinking. It had to be both aesthetically pleasing and sturdy enough to be jumped on. It had to be moved offstage with two people on it. Its satin sheets had to be upholstered so they wouldn’t fall off. And it would have to be broken down into four parts to be moved down the street from the D&P Technical Production Facilities, where the properties team works, to Catawba Theatre.
Beard enjoys the challenge. “If you love a puzzle,” he says, “Props is the department for you.”
• • •
Will Wharton started acting at a summer camp as a kid and continued to perform in community theater in Mount Airy throughout his youth. But his favorite part of theater was dressing up. Realizing that he wanted a career in costume design, he set his sights on UNCSA.
To get his foot in the door, he started volunteering in the school’s costume shop while still in high school, completing simple tasks like hemming dresses and sorting buttons. He graduated from the university in May with a degree in costume design and technology. The Rover was his first mainstage production as costume designer.
Will Wharton created a rendering of his costume for Willmore (below) before costume design assistants Teddy McMahon and Maki Niikura helped him bring it to life for actor Jack Zubieta Elliott. photograph by Scott Muthersbaugh
illustration by Will Wharton
Wharton estimates that he spent about 1,000 hours working on the designs for the show but thought about it “every waking minute, except the hours when I [was] actively doing other work,” he says. During the design process, “I would fall asleep thinking about The Rover.”
He started with research — 40 hours per week for three to five weeks, in addition to his regular classes. He used paintings from the 17th century to learn about styles for the play’s time period, and paintings of Carnival from the 18th and 19th centuries because the celebrations were not well-documented in the 1600s.
The set was already designed when Wharton started working on the show, so his palette was inspired by the colors onstage — black for the Spaniards who lived in Naples at the time, pinks for the courtesan and her bodyguard, creams and earth tones for the English cavaliers to reflect the pastoral nature of their country in the 17th century. Following the director’s vision, he stayed true to 1660s styles for the female characters — nipped-in high waists, poofy sleeves and skirts — but designed the men’s costumes based on an earlier time period that was more flattering to the male physique, “to emphasize the masculinity of the male characters,” Wharton explains.
illustration by Will Wharton
He set to work creating line art sketches with a digital drawing tablet, then presented his designs to the drapers, the technology students who lead the teams that make the costumes. Finally, he began sourcing fabric and garments.
One character, Blunt, gets robbed, disrobed, and dragged into a sewer, spending most of the rest of the play in dirty bloomers. Wharton got to apply what he’d learned in his fabric modification class — a course on dyeing and distressing fabrics — to instruct the technology students on how to make the bloomers look muddy and bedraggled.
Wharton’s favorite part of working on the show was seeing the actors in their full costumes for the first time. “It was just this marvelous thing because for months you’re thinking about, ‘How does this work? Can we get it to look like this? If I change this, then what does that affect?’” he says. “And then when you finally see them in [the costumes], it’s just this mind-blowing experience.”
• • •
By the time the play opens in the intimate black-box Catawba Theatre, the D&P teams are done with their work and can sit back and enjoy the show. They laugh along with the rest of the audience at the witty remarks of the characters and the hilarious misfortune of Blunt.
“It’s so exciting to see the things that you’ve been dreaming of, quite literally, for months be made in real life,” Wharton says. “And you can look at something and say, ‘Wow, I thought that up. I designed that.’”
Lu has a similar reaction when seeing the set come together, particularly the bed. “It was so beautiful with that fabric on the sides because the light pours in through the fabric, and it creates such an ethereal feel,” she says. “And the reason I love the bed so much is because of all the people who collaborated on it to make it better than we had envisioned. That’s exactly what I got into this career to do: big, creative projects with lots of people who are very passionate about what they do.”
“That’s why I do props,” Beard adds, “because I think it’s a way to help people.”
As the cast members take their final bows, Yeatts, Lu, Beard, and Wharton stand and clap enthusiastically — not just for the actors onstage but also for the characters behind the scenes, who started from scratch and created a world.
To learn more about UNC School of the Arts and to see a schedule of performances, visit uncsa.edu.
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