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Miller and Karczewski are designing sets and lights (respectively) for Mercury Theater Chicago’s Spamalot, one of at least four fall shows with design crews that are exclusively femme, nonbinary, or gender nonconforming. (Miller just earned a Jeff nomination for her set for First Folio Theatre’s production of All Childish Things, while Karczewski is nominated for her lighting design for A Chorus Line with Porchlight Music Theatre.) After 25 years in the business, Weber has thoughts.
It falls to University of Michigan-based violence and intimacy designer Black to keep Redtwist’s cast safe while looking like they’re beating the daylights out of each other, sometimes while in chains. Like Weber and Karczewski, Black has been designing for close to a quarter of a century. “There used to be a lot more microaggressions,” she says. “For instance, I was always the ‘female fight choreographer,’ always the title qualified by the fact that I was ‘female,’” she says. “For years, when I walked into a room, I had to prove that I was supposed to be there. Now I can walk into a room and it’s just like, ‘let’s get started.’”
BOTTOM “I’ve breastfed while running light cues, changed diapers while scene changing,” says Weber. “You find a way.” v
