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
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.
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.
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.
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.”