Keep an Eye On - Emily Greene by / Laura Brueckner

Emily Greene has been in the Bay Area only a few years, but she’s already made a splash with her striking design work. She hit the ground running in 2008 with an assistant gig at Cal Shakes, and was soon designing for Shotgun Players, Cutting Ball, the Palo Alto Children’s Theatre and Crowded Fire, where she is the resident set designer and a member of the literary committee.

Greene, originally from Birmingham, Alabama, studied directing at the University of Montevallo. “But I started feeling like the part of directing I was good at was the visual,” she says, “and the part I struggled with was working with actors.” Then, during her senior project, the set designer abandoned the show, so Greene designed it herself. She enjoyed the process so much that she rearranged her class schedule to give her another year at the university studying design.

Greene’s set design models are gorgeous, something she attributes to her training at the University of Ohio, where she earned her MFA in set design. “I assisted my professor, Ursula Belden. She was extremely hard core. When you were assisting her, the quality of what you did had to be really good, and it had to be really fast, and you had to be extremely efficient and neat while doing it. So I learned out of sheer fear.”

After graduation, a six-month internship with Broadway set designer David Gallo brought Greene to New York. Gallo runs a busy studio, but never assigned her mundane tasks unrelated to design. “He took the fact that I was there to learn about him seriously,” Greene says. “He took me to all of his meetings, and when he did visits to big scene shops I got to go with him. And I sat with him in tech, so I really got to see how being a working designer at the highest level worked.”

When the internship ended, Greene was ready to leave New York. “I felt like I would drown,” she says. The competition seemed “cutthroat”; she also saw how easy it would be to fall into assisting designers instead of designing. “I thrive in situations where I take a huge leap, where I put myself in a situation that I’m almost not ready for, and I have to catch up. And I’m better in a situation where I’m a bigger fish in a smaller pond, you know? So I wanted to move somewhere where I would be able to make my career.”

In part, Greene considered the Bay Area because of the freezing Ohio winters she’d hated in grad school. “I didn’t want to live somewhere cold again,” she admits. She consulted Theatre Bay Area for a list of theatres and sent out “a whole bunch” of resumes. She decided to omit her New York address so her location wasn’t a factor in hiring. “I just didn’t mention that I didn’t live there.”

Her tactic worked: “The very first call that I got was from [production manager] Jean-Paul [Gressieux] at Cal Shakes,” Greene says. Gressieux was looking for someone to assist set designer Melpomene Katakalos on “Pericles.” Greene replied, “Well, I’m out of town right now, but I’m going to be back in a couple of weeks.” She then quickly set up a few more meetings—and booked a one-way ticket to the Bay Area.

She landed the job, and more huge leaps followed. While working on “Pericles,” Greene met Cal Shakes technical director Dave Nowakowski, whom she married last October. On her next Cal Shakes show, “Much Ado About Nothing,” she assisted Dan Ostling, who couldn’t attend rehearsals, tech, or production meetings. So, on just her second show with the company, Greene says, “I was basically hired to be [Ostling], to speak for the design.” Her success with “Much Ado” led to her own Cal Shakes show, “Titus Andronicus,” in 2011. She’s now looking forward to her next Cal Shakes project: “The Tempest.”

Asked which show she’s found the most challenging, Greene replies, “I feel like all of the shows I do at Crowded Fire are challenging. The scripts are generally challenging. The spaces, particularly the Boxcar [Playhouse], are extremely challenging spaces. And of course the budgets.” For Crowded Fire’s “Forever Never Comes,” she had to make it rain onstage. “That might be my favorite production I’ve done,” Greene says. “One of my favorite things to do is to create different layers of understanding the space for the audience member. For that show, you initially see this beautiful wood floor, like a dance floor. Then you start seeing the grates, and you’re like, ‘why are there grates in the floor?’ And then you see the moss and realize it’s not that pristine in some places. Then when it rains, you understand, ‘Oh, this place gets wet—that’s why it’s like that.’”

For Greene, satisfaction comes from responding to challenges. “I find it extremely exciting, finding creative ways to solve problems when you don’t necessarily have the resources,” she says. “People go into design projects thinking really big, then try to fit it into the constraints of what they have. I don’t think that works at all. What works is to see your limits and build something interesting within that. I think design works much better when it’s totally within our capability.”


Laura Brueckner is the associate editor for Theatre Bay Area. She is also director of new works for Crowded Fire Theater Company, and a doctoral candidate in Theatre at UCSD.