[music]

Matt Katz: Welcome back to All Of It. I'm Matt Katz, filling in for Alison Stewart. You know the work of Tony-Award winning set designer Beowulf Boritt even if you don't know his name, yet. He is prolific on and off Broadway. You might have seen his sets for Come from Away or the Ohio State Murders or POTUS or Harmony, or Be More Chill. Now, Beowulf wants to leverage his success to help others break into the industry. He co-founded the 1/52 Project, a group that has raised over $200,000 in donations from the theater world to provide grants to up-and-coming theater professionals from underrepresented groups.

One of their past recipients was Stefania Bulbarella, who just last year, made her Broadway debut designing the sets for Jaja's African Hair Braiding. Beowulf and Stefania, join me now to discuss the 1/52 Project, and what it takes to make it as a set designer in the world of New York theater. Hey, guys, welcome to the show.

Beowulf Boritt: Hi.

Stefania Bulbarella: Hi.

Matt Katz: So glad to see you both. I'm curious to dig into this and dig in this project that you've been working on, Beowulf. When did you first realize that set design was a career you were interested in, Beowulf?

Beowulf Borrit: I think I fell in love with the theater in high school, like a lot of people do. I went to college, I went to graduate school, and I started out as a young designer in New York 25 years ago now. It's difficult. It was difficult then, it is difficult now. It's a fun profession, and it doesn't pay very well, but it's a lot of fun, a lot of people want to do it. As I've had a lot of luck. I started thinking, "Is there a way to help the next generation?"

Part of it came out of some of the social movements that came out of the past seven years, the Me Too movement, and some of the reaction to the George Floyd murder. I think it made us all a little more aware of some underrepresented groups who are not getting the chance they ought to get in the world. I started thinking, "Is there a way that I could do something to help?" Within the theater world, I think the theater thinks of itself as very open and liberal, but when I started really looking at it, we're more white-male-dominated than I cared to admit. I'm a straight white boy, I thought, "What can I do about this?"

If you were lucky enough, as I have been, to have a commercially successful show on Broadway, something like Come from Away, which runs for many years, I get a little royalty check every week from that. I thought, if I took one check every year and put it into a fund, if I asked every other designer working on Broadway to do the same thing, we could raise quite a bit of money, and it wouldn't hurt us much. It wouldn't be a huge sacrifice, and that could create a fund that we could use to give grants to young designers. That's where the 1/52 Project comes from. It's this idea that it's a way for people who work in Broadway and help the next generation.

The last thing I'll say about this, I don't actually believe that anybody is owed a career in the theater. It's a difficult career, you've got to work hard, you've got to have a lot of skills to do it, but it shouldn't be harder because you're not a white guy. Looking at some of the statistics, there are clearly some barriers to entry, and that is the hope that 1/52 can at least help. It's not going to reduce those barriers, but give people a little breathing room, is what I always say. Give people a little help along the way.

Matt Katz: Stefania, you were one of the recipients of a grant. Did it help? How did it help?

Stefania Bulbarella: Yes, it absolutely helped, obviously, financial. It was a great financial help. It's hard to make a living in New York, it's expensive and even working in the theatre industry, it does feel hard sometimes. What this grant gave me was a possibility to, as Beowulf said, have some breathing room. I do not have to live month to month trying to pay rent towards the end of the month, now I had a backup. That felt like I could take more design gigs and do less associate gigs, and focus more on my art, and invest on my art.

As a projection designer and video designer, there's so much technology that I need to know in order to be able to work. Computers, NAS, cameras, and this gave me something to upgrade my computer. Not only that, it also gave me the possibility to meet all this wonderful Broadway designers that I've always, always admired that I've been following their work for years and years. Suddenly, I was in the same room speaking to these people that are my idols, that I want to grow up to be like them. I got the grant two years ago, and now this year and last year, I got to share rooms as a designer with these people, and now they're my peers.

Matt Katz: Well, congratulations. That's amazing. Stefania, give me a little sense of your career trajectory before that point. What was your first professional theater job in New York? Did you get the grant shortly after that, or had you been doing this for some time?

Stefania Bulbarella: I graduated from The New School where I did a BFA and dramatic arts. While directing was my major, my minor was projection design. I immediately fell in love and started working as a projection designer while I was in school, doing some shows with friends and colleagues from my network. After that, I started assisting established projection designers and I got to these designers through a mentorship that I did, called the Wingspace Mentorship. I feel mentorship is a very important thing in theater, as in everybody has their own path, and it's great to hear different experiences and stories.

We went into pandemic. Pandemic was very hard. Also being an immigrant, I'm on an O-1 Visa, which is the artist visa, I could not apply to an employment. I started working with theaters. We created virtual theater, and I started working with bigger established theaters that I had not as a lead designer. Once theater resumes, and we're back and running, my first off-Broadway show was at Signature. I did my first off-Broadway show. That was a huge door opening, and that New York Theater Workshop came, and MCC came, and that's Signature again, and that's how I started building until last year that I did my Broadway debut for Jaja's African Hair Braiding as a video designer.

Matt Katz: Wow. You've used this term projection designer, do you mind just explaining what that means to those of us who might be a new word?

Stefania Bulbarella: Totally. To me, it's the video that appears in the set. It's all the mapping of video.

Matt Katz: Got it.

Stefania Bulbarella: If you go see a concert, and you see those LED screens in the back, we do that, but for theater. We help shape the world, we add new characters, we built environments, we bring some information that wants to come through video. There's very different various ways to bring video into theater piece.

Matt Katz: Beowulf, what are some of the biggest challenges that young set designers might face in terms of having a career in New York? It seems that the number of jobs might be just limited by nature of the work.

Beowulf Borrit: It's absolutely true. There are very few jobs available, and there's a lot of people who want to do them. As I say, it's a fun job, so supply and demand is working against you because a lot of people want to do it. There's a huge amount of competition, you have to learn to network, but you have to find a way to survive. You have to be a jack of all trades and do a little bit of everything. That's again, that's what we're trying to do here is to give people a leg up with that.

The moral component of what we're doing is that we want the doors open to everybody equally. I often say to people that my father was a Holocaust survivor. He came to America in the 1950s as an immigrant with a dollar in his pocket, and he lived the American dream. By the time I came along, he had a middle-class life, and my brothers and I were raised very well. I really believe in that American dream ideal and want that for everybody. I want that for Stefania. I want that for everybody. In my tiny little corner of the world, which is the commercial theatre in New York, I'm pushing to try to get some equity there as much as I can.

The flip side of it, well, not flip side, but the other portion of this is, the way that it strengthens the art, in fact, is the more perspectives we get in the room, the more interesting and the more rich the art becomes. If it's just four more guys who look like me doing it, we all have a similar background, we've read the same books, we've come up the same way, the perspective is less broad.

Theater, anytime we make any play, I think people maybe look at it and think someone writes the play, someone directs it, and those two people are telling all the rest of us what to do, but it's a melting pot. It is a room of writers, directors, producers, designers, actors, more people, all of the craftsmen who are helping do it. Everybody's opinions come together into this melting pot, and the director is the one ultimately in charge of it, but all those ideas come together.

At its best, we're creating something that's better than any of us could have done on our own, and we're all sort of putting those things together. The more broad that group of collaborators is, the more interesting the result is going to be. Stefania and I were talking about this earlier, that she grew up in Argentina reading different books than I grew up reading in Memphis, Tennessee. The more we can mix all that together, the more interesting it makes the art and the stronger it makes the art, I think. The more perspectives we show.

I think theater at its best, it opens a window and it lets you see the world through somebody else's eyes, through some character's eyes. The more diverse opinions creating that story, the more interesting it is.

Matt Katz: I'd love to talk a little bit about that art with Stefania, specifically your first Broadway gig with Jaja's African Hair Braiding. The set for that show was very colorful, it was full of life. Each braiding station had its own little charming character. Stefania, tell me how that came to be realized, what you wanted to do in terms of conveying the personalities of some of the characters through that set.

Stefania Bulbarella: Totally. The set was actually made by David Zinn. He's the set designer. I came in as the video designer.

Matt Katz: Got it.

Stefania Bulbarella: Inside this beautiful, incredible hair salon that David designed, I was in charge of creating the video that we would see on two TVs that were on for the whole show on Jaja's African Hair Braiding.

Matt Katz: Oh, got it. Cool.

Stefania Bulbarella: I created all the content from beginning to end of the video that was on these two TVs. What we would see at moments was what these women were seeing while they were getting their hair done. I got to shoot a Nollywood scene and to shoot a commercial, and obviously always accompanying the music of Justin Ellington. It was a very collaborative work.

Matt Katz: Very cool. Beowulf, tell us how people can find out more about the 1/52 Project.

Beowulf Boritt: Yes, well, we have a website. It's spelled out, it's @oneeveryfiftytwo.org, or you can Google 1/52 designer project, and that will probably get you to us as well. There's a lot of information there. As I said, the initial impetus of this was to ask people working commercially on Broadway to donate, but anybody can donate, and we've actually gotten wonderful support from throughout the theater community, not just designers, and we welcome participation from absolutely anybody.

Matt Katz: Beowulf Boritt is a set designer and co-founder of the 1/52 Project, and Stefania Bulbarella is a set designer and was a recipient of one of the grants. Thank you both so much for coming on All Of It.

Beowulf Boritt: Thank you so much. It's really good to meet you.

Matt Katz: You as well.

Stefania Bulbarella: Thank you.

[00:12:58]