The August Wilson Door

From Drew, Arts Management Intern



I don't usually wander down into the scene shop. To administration kids like me, it's an unknown environment that frightens me in a very meaningful way. Bare-handed soldering of huge pieces of metal; huge paintings of Noel Coward's face; super intimidating facial hair; lots of crazy things. However, recently, I happened to find myself deep within its interior (looking for cookies or something) and stumbled upon a giant door. The August Wilson Door.

Acting as a good Rep blog investigator, I looked into it. Supposedly, there is a path in Seattle Center that is being renamed "August Wilson Way" in honor of the late, great playwright August Wilson. Supposedly, there was a request for an "icon" to be designed to commemorate this path. Supposedly that "icon" looks a lot like a door. A twenty-some foot, 3000 pound invocation of 1839 Wylie Avenue, the house that bookends Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle (the characters live in it in the first and debate the demolition of it in the last). And we here at the Rep made it.

And we do tons of stuff like that. I guess our brilliant carpenters/painters/machinists help out with projects outside the Rep all the time. Well, not all the time, but, if you saw Shrek the Musical at the 5th Avenue, the coolest pieces of the set: yeah, that was them. Now, if they do that kind of work for foreigners . . .

Fiduciary Responsibility

From Drew, Arts Management Intern



Seattle Repertory Theatre is a non-profit entity. This means that we make no money so we can make great art and then ask other people for money so people who want to be moved, inspired, enlightened by the art but can't afford the premium price of world-class theatre, can come anyway. This also means that sometimes, we have to make novel use of scarce resources. Thrifty manuevers to keep our financial situation in order/survive to the next day. Case in point: the "Play a Role" buttons. These marvels of design and craftsmanship were first built for an event for the CREW, the group of successful young professionals who love the Rep. Now if we were a for-profit company, or the 5th Avenue, at the end of the night, those buttons would most likely have met the garbage. But, being good financial stewards, since that day I have seen them at meetings with the Board of Trustees, among countless SRT volunteers, on Managing Director Ben Moore, and, today, at the voter registration booth.