By Audrey Fleming

In 2018, Alan Williamson was welcomed to Collegiate School staff as the technical director and set designer for the theater program. He has completed various projects at Collegiate, including plays and campus renovations in preparation for the 2020 school year.

Williamson was born in Lynchburg, Virginia and attended Lynchburg College, where he majored in theater and minored in religion. Williamson says his passion for theater began when, “I was a freshman in college and saw a sign up for auditions for a play, so I went down and auditioned, and I just stayed with it.”

Williamson began his theater career acting in plays at Lynchburg College because, “Lynchburg had a small theater department, compared to Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), where you can be in technical theater, design, or performance.” Williamson moved into technical theatre and set design once he graduated in 1980.

Before his permanent position working at Collegiate, Williamson was the regular set designer for Collegiate’s plays in the late 90s and early 2000s. He was a professor at VCU for roughly 10 years, where he taught Gabe Yelanjian, who has been the theater production technician at Collegiate since 2019. Williamson was brought to Collegiate by Upper School administrative assistant Julie Miller, whom he had previously worked with in professional theater, and who herself has experience working backstage in Oates and other venues.

Williamson says, “All in all, I’ve probably worked on almost a thousand shows and projects mostly in the Richmond area at TheatreVirginia, Dogwood Dell, Longwood University and VCU, among others.” Williamson’s recent projects have included Stupid Kid at the Firehouse Theatre, Buyer and Cellar at Richmond Triangle Players, and several years of Live Art for SPARC at the Altria Theatre. Additionally, he worked on Shrek, the Musical, Eurydice, and Chicago at Collegiate.

Along with play production, Williamson worked in television in Wilmington, North Carolina, and Lynchburg when he was in college. He says, “I’ve done quite a lot of projection design over the past twelve years or so, as well as teaching it at VCU.  Many of those skills transfer readily to video production, too.”

Wooden classroom divider in the Saunders Family Library. Photo credit: Audrey Fleming.

This summer, Williamson built classroom dividers throughout campus with the help of Yelanjian and Collegiate Help Desk Technician (and former student of Williamson’s) Andy Santalla. These dividers helped provide a safe return to school and the use of new classroom spaces, such as the former Makerspace in the Sharp Academic Commons and the balcony of Oates Theater.

Williamson recently helped put on this fall’s production of Almost, Maine, which turned out to be his favorite production. Williamson says, “I’ve been in theater for a while now, so I have experienced many different aspects of theater. The production of Almost, Maine was something I’d never seen before, and really something no one had seen before.”

Due to COVID-19, a normal production could not happen this fall. Instead of cancelling the production completely, Williamson and the theater arts team took the attitude of “the show must go on” and used this as an opportunity to get creative. Collegiate was very lucky to be one of the only high schools in the country with the ability to put on a play in the COVID-19 era.

Williamson says, logistically, it was a “problem solving opportunity to figure out how to get all of the equipment together and to get it to communicate with each other,” as well as maintaining health guidelines. In order to maintain the health guidelines, there were four cameras spread across the stage facing an actor straight on, and Plexiglass dividers between each actor. The back of the stage was a green screen, which was used to drop backgrounds for each scene. In order to maintain the traditional feel of a play, the backdrops were scans of actual painted sets.

In order to get all of the technology to work together, Williamson says, “We had to buy cameras because we had some old cameras, but they weren’t up to speed enough to be able to communicate with the computers to do the right thing.”

Williamson explained, “There was a monitor in the middle of the stage for the crew to see, and there were also four monitors facing the actors so they could see themselves, so they knew they weren’t partially cut out of the shot.”

Photo credit: Taylor Dabney.

The play was live-streamed and displayed two separate boxes on the viewer’s screen. Each actor was shown within a box, with a backdrop displayed on the green screen behind them. The viewers saw each actor from the point of view of the other actor, as if you were experiencing the dialogue. This created a viewing experience that viewers had likely never seen before.

Williamson said the idea of producing the play in the way that they did was a “group effort.” The team included Williamson, Director of Performing Arts Mike Boyd, director Steve Perigard, students on deck crew, and camera operators. Williamson says, “The team had early group discussions about what we wanted to do, what the director wanted to do, and then how we were going to accomplish that.”

The production of Almost Maine showcased Williamson’s and the rest of the theater team’s ability to overcome obstacles in a creative way. Williamson and the rest of the crew used this situation as an opportunity to experiment with new technology and do things differently, despite the pandemic.