Dusti Rhodes interviewed me (as well as Houston scenic designers Kevin Rigdon and Jodi Bobrovsky) for a recent article in Arts + Culture Texas

Designer Ryan McGettigan leans toward the abstract as well. (Houstonians likely remember his remarkable use of trapdoors for the Classical Theatre Company’s production of Ubu Roi.) McGettigan is the resident scenic designer for Cape Red Theatre in Massachusetts, and has designed sets for theaters all over the United States, including local companies such as Houston Grand Opera, Stages, Main Street Theater and Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music.

His recent design for Stages’ production of The Language Archive featured a file cabinet that seemed to grow up and out of the floor. But the surrealism didn’t end there. “Then it turns into a bakery,” he says and explains how as the scent of bread is sprayed into the audience, the file cabinet drawer fronts flip open and turn into bakery shelves.

“And there’s like three million loaves of bread. That, I love: Like, here’s what you’re looking at the entire time, which is weird in itself. You’re drawn to it because you don’t know everything about it and that’s what’s exciting – That’s what’s exciting about most things: If you know everything about it, why bother? Then, after staring at it for the past hour-and-a-half, it changes in this big way,” explains McGettigan.

When working for Cape Red in 2010, McGettigan designed the set for Eurydice, a play chronicling a mythological Greek woman’s unfortunate journey into the Underworld. For that play, McGettigan strung tiles together to create a structure similar to a beaded curtain, but to the audience, it looked like a solid wall. Once again, McGettigan defied and surprised.

“As [she] descended into the Underworld, it was her slowly going across this curtain and the entire world starts shaking like a dream sequence in a movie where everything becomes wavy,” McGettigan explains.