Larry Wild at ABC Studios on Time's Square March 2003

Larry Wild, Designer -- Technical Director Winter - Spring 2008 Theatre 100: Introduction to Theatre via the InterNet Theatre 100: Introduction to the Theatre Theatre 441: Scene Design Courses not offered this term Theatre 241: StageCraft Theatre 445: Lighting

Who I Am...
I am the Production Designer (sets and lights) and staff Technical Director for the Department of Music and Theatre in the School of Fine Arts, at Northern State University in Aberdeen, South Dakota. I hold an MFA in Production Design from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale and have taught and designed at Ohio Northern University (1968-1971) in Ada, Ohio, Wilmington College (1971-1975) in Wilmington, Ohio and Indiana University of Pennsylvania (1976-1978) in Indiana, Pennsylvania. I was born, raised, and lived the first 25 years of my life in southern Illinois. I came to South Dakota in 1979.

I design the sets and lights for the three MainStage production and teach Introduction to Theatre, StageCraft, and Scene and Lighting Design. I am a member of the Northern Boundary Region of USITT, and attended the 2005 national conference in Toronto, ON. I have been active, primarily as lighting designer, with the Aberdeen Community Theatre (or ACT) since its first production: Irving Berlin's Annie Get Your Gun, in July of 1980.

My passion: Lighting...
My interest in theatrical lighting began while I was still in high school. During my junior year (1958-59) I joined the "Little Theatre" and became a member of their lighting committee. That spring we saw the national company's production of My Fair Lady at the Kiel Opera House in St. Louis. This was my first exposure to a Broadway musical and what Jean Rosenthal, the mother of American lighting design, would call the "magic of light."

My senior year I started my professional library with three thin books I saw advertised in Theatre Arts magazine: McCandless' A Method of Lighting the Stage (1958), Rubin and Watson's Theatrical Lighting Practice (1954), and Century Theatre Lighting, the 1960 Century catalogue.

Thirty five years ago St. Louis, a forty minute bus ride from my home town of Belleville, Illinois, was a major stop on the national circuit. Almost every week a new show loaded into the American Theatre. Between 1960 and 1965 I saw productions of Arthur Miller's After the Fall, The Unsinkable Molly Brown with Tammy Grimes, The Best Man, Camelot, Advice and Consent, Once Upon A Mattress with Buster Keaton as the "mute king", Oh Dad, Poor Dad... with Hermione Gingold, Fiorello!, The Tenth Man, Oliver! and The Sound of Music. In those days a second balcony seat for a Saturday matinee of a musical cost $3.50.

At SIU I was hired as a student electrician in Shryock Auditorium. In the fall of 1966 that venue became an IA "bus and truck" house. During the next two years I worked as part of the electrical crew on Half a Six Pence, The Grand Canadian Ballet, Luv, On A Clear Day You Can See Forever, Hello, Dolly!, and The Martha Graham Dance Company. The lighting for three of those shows, Martha Graham, Luv and Hello Dolly! was designed by Jean Rosenthal. As a student I wanted to learn more about the Broadway approach to lighting, but in the 60s, with the exception of a brief chapter in Rubin and Watson's Theatrical Lighting Practic, very little information was available.

In the early 1980s I discovered that the documentation (plots, hook-up charts, focus sheets) for a large number of Rosenthal's designs was archived in the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research on the Madison campus of the University of Wisconsin. I made my first visit in 1986 and have returned four times.

An Interest: Computer programming...
In 1993, after the University placed an AT&T 8086 in my office, I developed an interest in computer programming. I began by writing a couple of short lighting programs in BASIC, later I began coding in C. I have written several small utilities I use in determining grades and two DOS based (non-Windows) lighting software packages: GelFind and LiteCalc.

Family and friends...
Margaret and I have been married since June of 1968 and have three children and two grandchildren. Our first born, Elizabeth, is the Director of the Public Library in Henry, Illinois. Fred, our oldest son, is a press operator at Mid States Printing in Aberdeen and Jerome, the youngest, is a Northern student working on a degree in Computer Graphics. My wife and all three of our children (and daughter-in-law) are active in the theatre.