Kathryn Sears
New York-based director Andrew Scoville has built a reputation as an in-demand immersive theater expert. His many projects include “Escape the Planet,” a New York Hall of Science commission with astronomer Moiya McTier; and the New York Times Critics’ Pick “The Brobot Johnson Experience.”
He’s also been involved with productions for the New York Comic Con and the National Museum of Math, among others.
The Elmhurst native credits his theater experiences growing up in the west suburbs with sparking his passion.
“My first theater experience was in ‘Odyssey of the Mind,’” Scoville said. “It was a creativity competition for young people. We got together and we were given criteria to either create a certain structure that moved and had to do certain tricks and we would tell a story around the structure that we had created or sometimes we had to delve into the history of a certain civilization.”
He said the competitions involved “mixing academic research, engineering ideas, and creativity.” In addition to creating the stories, all of the students acted in it.
Scoville began working on those projects while attending Sandburg Middle School, and that was when he first realized, “This is something I enjoy doing,” he recalled.
In his last year in middle school, Scoville played the Prince in a production of “Beauty and the Beast,” with Elmhurst Children’s Theatre. “I like to tell people I was the Beast before and after he was the Beast,” Scoville said. “The Beast at that time is still a good friend of mine — Anthony Michael Lopez. He’s a Broadway actor now and in film and on TV. We became good friends doing theater and now we’re both doing it in New York.”
The two of them were both active in theater at York High School.
Scoville was in his first show at York High School, “Grease,” during the summer between his freshman and sophomore years.
“I did every show after that I could,” he reported.
Scoville earned a theater degree from Playwrights Horizons Theater School at New York University. “Though I got into NYU as an actor and that had been my primary experience up until that point, I was pretty certain that I would find myself eventually on the other side of the table, either in production or in directing.”
He became interested in immersive theater, he said, because “it’s a kind of theater that moves around and requires a lot of departments working together to create something where the audience isn’t just seated and watching it. It’s something that they actually move through.”
One of Scoville’s adventurous projects was turning his New York studio apartment into a 30-seat theater.
“I was working with this playwright Colby Day and he had written this piece about a couple who had agreed to let scientists into their home to study them and learn about their relationship and them as people,” Scoville said. The challenge was finding a theater they could turn into an apartment and integrate the seats into the set design. Scoville volunteered his apartment because he figured if he put cushions around, 30 people could easily fit in his place.
“My wife was thrilled about that,” Scoville joked.
Scoville is back in the Chicago area to direct David Byrne’s “Theater of the Mind” at Goodman Theatre, which runs from March 11 to May 31. He previously directed the show at the Denver Center of the Performing Arts.
“I’ve always been drawn to things that are complex and that are not traditional theatrical experiences and ‘Theater of the Mind’ is certainly the largest, most complex and most unique project,” Scoville said. “When it came to me it was a perfect confluence of my interests.”
Information about the show is at theaterofthemindchicago.com.
Scoville observed that he did not come from a theatrical family so he didn’t see shows when he was really young. He said, “Theater was a passion I fell into through my own interests.”
Myrna Petlicki is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.
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