Sound Design
Sound Design
10 Out of 12
By: Anne Washburn
Mercutio Troupe 2026
Directors: Maddie Wright + Sawyer Grabow
Scenic Designer: Stella Byrne
Lighting Designer: Stel Stein
Costume Designer: Sky Hermanson
Photo Credit: Ren Lake
This production was my last design in college. In many ways it was a love letter to the student theater scene of Emerson College. The play takes place over a couple very tense days of tech, with injuries, unruly actors, and technical problems. We hear sound cues be edited in real time and the stagehands talking over comm throughout the show. There are aspects of this production that are self referential, celebrating moments from shows the creative team had worked on before together. For me this mainly meant throwing in bits of underscoring from previous shows while cues were being built within the context of the show.
This is one instance from the show where the soundscape is being built in real time. Many of the changes are being prompted by lines the actor playing the sound designer says.
Paul is the problem actor of the cast, often making a scene and delaying the process. Paul uses a really extreme method to keep himself in character. This monologue is happening over a scene being ran. I used radio static and LED hum to kind of emulate the feeling of zoning out during a tech rehearsal
This bit of underscoring if from a part of the show where the scene keeps getting restarted as the SM keeps missing a cue.
Similar to the forest soundscape building this snippet is from a moment of the show, where the sound designer is trying and failing to make a clean loop in a piece of underscoring. Definitely not based on any personal lived experience.
Emerson Stage 2025
Director: Bridget O’Leary
Scenic Designer: Zoe Mills
Lighting Designer: Chiron Speidel
Costume Designer: Madeline Henry
Fight Director: Jessica Scout Malone
Photo Credits: Roman Iwasiwka
Julius Caesar
By: William Shakespeare
For this production of Julius Caesar we were exploring the intersection of the past and the present, and the political cycles we see following the cults of personality surrounding politicians. For the sound design I pulled from the works of Richard Wagner, specifically from the Ring Cycle as it tells the story of a war between gods that leads to the end of the world. I was interested in this work as one that has been co-opted by certain political movements. Wagner’s work in my design represents the old regime and the forces pulling the people to political violence.
Caesar ignored Calpurnia’s pleas to stay home thinking he is invincible but the gods think differently. A storm is building to warn him but he is deafened by his own ambition. The orchestra tuned under his ranting.
This was a collaboration with the Fight Director to have the piece build to the point where Caesar gets stabbed. The moment was played out is slow motion so we had to maintain an energy and determination through the underscoring. The timpani rolls as Caesar says “Et tu Brute” and then finally falls.
In this production, Portia’s Ghost appears as well as Caesar’s. Brutus plays the song to calm himself and it transforms while his wife comes to see him.
This was also a collaboration with the Fight Director to have the tension build until Cassius is killed.
This drone begins when Antony is inspiring the people to mutiny after Caesar’s death. It then explodes into a chaotic destruction of the set and brawl amongst the poeple, which brings us into intermission. The big challenge with this piece was making Wagner’s most famous work not sound like itself.
Brutus plays himself another song to calm himself, but it begins to cut out as Caesar’s Ghost comes to visit him. It is replaced by the sound of the arco of a cello.
The Inheritance Part 1
By: Matthew López
EmShakes 2025
Director : Reed Atherton
Scenic Designer: Mack MacIntyre
Lighting Designer: Ryan Tse
Costume Designer: Grace Cunniff
Photo Credit: Amanda Jacobson
The Inheritance is an adaptation of Howard’s End by E. M. Forster centering around a group of gay men in New York. The grapple with feelings of belonging and uncertainty going into an uncertain future. For this production I was really interested in the differences between living in the city and living in this big haunted house our main character comes to inherit. What are the ways we hear music in passing in these spaces, your upstairs neighbor listening to the radio or a piano echoing throughout the halls of a grand house.
Evvy Nominated for Outstanding Sound Design for Stage
During Act 2 the characters gather to celebrate what they think will be the election of the first woman president. We had to capture the feeling of watching for hours as the world they thought they lived in disappeared.
Leo is a poor young prostitute. For the first time in his life he is standing on top of the world with the city he lives in purring at his feet. He feels safe in this penthouse at the top of the world.
Adam, a young gay man tells the story of an encounter he had in a bathhouse in Europe. He then says how that encounter led to him contracting HIV.
Toby tells his friend Eric, a young gay man, what it was like during the AIDs epidemic. He has him list his friends names and tells him how each would have passed away. “That is what is was.”
Rabbit Hole
By: David Lindsay-Abaire
BlueJay Theater Collective 2024
Director : Gabi David
Composers: Wyatt and Izaiah Rhinehart
Scenic Designer: Eli Goldberg
Lighting Designer: Eli Goldberg
Costume Designer: Maria Renee Herman
Photo Credit: Zubin Stillings
This production of Rabbit Hole was a very actor centric one. The sound design was simplistic focusing on diegetic sounds while having surreal moment of gazing into another happier universe. For this production I collaborated with two composers who helped with the main moments of underscoring.
Evvy Award for Outstanding Sound Design for Stage
This production ended with a movement piece of the family living out their life without their son. We had filmed some home videos with a child actor for a few moments in the show. The Composers provided me with this piece of underscoring and I scrubbed through our home videos for moments of joy and laughter to play alongside with the underscoring, a vision of the other universe where their son is still alive with them.
Along side the final piece I had moments of Danny’s laughter play during transitions as we look into the rabbit holes of other happier worlds.
