Lights, Camera, Action! by Berkshire School

LIGHTS, CAMERA, CAMERA,

ACTION! ACTION!

Many people dream of making it big in Hollywood or creating media that changes the arc of history; few succeed. It just so happens that Berkshire alumni—more than we could feature here—are working and excelling in the entertainment industry. From award-winning set decorators to groundbreaking directors, actors, producers, and choreographers to beloved reality stars, these alumni have drawn from lessons and experience learned at Berkshire to take entertainment to a whole new level.

Plus, an interview with Berkshire’s own theater director,

JESSE HOWARD 24

Berkshire Bulletin

Summer 2020

NEEDLE in a HAYSTACK Set decorator Andrew Baseman ’78 transports film and TV audiences. By Megan Tady

Baseman at the Newel Gallery in Manhattan, where he often searches for set decor items

Set decorator Andrew Baseman was on the hunt for a Dixie Cup, and not just any paper cup would do. He was decorating an office set for the upcoming film “The Trial of the Chicago 7,” based in 1968, and every last detail— including a Dixie Cup perched on a desk—needed to reflect the time period. “I love shopping for the hard-to-find item,” Baseman says from his home in Chelsea, N.Y. “It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack, especially with a period piece. Having the right paper cup on somebody’s desk or at a coffee station—that’s exciting to me.” Baseman and an assistant eventually tracked down the Dixie Cups in the original box. It was a lucky find, as were the dozen 15-foot-long church pews— posted for free on Craigslist— that he used to furnish the courtroom set for the film, which is directed by Aaron Sorkin and stars Sacha Baron Cohen and Eddie Redmayne. The film follows the story of seven people on trial for charges surrounding the

uprising at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Yet luck doesn’t have much to do with Baseman’s success. He’s made a name for himself as a meticulous and committed set decorator who can rapidly transform sets and transport audiences, tracking down elusive items to visually articulate the script and its characters. In 2018, Baseman won an Art Directors Guild Award and was nominated for a Critics’ Choice Award for his work on the film “Crazy Rich Asians,” directed by Jon M. Chu. He was also the set decorator for Chu’s “In the Heights,” which is based on the musical written by Quiara Alegría Hudes and Lin-Manuel Miranda. Other film and TV projects include “The Nanny Diaries,” “The Americans,” “Gotham,” and “Eat, Pray, Love.” Baseman says his role differs from that of a production designer, a title that goes back to “Gone with the Wind.” The production designer conceives the look of a movie and the set decorator starts with an empty space and procures

Photo by Joanna Chattman

Berkshire Bulletin

Summer 2020

“I often create characters’ backstories, even deciding where they graduated from college if I hang a diploma on the wall. My work includes all the details. Ninety-nine percent is not in the script.”

just as the cameras start rolling—a loose curtain panel over an office window in one film, for instance, still has him vexed. “I have a good eye for detail, and it’s also a curse, because when I go to the movies and I see something that’s wrong, I obsess,” he says. “I can’t help it.”

EARLY TRAINING

Baseman spent his four years at Berkshire immersed in drama and the arts.

From a young age, Baseman was intrigued by detail, noticing things other kids (and even adults) did not. “I was an unusual kid,” he says. “I was into antiques and furniture refinishing.” He spent many hours in his parents’ bookstore and antique shop in South Egremont, just up the road from Berkshire School. “That was instrumental in my development as a decorator because so many things came

through the doors of their shop that I got to learn from. Our house was furnished with antiques, so I’d ask my parents, ‘Where did you get this? What is it? Tell me everything you know about it.’” When he was 8 years old, Baseman became captivated by antique postcards—which, at a nickel a piece, were one of the few antiques he could afford to buy himself—and he attended postcard shows and auctions. It was at flea markets with his parents that he discovered a lifelong passion for antiques with “inventive” or “make-do” repairs, which he explains on his blog, “Past Imperfect: The Art of Inventive Repair,” are “unique examples of necessity and thrift, made during a time before Krazy Glue was invented.” “If I bought things that were

Baseman’s set decoration for the film “In the Heights,” scheduled for release in summer 2021 Anthony Ramos as Usnavi and Melissa Barrera as Vanessa in Warner Bros. Pictures’ “In the Heights,” a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo by Macall Polay

everything, including furniture, rugs, wallpaper, lamps, and the art on the walls. “I often create characters’ backstories, even deciding where they graduated from college if I hang a diploma on the wall,” he says. “My work includes all the details. Ninety-nine percent is not in the script.” The feat is truly monumental. To create interior sets—inside a character’s home, for example—films often use people’s real houses or apartments. Baseman and his team arrive with a large truck and must empty out the residence, carefully taking photos so they can later restore the house to its original condition. Then the real work begins: decorating the set to reflect a character’s life. Nearly always pressed for time, Baseman is sometimes still adjusting a set mere minutes before the actors arrive, often working while the set lights 28

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are being hung up above him. Each character requires a vastly different look—a grandmother who’s been living in her apartment for 30 years needs “30 years’ worth of layers of everything she owns.” Baseman continues, “Her books, her clothes if you open the closets, everything in the kitchen, piles of mail and magazines— all those things I have to find.” For period films, Baseman has to conduct historical and cultural research, painstakingly tracking down each item and then ensuring that it accurately reflects the era, culture, or location. For the film “In the Heights,” his team decorated sets to reflect Cuban, Dominican, and Puerto Rican families. “We had a big responsibility to tell their story, because Cubans, Dominicans, and Puerto Ricans are not well represented on the screen,”

Baseman says. “The production designer and I did a lot of research to find out the subtle differences in how people from each of the three islands furnish their own homes.” Once shooting begins, Baseman is on hand to open the set and make any lastminute adjustments. “I want people to think the set is a real environment,” he says. “Sometimes a producer will walk onto a set and think that we found it like that. Of course we didn’t. We spent a long time making it look authentic. My ultimate achievement is when I’m doing a biopic and the relative of the character comes to set and cries, saying something like, ‘Oh my God, this looks just like my father’s house. I can’t believe you made it look like this.’ I like tears if they’re positive. I don’t really want crying if I did it wrong!” Every once in a blue moon, Baseman notices something that’s too late to fix

Set decoration of “Trial of the Chicago 7” Photo courtesy of Andrew Baseman

Summer 2020

imperfect, I could afford them because most people didn’t want them,” he says. “I realized that I preferred the imperfect to the perfect ones because they had an additional something, so a broken teapot with a metal handle is to me more interesting than the perfect one with just a normal handle.” Baseman now has the largest collection of make-do antiques in the world, rotating 600 items for display in his home. “It just really took off. I started to write about them and study them. It’s grown into an obsession.” When Baseman arrived at Berkshire, he was nervous about playing sports, something he says would have been “a disaster.” Full of ingenuity, he asked his teachers if stagecraft (constructing scenery) could fill his sports requirement, and thus began four years of building and designing sets, costumes, and posters for drama productions at the School. Hungry for knowledge and experience, he also took every art class available, began directing plays, and he became president of the Drama Club. At graduation, he was awarded The Berkshire Dramatics Cup, The Margaret V. Beattie Memorial Prize for Excellence in Art, and The John E. Rovensky Memorial Prize for Excellence in Independent Study. “Without even knowing it, I was training to become a theater designer,” Baseman says, who earned his bachelor’s degree in set and costume design from Carnegie Mellon University and began his career as an assistant set designer on Broadway. “Berkshire really had a lasting impact on me. I had a real sense of pride being at that school. I loved the history of it. I loved the setting of it. I loved the community.” Long before Hollywood beckoned, Baseman’s first breakthrough came during his junior year, when he had the temerity to approach the acclaimed Berkshire Theater Festival about designing posters for its upcoming

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WHEN ALL THE ELEMENTS COME TOGETHER One such challenge was “Crazy Rich Asians.” Baseman received the call to join the movie just five weeks before shooting began, leaving him half the time normally allotted. The film is a romantic comedy, based on the bestseller of the same name, that follows a Chinese American professor who travels to meet her boyfriend’s family and discovers they are among the richest families in Singapore. The film was praised for being the first modern Hollywood film with an entirely Asian cast. “I jumped into it, and everything was foreign to me: the language, the money,” he says. “I work off of scale drawings, and the scale was metric, not inches. I was working with people I had never worked with before. It was mind-boggling.” Because filming was near the equator, Baseman also had to contend with 100% humidity. “Many of the crew members and I had sunstroke,” he says. Still, Baseman forged ahead. “I put my blinders on and did it, and it was

probably the most amazing experience in my work I’ve ever done,” he says. “We knew we were doing something important. Again, we had a story to tell about the culture, which was not well represented [on screen].” Baseman and his team had a relatively small budget—“the word ‘rich’ is in the title of the movie, so you can’t cheat”— yet they managed to decorate the sets with ornate, opulent furnishings and lush, beautiful flowers and plants. To decorate the main character’s ancestral home in Singapore, he got a quick education on the Peranakan design style. “It’s a very specific style of decor and color palette that is a mash-up of Chinese, Malaysian, and English, and I had never heard of it before,” he says. “I had just weeks to not only learn about it but find it and then put it all together. It turned out that I loved the color palette, I loved the style, and it was right up my alley.” The film received widespread acclaim when it was released in 2018—and so did Baseman’s work. “The response was just incredible, and I was so thrilled that

after all that hard work, not only was it a good movie, but you saw everything [in the sets],” he says. “That made me feel really great. The cinematography and costumes were beautiful. It’s so rare that all the elements come together.” The best part of his job, Baseman says, is transporting audiences to a new time and place, and introducing audiences to unfamiliar characters. And he himself loves to be transported by the silver screen. The latest movie to do that for him was “Roma,” Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón’s story of the life of a live-in housekeeper in the early 1970s who works for a middle-class family in Mexico City. “I had been to Mexico a couple of times, but I certainly had never seen interiors like that or gotten to know those characters. Everything in that film came together to become this world that I’d never experienced before. I hope I can do something like that for audience members the way ‘Roma’ did it for me.” andrewbaseman.com

Baseman at Newel Gallery Photo by Joanna Chattman

season. His offer was declined, but he was asked to become an apprentice. Baseman accepted, and the early connections he made there were instrumental to his later success. It was there he met production designer Bill Groom, who called on Baseman years later, after he had pivoted from Broadway, to join him as the assistant set decorator on what would become Baseman’s first film, “Rocket Gibraltar,” starring Burt Lancaster. “I was so green,” he says, of working

on the film. “I had never worked on a movie set, and I didn’t even know the terminology.” He has learned a lot since then. “I turned down work very early on because I didn’t think I could handle it. I didn’t really know where to find the things [the set would need]. I don’t turn down work now unless I just have too many projects, but not because I don’t think I can handle the job. At this point, I love doing big period movies because those are hard to do, but it’s a challenge and I really enjoy it.”

In 2018, Baseman won an Art Directors Guild Award and was nominated for a Critics’ Choice Award for his work on the film “Crazy Rich Asians,” directed by Jon M. Chu. Photo courtesy of Andrew Baseman

Summer 2020

The

CAMERAS LIKED ME Dorinda Cinkala Medley ’83 is featured on “The Real Housewives of New York City.”

Last year, Dorinda Cinkala Medley was touring an open market in Dubai when residents began approaching her saying “I can’t believe it’s you.” Medley, who is featured on the reality TV show “The Real Housewives of New York City,” couldn’t believe she was being recognized. “The most amazing thing about the ‘Housewives’ franchise is the incredible reach it has,” Medley says. “I find the whole experience fascinating—reality shows have this powerful message which can be both positive and negative. When I’m filming I forget that this is going to be broadcast all over the world. The bond is that people are people, and we are all going through the same stuff everywhere.” “RHONY,” as it is coined, is in its 12th year on the Bravo TV network and follows the personal and professional lives of a group of women living in New York City. Medley, who is embarking on her

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sixth season, has an Instagram following of over 900,000. Her fans have deeply connected with her vivacious, funny, tellit-like-it-is personality; her off-the-cuff one-liners, termed “Dorinda-isms;” and her ’80s-themed aerobics classes, also with their own name: “Dooorobics.” Medley graduated from Franklin & Marshall College in 1986, worked for Liz Claiborne, and then relocated to London with her first husband. In London, she started DCL Cashmere and counted Princess Diana and Joan Collins among her clients. After her divorce, she and her daughter, Hannah, moved back to Manhattan. In 2005, she met and married Dr. Richard Medley, who tragically passed away in 2011. Medley was reeling from the loss when “RHONY” cast member and friend Ramona Singer suggested that she join the show. “Ramona came to me and said, ‘Why don’t you try it for a year? It’s

a great distraction, and I think it’d be good for you,’” Medley recalls. “I went on the show, and the cameras liked me, and I liked the cameras. So off to the races we went.” During her first season in 2015, Medley was honest with the audience about her grief. Medley told the magazine Saratoga Living: “One of the most powerful moments for me after the first season was when I was at a fruit stand in front of my building, and this woman walked up to me and said, ‘Can I just say how powerful it is that you spoke about Richard and his passing, and that you spoke about becoming a widow?’” Each season requires months of intense filming. While cameras don’t follow Medley 24 hours a day, she is required to film scenes several times each day, and she simply allows the camera crew and producers to

Photo courtesy of Dorinda Medley

By Megan Tady

Summer 2020

“Each season is a different animal. It’s a pretty realistic look at me in my life. What you see is what you get.”

showcase both the glamour and the everydayness of her life. “They literally just pick you up in your life,” she says. “I know it sounds crazy, but it works. If you try to create a storyline or try to push anything, it never ends up how you think it’s going to.” Viewers are glued to “RHONY” for the drama that unfolds—gaffes, intense discussions, and emotional outbursts. “Our show in particular is very much based on resolving, getting things out in the open, being real and saying it the way it is, and having people take accountability,” she says. Medley adds that she isn’t allowed to retract anything caught on camera. “You sign that privilege away! Once you’re mic’d, you’re mic’d.” At the same time, Medley says the audience is drawn to moments that portray normal life. “People love to watch us pack for trips,” she says. “I think it brings comfort to let people see that we’re all just doing the same stuff, dealing with the same problems, handling the same issues, whatever it may be: death, divorce, aging, dating, finance, and motherhood.” On and off camera, Medley is also known for her many philanthropic endeavors to benefit causes near and dear to her heart, including Lalela Project, Ronald McDonald House, Ali Forney Center, Gabrielle’s Angel Foundation, and many others. Medley, who grew up in Great Barrington, Mass., says her penchant

for outrageous one-liners comes from her mother, who always “said whatever needed to be said.” As one of four children in a large and diverse family— Italian, Catholic, and Polish—she needed to vie for attention. “I think I’m a comic by nature,” she shares. “There was always a lot of banter and stories being told, usually over a lasagna, and you weren’t noticed unless you had a colorful story to tell, because there were so many of us.” It was Medley’s mother who insisted that she and her siblings attend Berkshire School. “My mother had a vision for us,” she recalls. “I grew up locally, my dad was a telephone man and my mother was a bookkeeper for my grandfather. They didn’t have the opportunities that they wanted to give us through education, exposure, and athletics. Berkshire School was pivotal in changing my mindset. It made me realize that there was more than Great Barrington, and that the opportunities were endless.” As a day student, Medley says she was actively involved in athletics and extracurricular activities. “It really kept us out of trouble because we were just so athletic and engaged, and we were basically exhausted. If we weren’t doing academics, we were doing athletics, if not athletics, student council. All that was left was sleep.” One of Medley’s favorite Berkshire memories is of students and faculty

members dining together. “I felt like it was an extended family and everyone was rooting for each other to be the best we could in the world,” she said. “It really set a tone.” Medley is often back in her old stomping grounds. Her second home in the Berkshires called Blue Stone Manor is a 1902 Tudor-style cottage with seven bedrooms. The house, which was a wedding present from her late husband, has a rich familial history: her great-grandfather and grandfather were masons who helped build it. Medley often daydreamed about one day owning the home with its expansive 18 acres. “The Berkshires are a very special place,” she said. “When I get there, it’s a relief and a release from all of the worries that I have when I’m in New York. I’m with my family. I relax, read, cook, take walks, and get back to nature. It’s a very spiritual retreat for me. It’s where my heart and my parents are, it’s home.” As for the upcoming season of “RHONY,” Medley doesn’t have any predictions. “Each season is a different animal,” she says. But fans near and far can expect Medley to be her tried-andtrue self. “It’s a pretty realistic look at me in my life,” she says. “What you see is what you get.” bravotv.com/people/ dorinda-medley

Medley in her living room at Blue Stone Manor, her second home in the Berkshires Photo by Mick Hales, www.mickhales.com

Berkshire Bulletin

Summer 2020

MAKING CHANGE on Stage Q&A with Actor Damian Walker-Edwards ’94 By Kevin Soja | Photos courtesy of Damian Walker-Edwards

Wonka.” I was able to show that Black people like “Star Wars,” too. We like to watch “Ghostbusters” and all of these kinds of things. We’re just normal people. What is it like to present your own work in your comedy shows? It’s great because I have more control. In acting, there’s a lot of uncertainty. And when I am able to create my own project, I create my certainty, to a certain extent. I can also express things that I’m going through personally and put it in the writing. I really love having the freedom to share what I feel about the world. At the same time, I’m a flawed person. I make my mistakes, but people are aware of that as I’m talking, and I think they relate to the imperfections, too. It’s refreshing.

Walker-Edwards played security guard William in “Lobby Hero,” a play that details racial injustice in the court systems.

With a strong, deep voice and an appreciation for humor, Damian WalkerEdwards connects easily with people on the stage—whether he’s performing in his one-man comedy shows or acting in a play. In 2018, Walker-Edwards performed in “Hands Up,” a series of seven monologues showcasing seven different Black experiences with police brutality in the wake of the 2014 police shootings of Michael Brown Jr., and John Crawford III. He is currently starring in an independent film based on the murder of Corey Jones, a young Black American man from Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., who was shot and killed by a plainclothes police officer while waiting for a tow truck. Walker-Edwards is using art and his love of acting to make the world a better place, one audience member at a time.

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What inspired you to be an actor? When I was in “Our Town” [at Berkshire], I delivered a big monologue at the end of the play that summed up the culture of towns—and that no matter black or white, or if you were from a different country or a different state, we all have similar stories. That was my first real, serious, dramatic role, and I realized that I can connect to the crowd, tell a story, and present certain issues that people may overlook. That was a powerful moment for me. I realized this is what I want to do. Who are your favorite actors? Denzel Washington. I love seeing a Black actor who’s popular because it’s something that I could connect to as a Black person. It’s amazing to me how interesting and dynamic he is as an actor. Seeing Black people on television or in a cartoon growing up was also

How did your Berkshire experience impact you? Diversity. Thanks to the loving support and guidance of my mother, Lola Edwards, I went there, and I’m meeting people that listen to the Grateful Dead. I don’t even know what that is. I’m like, I’m not listening to that. I’m a rap guy. Just being openminded and learning about other people and having differences of opinion and working through that. And, it was the first place where I did serious acting. I

“I realized that I can connect to the crowd, tell a story, and present certain issues that people may overlook.” wrote my first play at Berkshire: a oneact titled “Purgatory” that I performed. I was able to try a lot of things, and Berkshire gave me that space to do it. What is your dream role? “Black Panther Two.” I know I’m supposed to say Shakespeare or something, but I want to be in a superhero movie! facebook.com/ DamianWalkerEdwards

really important to me. As a kid, all my superheroes were white characters— Batman, Superman, and so on. So it was wild to me that the “Black Panther” movie was such a massive success, with a Black superhero. What was your experience acting in the play “Hands Up?” That was a great play, and it is definitely important because of the serious issues going on now, as far as police brutality and people understanding the Black experience and wanting to have unity. I think that with these monologues, I’m able to address the injustices that have been done to Black people. And one thing that I liked about my particular role was there’s a lot of comedy in it. A lot of light parts. I talked about frustration and brutality, but my character also talked about liking “Star Wars” and “Willy

Walker-Edwards, who played the character Amen, and the cast of “Hands Up”

Summer 2020

“The absolute best days in the world are when I’m in the field shooting. I live for that. I love watching it all come to life.”

HER ELEMENT In

Producer and director Jennifer Stafford ’09 tells athletes’ untold stories. By Megan Tady

Stafford and her crew prepare to film ice hockey star Hilary Knight on a pond in Idaho.

Jennifer Stafford, who directs and produces sports documentaries for Red Bull Media House, was in search of a frozen pond. She wanted it to look remote and arctic, the surroundings formidable, yet the ice needed to be safe enough to hold women’s ice hockey star Hilary Knight. After searching in vain for the ideal location in Western Canada, Stafford and her small team opted for a pond in Idaho, where they filmed Knight skating alone, taking practice shots into a net, her breath shooting out in icy plumes. The sequence serves as the opener for Stafford’s film, “Change of Pace—Hilary Knight’s Story,” which highlights Knight’s efforts to unite the two North American women’s ice hockey leagues and to better the conditions and compensation for female hockey players. Knight, who won an Olympic gold medal with the U.S. Women’s National Team in 2019, is one of women’s hockey’s most visible and outspoken players. When Stafford heard Knight’s story (Knight is a Red Bull-sponsored athlete), she knew she wanted to tell it, and she envisioned a scene of Knight skating alone. “I wanted Hilary on an open ice rink completely by herself because she has the weight of the world on her shoulders, and she’s carrying women’s hockey a lot of the time by herself,” Stafford says. “She’s saying things that a lot of people don’t want her to say.” Red Bull Media House, on the other hand, wasn’t sure they wanted to run with the story, and Stafford’s insistence sparked an internal conversation about transcending sports marketing. “This

was a separation from traditional Red Bull storytelling,” Stafford says, who has a B.A. in broadcast journalism from Emerson College. “We’re not an objective media source. We’re marketers. We have an athlete list, and our job is to make branded content with them. There was a large discussion around, ‘As a brand, do we have permission to tell this story?’ And we had to tell it with integrity and objectivity.” Stafford received the green light to move forward, and after its release on Red Bull’s Media Network, the short film was picked up by “Sports Illustrated” and the Associated Press. The film was also a feather in Stafford’s cap, since she has only been producing and directing at Red Bull Media House since 2018, where she works in Santa Monica, Calif. Prior to joining Red Bull, Stafford was the digital producer intern for the New England Sports Network, reporting on the fans and events supporting the Boston Red Sox, Celtics, and Bruins. She also reported on a Red Bull Cliff Diving event, which marked her first exposure to the brand’s experiential marketing. Stafford then joined Red Bull in 2013 immediately after college, paying her dues in positions that didn’t sing to her. “I had no desire to do public relations, but I knew that I was getting my foot in the door,” she says of her first post at Red Bull Media House. “I would say that my career path has been more of a game of Chutes and Ladders versus an upward trajectory where you march along and get a promotion every year and a half.” Red Bull Media House produces

Stafford in Santa Monica, Calif. Photo by Benjamin Askinas

branded content that relates to a roster of 140 sponsored athletes in the United States (and dozens more globally), and as a producer and director, Stafford had to quickly learn how to hold her own in highly competitive pitch meetings. “The story that you bring to the table has to be compelling,” Stafford says, who is the only female director on the production team of nearly 40 staff members. “As a young producer and director who doesn’t have the experience other people have, what can I bring to the table that’s unique? As I went through the list of stories that we were telling, I noticed that almost none of them included, on an emotional level, storytelling around our female athletes.” That realization hit close to home for Stafford, who spent her childhood

Photo courtesy of Jennifer Stafford

Berkshire Bulletin

Summer 2020

Photo by Benjamin Askinas

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and teenage years playing sports. At Berkshire, she played girls JV ice hockey, captained the girls varsity soccer team, and competed with the track and field team, setting Berkshire’s school pole vault record in 2009 (which still stands today). She also won three gold medals (out of three events) in the 1999 Junior Olympics for Karate, which she said sparked her passion for competition. “As a little girl, I would always look to other female athletes for inspiration because you have to see it to believe you can actually be it,” she says. “Whenever I can put a female athlete in the spotlight, I do. I took an opportunity [at Red Bull] that no one was capitalizing on, and it has become my niche.” Since June of 2018, Stafford has produced and directed four documentaries on a wide range of high-profile yet often underrepresented female athletes, including flat-track racer Shayna Texter, WNBA MVP Breanna Stewart, and barrel-racing champion Jackie Ganter. “The projects I find the most fulfilling are when I can figure out what makes an athlete tick,” Stafford says. “What are the nuances behind them, and what makes them operate at the highest level? I want to start to understand someone on an emotional and human level. That’s what makes a good story.” Long before filming begins, Stafford meticulously plans each shoot, scouts locations, creates a script and storyboard, and conducts pre-interviews. Rarely does filming happen in Santa Monica, so Stafford and her team usually travel to film their subjects, which is less glamorous than it sounds. Her 15-hour days often begin at 4 a.m. to capture early morning light. “Half the time you’re freezing or you’re hot,” she says. “You’re lifting heavy camera equipment. You’re not dolled up. It’s hard work, and it’s long work.”

“Whenever I can put a female athlete in the spotlight, I do.” Stafford directs Red Bull Media House’s film “Change of Pace,” about Knight’s fight for equality in women’s ice hockey. Photo courtesy of Jennifer Stafford

Summer 2020

Ms. Piatelli’s “10 Behaviors” card, which Stafford still carries in her wallet

Stafford interviews fellow Bear Jillian Saulnier ’11 about Knight’s impact on women’s ice hockey. Saulnier won a silver medal with Team Canada in the 2018 Olympics. Photo courtesy of Jennifer Stafford

“The projects I find most fulfilling are when I can figure out what makes an athlete tick ... that’s what makes a good story.”

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Still, Stafford contends, “The absolute best days in the world are when I’m in the field shooting. I live for that. I love watching it all come to life. All of the hard work that everybody has put into it starts to pay off, and I get the beautiful shots that I’ve been visualizing in my head for six months, or something totally unexpected works out.” Despite months of planning, there are untold variables that Stafford can’t predict, like the weather or an athlete’s performance. She has to be nimble and flexible, willing to “crumple up my shot list and throw it over my shoulder.” To tell the story about flat-track racer Shayna Texter, Stafford and her crew filmed three of her races, always unsure of the outcome. Flat-track racing is also known as dirt-track racing on a motorcycle, and in one of the races, Texter lost by a slight margin, which

became the opening of the film. “She’s standing on the podium reeling with anger,” Stafford says. “You can see it all over her face, that competitive spirit. You can’t script that. When you get the essence of someone like that when they’re in their element, it is just a beautiful thing.” Stafford says her directing style is still evolving, describing it as a “blend between a cinema verité, raw, fly-onthe-wall-style of filming and more dream-like, ethereal scenes that put [the viewer] in the flow state of mind of an athlete when they’re in their element.” As a director able to make her subjects comfortable or instill confidence in her team during a grueling shoot, she says she often draws on the traits that were instilled in her at Berkshire. To this day, she still carries in her wallet Ms. [Jane] Piatelli’s card listing “10 behaviors to

live by,” which were introduced to the community by her husband, the late Larry Piatelli, who was appointed Berkshire’s head of school in 2003 before his untimely passing in October of that year. “The behaviors and traits listed on that card make a good director,” Stafford says. “It’s all the soft skills and small things that make such a difference to somebody, like making eye contact or saying, ‘Good morning’ or ‘please and thank you.’ Having integrity, being your authentic self—that’s the stuff Berkshire instilled in me that has had such a profound impact on my life and helps me connect with people.” The Berkshire network has also been invaluable. When Stafford was looking for other female hockey players to interview for her film about Hilary Knight, it was by coincidence that Stafford’s producer suggested fellow Bear Jillian Saulnier ’11. “I’m looking at this piece of paper, and I’m like, ‘Jill Saulnier? No way.’” Of her trip to Canada to interview Saulnier, Stafford says, “It was a mini reunion. Before I even asked questions, we immediately started talking about Berkshire days. It was really wonderful to have it come full circle.”

Still image of “The Storm,” Stafford’s film about WNBA MVP Breanna Stewart

How’d you get that shot? “THE STORM”

With over one million views on YouTube, this documentary tells the story of the rise of WNBA MVP Breanna Stewart, who was also one of the first players to share her experience of sexual abuse. Throughout the film, Stewart is determinedly playing basketball in the rain. To get the shot, Stafford says: “The rain was a risk. I told everyone, ‘We’re bringing in 30-foot poles that spray freezing cold water at night, and it’s going to be 50 degrees.’ People were skeptical. The rain symbolized Breanna’s team, the Seattle Storm, but also that she’s come through her own storm. She’s gone through a lot in the WNBA fighting for equality and being a leader in the #MeToo movement. We put the camera on the ground and filmed upwards so that she was in a dominant and fierce position, where she had power and control. Whenever I work with a professional athlete of Stewart’s caliber, she’s got an entire team monitoring her down to the second. We have to be respectful of her time. And we were putting rain on the slippery plastic ground, so we had to make sure she didn’t get injured. As a director, I was right next to her in the rain guiding her through the entire thing. If I’m wet and you’re wet, then it’s not as bad as you just standing there by yourself. Everybody was in great spirits. The energy was so high because it looked so beautiful, and we captured it on film.”

jenstafford.com

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And,

SCENE!

Emmy-Award-Winning director Tucker Walsh ’08 reevaluates his purpose. A still from Walsh’s film “Water is Life” about the people of Thailand who rely on the waters of the Khao Laem River. View the film at NationalGeographic.com.

By Lucia Mulder

Tucker Walsh has been chasing stories for the better part of the last decade. His work as a commercial and documentary director brought him to locations across the globe and earned him an Emmy Award in 2019. It also left him well poised to tell what could be the most interesting story yet: his own. In May 2018, Walsh found himself at

Walsh on Peaks Island off the coast of Portland, Maine

Berkshire Bulletin

a pivotal point in his career. He was collaborating with m ss ng p eces, a toptier production company that originally hired him right after his graduation from Corcoran School of the Arts and Design in 2012. He was living in Los Angeles, taking on bigger and bigger projects, traveling the world living the “L.A. dream,” and meeting and working with icons like Lionel Messi, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton. “That time was totally surreal,” Walsh says. “I just put my head in the sand and worked nonstop.” Walsh’s dedication to his work earned him a great deal of professional success. He and his team at m ss ng p eces had recently produced “Prescribed to Death,” a film promoting opioid awareness for the National Safety Council that was one of the advertising world’s most decorated projects in 2018, winning over 80 industry awards. It was at this point, amid the hustle and bustle, the crazy long days, and the head-spinning travel, that Walsh made a decision to irrevocably alter the trajectory of his career right while it was careening toward its very height.

AN ASPIRING PHOTOJOURNALIST It all started with a gift Walsh received on his 13th birthday: a small Canon Rebel film camera that he brought along with him on a community service trip to Kenya. His family believed in the power of travel to help people understand the perspectives of others. Armed with this foundation and a brand new medium through which to see things, it didn’t take long before he was hooked. “I became obsessive about photography during that trip,” Walsh says. Walsh’s newfound hobby was a natural fit for a boy with a keen interest in the world around him. The events of September 11, 2001, turned Walsh into a self-described “news and politics fanatic” at the age of just 11. “I would go home after school and all my friends would be playing video games,” he explains,

“while I would watch Anderson Cooper on CNN.” Walsh arrived at Berkshire with a deep love of photography and developed his skills even further during his time under the Mountain. He pursued an independent study in photography with his advisor, Paul Banevicius, and took as many photo classes as Berkshire could offer. He also became involved with the school newspaper, The Green & Gray. “Mr. [James] Harris, who was the advisor for The Green & Gray, was really awesome and inspiring and taught me a lot about newspaper journalism,” Walsh says. As a first-year photojournalism major in 2008 at the Corcoran School in Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital became his classroom. “I would ride my bike past the White House every single day to go to class;

Capturing the view from the top of Mt. Everett at sunrise while a student at Berkshire

it was the perfect place for an aspiring photojournalist,” Walsh says. “There were all these incredible opportunities to photograph history in the making.” Like the night Barack Obama won the presidency, for example. “Everybody

stormed the White House,” Walsh recalls. “It was like this party that lasted until 4:00 in the morning. I was shooting so many photographs. I really felt like I was at the center of the universe.” One of the images he captured that night would win first place in the FOTOBAMA International Photography contest. The photograph, along with another of Walsh’s that was selected as a finalist, was exhibited at the Newseum Museum in Washington, D.C. in 2009. While at the Corcoran, Walsh cultivated his storytelling eye with internships at The Washington Post and NPR, where he covered topics including the government shutdown and the recession. He was entering the field just as the new “multimedia” format hit the internet. News organizations were using video that consisted of powerful photographs combined with audio to Summer 2020

Election Night, 2008. This photo of Walsh’s won first place in the FOTOBAMA International Photography contest and was exhibited at the Newseum Museum in Washington, D.C. in 2009.

A viewer connecting with “Treatment Box,” Walsh’s Emmy-winning film

“Everybody stormed the White House ... I really felt like I was at the center of the universe.” make stories come alive, and Walsh’s skill exploded in parallel. “At such a young age and with very little experience, it was an incredible opportunity to be able to make content that was being seen by thousands and thousands of people,” he says.

A COURAGEOUS FILM From there, Walsh’s career took off. “I worked really hard, and I tried to hone my talents,” Walsh says. “But another part of it was pure luck and timing and the universe just working in my favor.” 46

Berkshire Bulletin

By age 28, Walsh was accustomed to the stress and responsibility that goes along with directing a multimilliondollar project, but the novelty and the adrenaline had already worn off. It was during this time that The Truth Initiative, the country’s largest nonprofit public health organization, reached out to m ss ng p eces about creating a film to raise awareness about opioid addiction. The idea was to film a “live detox,” showing the harrowing physical effects a person must endure as the body recovers from opioids. Once they filmed a subject going through the detoxification process (while highly trained doctors administered care), they would screen the film outdoors in New York City in such a way as to suggest that viewers were actually looking at a real, live person inside a self-contained room in the middle of the city. The challenge for Walsh as the director, and the team at m ss ng p eces, was to create this 3D illusion and to make the experience as life-like as

possible to evoke the strongest effect. In doing so most authentically, they needed to know and understand their subject, a 27-year-old woman named Rebekkah, who had the courage to make her fourday detox public to help save lives. Rebekkah broke her ankle in a championship cheerleading competition when she was 13 and was prescribed an opioid for pain management. A year later when her parents were going through a difficult divorce, she continued to take the opioids as a way to numb the emotional pain from their separation. From then on, the addiction was nearly impossible to stop on her own. Walsh, who was feeling “like a complete zombie” from intense burnout and depression, identified with Rebekkah immediately, recognizing in himself a similar addiction that he pursued to the detriment of his own well-being. Walsh’s vice, however, was his work. The resulting project that grew from their mutual respect and friendship was the incredibly powerful film, “Treatment

Box,” which won the Emmy Award for Outstanding Special Class in 2019. “It felt like one of those projects where the whole team was guided by angels the entire way,” said Walsh of this tremendous accomplishment. Sharing the Emmy with Rebekkah, who has been sober since May of 2018, was by far the best part for Walsh.

QUARTER-LIFE CRISIS The experience also had one major unintended consequence: Walsh fell into a self-described “quarter-life crisis.” Getting to know Rebekkah was like a “big, soul-stirring wake-up call that began a year-and-a-half-long odyssey to rethink my entire life and to reflect and regroup,” he said. That odyssey began when Walsh fully resigned from his job and moved from Los Angeles to Friendship Island, a remote, off-the-grid island without roads 90 minutes north of Portland, Maine. He had recently separated from his partner of over a decade and deleted all of his social media accounts. And so he began what he describes as “a grueling and life-altering experience,” committed to doing the emotional work that goes along with the kind of rebirth he was after. Walsh fasted

Walsh with Rebekkah and Ari Kuschnir, founder of m ss ng p eces, on Emmy night

for four days while camping solo in the remote desert during a “vision quest;” he spent over 33 days in silence at meditation retreats; and he faced his own grief and many old wounds head-on along the way. While Walsh isn’t positive about what’s next for him professionally, he’s considering the stories he’d still like to tell. This summer he will apprentice at an electricity-free ecovillage called the Possibility Alliance in rural Maine. With

so much of the world in self-isolation during the current health crisis, Walsh feels that this “less glamorous” work that we do on our own to better ourselves is “possibly some of the most important work for humanity to do at this moment.” “I spent my whole life telling other people’s stories, and I forgot to live my own,” said Walsh. “I don’t regret anything, and I feel like I’m the luckiest person on the planet for the life that I’ve been able to live. But I’m starting to realize that maybe it’s all been practice for the most important story of my life, which is my own.” When Walsh recalls his work as a director thus far, it’s Rebekkah’s story he’s most proud of. The doctors who cared for her shared that her detox was one of the least difficult they had ever seen. They theorized that she felt a sense of purpose knowing that her experience would help others. As Walsh describes it, “She felt like her life had meaning again because she had a way to share her story, and it literally made her healthier.” That’s the healing power of storytelling. Chances are it can cure a quarter-life crisis, too. tuckerwalsh.com

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MAKES THEM TICK What

Q&A with Casting Producer Chelsea Resnick ’08 By Lucia Mulder

Hastings on the set of Freeform’s award-winning show “Shadowhunters” Photo courtesy of Matthew Hastings

Chelsea Resnick says she could literally talk to a brick wall. Her outgoing nature is a big asset in her role as casting associate producer for ITV America, the production company responsible for the super popular Netflix show, “Queer Eye,” as well as a host of other reality shows on networks including Bravo, the History Channel, and Discovery. Resnick is currently casting for the History Channel’s hit series “Pawn Stars,” and she shared some of the reasons why her job doesn’t even feel like work. What is your role as a casting producer? Casting is the first step of any production. We are the first point of contact that the talent will have with the production company. For every project, we scout the people that would best fit the network’s vision. We get the word out on social media, and then, [after some initial screening with possible cast members], we’ll do Skype interviews to showcase their personalities to the network.

Berkshire Bulletin

What’s the best part of your job? I love talking to different types of people and getting to know their stories. I get to ask people what makes them tick, to explain their personalities, and to share some weird traits. It ends up being so much fun. I love it. I feel so lucky, I don’t feel like I’m even going to work! What did your career path look like before ITV? The work is all project-based, and projects can be for weeks or months. The longest I’ve been at one company has been a year and a half. I’ve also been on gigs that only lasted a week or two. It makes it hard trying to plan and pay rent. I’ve been at ITV since October, and they would consider themselves to be “permalance,” because they try to keep people on. Being able to save up and be comfortable has taken a lot of the fear out of it. I’ve also been very fortunate to have great mentors in my bosses. It can be a tough business. A lot is expected of you, working 12-hour days, sometimes

for not enough pay. You really have to be passionate about it. What has been your favorite project? I really enjoyed working on “Ink Master,” a tattoo competition show. I interviewed all types of people, including some who had very troubled pasts, and it was eye opening to see how they had made something of themselves from the bad situations they had come from. How did your time at Berkshire impact your career? I do a ton of writing now, and I’d like to shout out to all of my English teachers: A.J. Kohlhepp, Cathy Schieffelin, Barry Fulton, and Ronn Cabaniol. At Berkshire, I learned a lot about the essence of working on a team, giving it your all, and not letting people down. For that, I owe R.G. Meade, Bill Spalding, and Bill Gulotta, for sure. Those lessons have carried me a long way.

STORY TO TELL

Behind-the-scenes with writer, director, and producer Matthew Hastings ’85 by Carol Visnapuu

Matthew Hastings put everything on the line to create his TV show, “Higher Ground” including maxing out all of his credit cards to create a pilot/presentation. It was his last shot to make his dream come true. He will never forget the sweet moment when he received a call from his friend Kevin, who said, “The show is greenlit! Twenty-two episodes!” The series

was inspired by Hastings’ own personal experience of attending Berkshire. In disbelief, sitting in his tiny rentcontrolled apartment in Santa Monica, Calif., he was gobsmacked, saying, “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe this is happening!” With “Higher Ground” as the match-light of his career, Hastings felt anything was possible. Two decades later, Hastings has been

involved with more than a dozen TV shows as a writer, director, or producer, including “Spinning Out” (Netflix), “Shadowhunters” (Freeform), “The Originals” (Netflix), and “Alphas” (Amazon Prime). Currently, Hastings is working on “Handmaid’s Tale,” an Emmy Award winning, dystopian series based on the novel by Margaret Atwood, which

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is streaming its third season on Hulu. Hastings joined the show in its fourth season and is producing with his longtime friend, writer, and Executive Producer Bruce Miller, who created the show. Interestingly, Hastings hired Miller in his first job as a staff writer on “Higher Ground,” and since then they’ve made over 80 hours of television together and counting.

GROWING UP ON THE SET As a young boy, Hastings often accompanied his dad to work—and work was on a TV set. For 50 years, his dad, Don Hastings, played the role of Dr. Bob Hughes on the CBS soap opera, “As the World Turns.” Hastings said this environment highly influenced his life. “I think I was five or six when I was sitting in the chair next to the director in the control room watching my dad on camera,” he recalls. What especially caught Hastings’ attention was watching the director steer scenes, take command, and have a vision all at the same time. “It just blew my mind … so, it has been something I have been drawn to ever since that moment,” Hastings shares. Initially interested in following in his dad’s footsteps, Hastings also wanted to pursue a career in acting. He attended the television and film program at Boston University after graduating from Berkshire School. But some wise fatherly advice changed the trajectory of his career. “My dad said, ‘You should be a writer, because the real creative drive is behind the camera.’” Hastings switched gears and began learning everything he could about the art of screenwriting, a skill that still serves him today.

Berkshire Bulletin

Hastings with cast member and a two-time Olympian in figure skating, Johnny Weir, on the set of Netflix’s show “Spinning Out” Photo courtesy of Matthew Hastings

BEHIND THE CAMERA Hasting has always been fueled by all aspects of the creative process, from show pitches to visual effects to post-production. “I love finding the inception of an original idea, whether it’s completely original or derived from intellectual property, and then developing it, making the show, doing post-production, and then airing it for the audience,” he says. He has also been tapped to step in to help shows that are already in production, but are experiencing problems, whether they be creative or financial. This was the case for the 2019 Netflix series, “Spinning Out”—a show about a figure skater who struggles to balance family, love, and mental health as she pursues her Olympic dream. Hired as the executive producer and director, the challenge for Hastings was addressing a large deficit that would not be easy to make up across 10 episodes. “Desperation is the mother of

invention,” he says. Luckily, with good scripts and actors, the rest was just critical thinking. The project was close to Hastings’ heart, as he was helping to deliver the creator’s first show. “It felt like a flashback for me when I had my first show … so I wanted to help and support this talented, new voice,” he says. Hastings also takes tremendous pride in creating an outstanding show for viewers, and he is often deeply connected to his fan base. He is also conscious of the message his shows deliver, including Freeform’s awardwinning show “Shadowhunters,” a series about a diverse group of people hunting demons, with an underlying message of tolerance, inclusivity, and kindness. “People have come up to me at Comicon and said, ‘I came out to my parents because of your show. Thank you.’” He continues, “The show started important conversations in homes and kids felt that they weren’t alone. Every time I turn the camera on, I’m not thinking about me. I’m thinking about the people who are watching.”

THE CHANGING LANDSCAPE Since Hastings first began his career, the TV and film industry has undergone a seismic shift. Instead of tuning into “whatever is on” cable, more people are streaming content online at any hour, through apps and platforms, or “streamers,” such as Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon—and more are on the horizon. The digitalization of TV has also provided more opportunities than ever for producers, directors, and writers to create content and tell stories. “It’s an exciting time to be in the position that I’m in because never before has there been more opportunity,” he says. “When I threaded the needle, the needle was much thinner … but now I feel like there’s more opportunity than ever for people to create.”

“I’m fortunate that I get to do what I love, and then in my downtime spend time with the people I love.” Hastings on the set of Netflix’s show “The Originals” with his son, Grayson Photo by Kurt Jones

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Hastings at New York Comic Con with fellow Executive Producers Todd Slavkin and Darren Swimmer and the cast of “Shadowhunters” (Below) Hastings with his wife, Tina, and their children Grayson and Cricket June Photo courtesy of Matthew Hastings

“Every time I turn the camera on, I’m not thinking about me. I’m thinking about the people who are watching.” Hastings says streamers have provided artists a platform to tell their stories in the same way that independent films have been produced and distributed. “[Streamers] take chances on artists that they believe in, but who have never created shows before,” he says. “I think that it’s an amazing time for storytellers.” Last spring, as people around the globe went into quarantine in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, many viewers relied on these online platforms for their entertainment. Hastings has a prediction: “I think after this crisis, there will be an explosion of content, because everybody is finally working their way

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through their Netflix queue.” Hastings says the advanced technology of visual effects has also changed the landscape of filmmaking. “It opens up your brain to imagine whatever you want … to really expand on the details that your shooting location doesn’t have,” he says. “The best kinds of visual effects, I think, are the ones that you don’t even notice.”

LASTING CONNECTIONS Hastings, born in New York and raised in New England, splits his time between his homes in Toronto, Canada, and Los Angeles with screenwriter wife, Tina, and their children, Grayson and Cricket June. Together, they enjoy traveling, which includes spending a lot of time in Europe, especially Paris. Hastings laughs, “We travel as a little nomadic circus.” Hastings is hopeful he will be back to France next year, as he recently sold a show to Legendary Entertainment that takes place in Paris. “I’m fortunate that I get to do what I love, and then in my downtime spend time with the people I love,” he says. Hastings also shares his passion and creativity with students. He has given lectures to his alma mater, Boston

University, along with Florida State University and Emerson College. He also taught a course in screenwriting during Berkshire’s Pro Vita Winter Session and hopes to come back to teach another course. “If I can impact even just one or two Berkshire students and see the lights go on, that’s cool, because that’s the next generation of storytellers,” he says. And Hastings’ very first show, his matchstick moment, can be traced back to his time at Berkshire, when he himself was becoming a storyteller. “The very first TV show that I created was loosely based on my experience going to prep school,” he says. Berkshire provided a solid foundation for Hastings and afforded him an opportunity to excel in the arts, which included performances on stage in Allen Theater. There is a deep kinship to the School that can be heard in Hastings’ voice as he shares, “I love that school. My dad still lives in Dutchess County, so every time I go home, I always take the car and take a lap around Berkshire. I’m extremely proud to be an alumnus.” mattmakestvandmovies.com

DANCING Every DAY Q&A with Choreographer randy reyes ’10 By Megan Tady

Using dance to raise eco-sociopolitical issues, randy reyes’ (who prefers the pronoun they/them/their, and to lowercase their name) work has been gaining notoriety. Among other nods, they received a Princess Grace in Choreography Fellowship in 2019, an award dedicated to elevating extraordinary emerging artists in theater, dance, and film to continue the legacy of Princess Grace Kelly. With some performance plans on pause because of the COVID-19 pandemic, reyes will still continue to dance, saying, “If I dance every day, inevitably I’m growing like a plant, and that is really the gift for me, to witness myself growing, shedding, in the process of becoming.” What was your relationship to dance as a young person? I started dancing in the complex context of the Pentecostal church my family attended where I grew up in New Jersey. The intersection of dance, movement, choreography, and spirituality was the stepping stone and is the thread and throughline to what I’m doing now within my choreographic work. I took dance even more seriously at Berkshire, but it wasn’t until undergrad where I designed my own major in dance that I decided that dance was going to be my life.

What grant/fellowship has had the most impact on you? I truly am grateful for every opportunity I have been granted to date and am super excited about having received a Creative Capital Award this year because this grant will allow me to finally begin digging deep into my life vision of launching a school, healing center, queer club space, choreographic research incubator, and land-based initiative called La Escuela de Corporealidad y Artes Sutiles, set to launch in December 2025–2030 in the Bay Area and abroad. What stories do you seek to tell through your choreography? I identify as a queer, Brown, AfroGuatemalan artist who has interrupted Mayan-indigenous ancestry. The stories that I’m interested in sharing are ones that invoke the presence of — Black, Indigenous, Queer, Trans, Artists of Color. And specifically folks who are first-generation and have parents who have emigrated to the U.S., because that’s my reality. The themes I excavate choreographically include: reclaiming my erotic potential, reclaiming pleasure and time, integrating trauma, endurancebased improvisation, and incrementality.

Photo by George Emilio Sanchez

Why is dance important to the health of individuals and communities? I don’t think that movement alone is the solution to the issues of the world, but what it does provide is an aperture into a deep and innate understanding of who we are on a cellular level by taking us to a place where language becomes decentralized and an embodied form of knowing is pushed to the forefront. Choreography and movement are bridges for accessing more shared well being and are portals for rehearsing how to be in better relation with the earth and with one another. How did your Berkshire experience impact you? My teachers Katherine Gurley and Della Schleunes were instrumental in my falling in love with dance. It was during this time at Berkshire where I was coming of age and coming out that dance entered my life. I could not have done it without the support of those teachers, my advisor, and the people in the dance program. My senior thesis performance was unexpectedly beautiful. So many people in the community showed up to watch and support me. I was finally able to meet myself with compassion and be like, “You have been through a lot, dancing has catalyzed and transformed you from the inside out, and these people in the room, my community, who came to witness your growth, have been critical to your development and holistic well being.” randy-reyes.com

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BEHIND the CURTAIN A conversation with Theater Director Jesse Howard by Carol Visnapuu | Photos by Gregory Cherin Photography

When Jesse Howard was appointed theater director in 2010, only a handful of diehard theater students showed up to his first casting call. He quickly realized that if he wanted to build a robust program, he would need to impassion students and engage audiences. Fast forward to today, and he’s done both. Over the last ten years, Howard has staged more than 30 productions in Allen Theater—including “Rent,” “Grease,” “In the Heights,” “Metamorphoses,” “Into the Woods,” and “The Crucible”—with each production setting ever higher standards. Raised by musician parents, Howard spent his formative years onstage at the schools he attended. In fifth grade, he played the title role in the musical “Snoopy,” and after his big solo, the audience went wild—and Howard was hooked. At Berkshire, he hopes to instill that same love of performing in students, introducing them to every aspect of putting on a production, from stage design to sound production to lighting. Howard’s

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caring nature and all-business attitude make him at once a beloved and effective director, and his increasingly ambitious and impressive shows have our community flocking to the theater, time and again. What was the first play and musical you directed at Berkshire?

When I showed up on Day One at Berkshire, there were only six students [in the fall theater program]. I needed to find a play that had six roles. I found the play “Reckless” by Craig Lucas. I remember the students said, “Nobody’s going to come. They’ve never heard of it, Mr. Howard.” So I told them, “We have to do something that is good enough that the people who come the first night tell everybody else to come the second night.” Quality actually trumps cool. We worked really hard, we had a great turn out, and the kids were like, “Whoa! It’s amazing what happens when you worry less about what people will think and just focus on quality!” The first musical I directed was “Little

Shop of Horrors,” which is one of my all-time favorites. It has the man-eating plant and these massive puppets that actually eat people on stage. We were able to attract a group of kids that spanned many different social groups, so it was this explosion of fun that landed in February that year. It created a lot of excitement around the theater program and showed the community that anybody can be in a play at Berkshire. What do you enjoy most about directing students? And what do you find challenging?

I enjoy betting on students and then being proven right. I feel strongly that people are more motivated when they’re setting out to prove somebody right about them rather than trying to prove somebody wrong. I love that feeling when you start to see a student crack through what they thought they could do to what you knew they could do. What I enjoy most is also the most challenging—to see something students

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“I love that feeling when you start to see a student crack through what they thought they could do to what you knew they could do.”

can’t see. We have to keep acting as if that’s where they are going. Even when they say, “I don’t need to work this hard to memorize my lines.” Yes, you do. Because when you get here and we start throwing a microphone on you and we put lights on you, you’re going to forget 30% of everything you know, and we know that. Students can be over confident sometimes or under confident, so you’re just trying to get them all in the same zone. It’s all about caring for students as individuals while also attending to the essential job of building the group into a team. What is one of the most important things your students learn being a part of a production?

Students learn the habits of caring … being on time, getting enough sleep, eating well, being respectful to people, listening, saying thank you, doing the things you say you’re going

to do, keeping your agreements, saying you’re going to get off book and actually learning your lines. We have a job to do here, too. I say to the kids, “We draw our swords together.”

for how we try to value all aspects of the student’s audition.

What makes for a good audition?

On a practical level, I am a big fan of pushing students toward a B.A. program rather than a B.F.A. program. They can always get a master’s degree in some area of acting. They can go to a school that has a really good theater program, but that’s more of a community. What our students fall in love with here about theater is the community and the family and how we try to base it around caring about people. I try to focus on the idea that if students love theater, they should prepare to work in a life of theater and not necessarily to be just an actor. Go work with the costume crew, take a set design class … keep your foot in all different areas of theater.

What makes a good audition is when students let us see who they are and do the best they can with the tools they have. When they don’t try to change who they are to fit what they think we want. Then, they need to trust us to figure out where people fit. And, that can be painful. I’m not joking when I say my least favorite day is when we post the cast list on the call board outside of the green room. Whether the students got the parts they wanted or not, I offer to meet with them to tell them everything we were thinking behind our decision. All casting is made by a group of adults. I don’t go off and twist my mustache in a closet somewhere and make the decisions. We have a rubric

What advice do you offer students who want to pursue a career in theater?

How do you decide on what production hits the stage each year at Berkshire?

The number one thing we’re always looking to do is give the students and ourselves a challenge that’s going to stretch us in a new way. For example, when our students tackled the difficult art of humor and accents in Monty Python’s musical, “Spamalot” or traveled to Salem, Mass., to read an actual court document from the witch trials with featured characters they would be playing in “The Crucible.” We always strive to tackle questions we don’t already know the answers to, so the students are part of a genuine discovery process. We want to do productions that touch on important relevant topics that create an invitation for students of all backgrounds. We want community members of all different identities to see themselves on stage. People need to see

Berkshire Bulletin

A scene from Berkshire’s theater and music production, “Rent”

an actor who looks like them playing a key role, or a storyline that touches their life featured in a big production. By selecting material that represents the population of the school, students feel an invitation to care about the play either as a participant or as an audience member. It is a gift and it must be given to all. This fall marks the 50th anniversary of coeducation. How did this milestone impact this year’s lineup of shows?

Annie Rosenberg, my assistant director, and I take great care to select musicals with strong female characters, whether it be “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” “Metamorphoses,” or “Hairspray.” We were thrilled when we learned we’d be celebrating the 50th anniversary of coeducation at Berkshire because our fall play, “Nickel and Dimed,” was written by a female playwright based on a book by a female author, with strong female characters. It was a great opportunity to highlight women in theater and to offer amazing roles to our female students.

What is the work you are most proud of during your 10 years at Berkshire?

I am most proud of creating a program where every single person is valued. I hear students say that theater is a place where they can be themselves because their background is celebrated here. Students aren’t going to come [to the theater program] if they don’t feel invited. We’ve made a real concerted effort to try to have our productions represent all of the backgrounds of our students and faculty at Berkshire from gender to sexuality to race to ethnicity. For productions, I am most proud of “In the Heights,” as it does such a good job of exposing people who are not from, say, the NYC Latino neighborhood of Washington Heights, to the beauty, struggle, dreams, and life of a community of people whose descendants are from Puerto Rico and Dominican Republic. I think it was eye opening for our community. I really wanted to be a part of that story getting told here. berkshireschool.org/theater

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