2025 DENVER GAZETTE TRUE WEST AWARDS: DAY 10

Innovative program gives future theater professionals paid, real-life experience building sets for area plays and musicals

One: Technical theater students need practical, real-world experience before graduating, same as plumbers, electricians and accountants.

Two: The cost of staging live theater has surged across-the-board since the pandemic. Inflation, labor, insurance and materials like lumber and steel have driven up the cost of making theater by 30% or more, according to the New York Times. Adding to the challenge:  A prime chunk of the available skilled labor pool chucked the itinerant freelance life and moved on to more stable employment opportunities after the shutdown. Good help is becoming harder – and more costly – to find.   

Three: Something’s gotta give. And the six students currently enrolled in the kind-of-miraculous DU Theatre Tech Internship Program are giving it. As in, their time, to build sets not only for productions on their own campus but on some of the biggest and best professional stages in the Denver metro area.

In the past 18 months, the DU Pio Techs have built the sets for 22 stage productions ranging from small plays to large musicals for a client list that spans Curious, the Boulder Ensemble Theatre Company, Parker Arts, Local Theater Company and Veritas Productions.

The current class of DU interns spent Tuesday morning taking down the set for Curious’ “Job,” an incendiary new play that closed on Sunday. On Tuesday afternoon, they moved in the set pieces they built back on campus for Curious’ next play, called “Bad Books.”

That one is a co-production with Boulder’s Local Theater Company. When the run at Curious (opening Jan. 10) ends on Feb. 1, they will be back to disassemble the set, transport it to the Dairy Arts Center in Boulder and re-install it there for a second run from Feb. 5-14.

This one-of-a-kind program provides DU students with paid opportunities to work with actual industry professionals in a supportive setting that prepares them for real-life jobs in the real-world entertainment industry.

These students take plans drawn up by the client companies’ professional design teams and build them in the DU construction shop. They get to then experience the challenges of moving the show into a venue, working in lock step with the theater company’s in-house team.

Michael Morgan, Curious’ resident technical director (and the actor who co-starred in “Job”), calls the DU students highly skilled, flexible and adept at problem-solving. “They understand all of the challenges we throw at them, and they are up to every one of them,” Morgan said. “I’ve enjoyed working with them for every show we’ve ever done with them.”

The largest project the scenesters (that’s just a better word for them than “interns”) have taken on to date was last summer’s big build of Parker Arts’ and Veritas’ co-production of “Rock of Ages,” a massive 1980s-era Broadway musical designed by the great Brian Mallgrave. That job was a $30,000 contract for DU Tech, but show producer Nancy Begley says it would have cost her at least 20% more to hire another company to do the build.

“We had Steven and his team on board for both ‘School of Rock’ and ‘Rock of Ages,’ and for both shows, the process was just a total dream,” Begley said. “Communication was clear. Everybody was kind. It’s natural to maybe feel a little bit nervous about getting student help, but they were all so interested and invested in doing it right. They paid such attention to every little detail. We got feedback from the Parker Arts team that ‘Rock of Ages’ was the best set they’ve ever seen on their stage.”

Everybody wins. Especially the students, who are paid “a professional wage,” said Steven McDonald, chair of the University of Denver theater department and the mad genius who came up with the idea to essentially create a professional scene-building company and add it to the university curriculum.

The way DU is set up academically makes it popular for many students to double major. Half of McDonald’s most recent scenester class majored in technical theater, but the swath of degrees includes everything from kinesiology to political science to history.

Recent grad Kate Hebert is both an actor and teaching artist who already has performed for companies including BETC and Athena Arts, but she loved the idea of learning shop skills like welding, McDonald said.

Erin Kubat, a now-graduated theater major, minored in Japanese, math and chemistry – and is also an audio engineer. When Morgan needed time off to drive his kid to college this past fall, he hired Kubat to mind the shop in his absence, based entirely on her performance helping to build and install the set for a provocative Curious play called “Eureka Day.”

“She came in fresh out of that program knowing how to do absolutely everything,” he said. “She’s loaded it in, she’s done lights, she designs, she acts. She was so great at covering for me that everybody was just like, ‘How do we get her back?’ Now she’s on our permanent ‘hire’ list. She’s been amazing – and she came directly out of that program.”

Then there is Aspen McCart, who came out of the DU Tech Internship Program so fully primed for the real world, she was immediately hired into a full-time position as a scenic carpenter at the Arvada Center. It must be said here for emphasis that this … never … happens … for a student right out of college.

“For sure, the reason I am working at the Arvada Center today is 110% because of my work in the DU internship program,” McCart said. “I would not be living the life that I’m living right now without it. I mean, it’s the reason I can pay my rent. More than that, it’s the reason I found my passion. It fundamentally changed my life.”

One show more than any other, she said, and that was last summer’s “Rock of Ages.” “That one gave me so many nitty-gritty new skills,” she said, listing off LED lighting and building a bar that already has since been used in three separate shows.

“I think that is the one that made me feel like, ‘Oh, I really could be a carpenter. I actually could do this for a living,” she said.

Begley was so pleased by the work of McDonald’s team on “Rock of Ages” that she’s crestfallen because now, they are booked out so far in advance, the Pios aren’t available to take her bid on her upcoming production of the Elvis Presley musical “All Shook Up,” running June 26-July 19 at the PACE Center.  

This all started with a 2016 production of “Evita” by the disability-affirmative Phamaly Theatre Company that ended up being staged on the DU campus. McDonald’s students helped with the build, and the idea that the DU Theatre Department could essentially start its own city-wide set-building company started to take root.

But it really took off in 2019, when the staff at Parker Arts approached with a proposal that McDonald’s team build the set for its upcoming production of “The Full Monty.” As always, the set would be conceived and designed by the company’s own creative team. But for the first time, it wanted to outsource the set build to McDonald, who would take their plans and build the set with his students over at DU. An offer to build “Matilda” soon followed.

But then came COVID, and the stoppage in shows put a few local companies that also do this kind of work into hibernation. Before long, McDonald was hooking up with Curious, BETC and others.

McDonald estimates that, to date, about 25 DU students have taken part in the program. In one 12-month period, the scenesters built 22 shows, including 14 plays, two musicals, an opera and a comedy special with Paul Reiser that was taped on campus. McDonald is currently booked well into next year, with a job slate that includes the final three plays of the Curious season. That economic infusion has allowed McDonald to hire two new staff members to manage the program and expand its staffed shop hours from 12 to 32 hours a week.

At Curious, which has been in a very public existential rally to financially survive over the past few seasons, every dollar saved matters. Morgan says this arrangement helps the company’s bottom line in a number of ways.

“If we were building our sets ourselves, we would have to rent a whole new space for a shop,” he said. “We’d have to buy and maintain all the tools. We’d have to have some kind of transportation for all of the set pieces that go back and forth, which means we’d probably have to rent a truck at least twice per show. And then we’d have to staff the shop itself.”

McDonald emphasizes that, to him, the real value of his program is not so much the hard dollars a company might save by hiring his team over another outfit. “What they are getting is a lot more value for their dollar in terms of care and attention to detail.”

Right now, McDonald is up for a big promotion that would remove the word “Associate” from in front of his “Associate Professor” title. (Side note: I can’t fathom how the guy who chairs the Department of Theatre at the University of Denver isn’t already called a full-on professor, but then again, I never made it past adjunct.) Anyway: McDonald has just been put through a thorough and nerve-wracking external review process – with feedback. And the No. 1 comment that came back on the evaluation that followed was this:

“Why aren’t we talking about this internship more?”

I’m here for that.

McDonald should tell those professor reviewer-types to consider McCart’s overall evaluation of the program he created as an invaluable career-building opportunity for students like her.

“I don’t come from a family with a lot of money,” McCart said. “And so, being able to do something that I loved, in the department that I adored, with people that I loved – and getting paid for it? It’s literally a dream come true. If I could have worked in the DU Tech Intern Program for the rest of my life, I would’ve done it.”

Note: The Denver Gazette True West Awards, now in their 25th and final year, began as the Denver Post Ovation Awards in 2001. Denver Gazette Senior Arts Journalist John Moore celebrates the Colorado theater community throughout December by revisiting 30 good stories from the past year without categories or nominations.

Current DU Tech interns

• Ruby Gregorson
• Marleigh Hickey
• Zuri Lutz
• Jack McDonald
• Luke Sewpersaud
• Matthew Stanton

More True West Awards coverage:

• 2025 True West Awards, Day 1: Matt Zambrano

• Day 2: Rattlebrain is tying up ‘Santa’s Big Red Sack’

• Day 3: Mission Possible: Phamaly alumni make national impact

• Day 4: Jeff Campbell invites you to join him on the dark side

• Day 5: Cleo Parker Robinson is flying high at 77

• Day 6: Mirror images: Leslie O’Carroll and Olivia Wilson

• Day 7: Philip Sneed will exit Arvada Center on a high

• Day 8: Ed Reinhardt’s magic stage run ends after 27 years

• Day 9: Costume Designer Nikki Harrison