As part of a Q&A series with our faculty, the USC School of Dramatic Arts asked faculty member Sibyl Wickersheimer about her recent productions, serving as a mentor to students and the enduring magic of set design.

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In the past month, three plays you’ve designed sets for have opened in three major cities. What are the opportunities and challenges of working on multiple shows in quick succession?

Sibyl Wickersheimer: The opportunity to build relationships with collaborators and teams over an extended period has been paramount in balancing my work. Set design provides a visual storytelling playground for actions in the play to take place and to enhance words and performances. My goals are to balance the aural and visual storytelling while allowing the overall production to relate to contemporary events and historical context. This is a challenging tight rope to walk on. Highlighting connections helps to make the plays impactful, fostering insight from varying perspectives. This balancing act gets even more challenging when we are experiencing personal and educational freedom being undermined by our government. Something I used to take for granted. This is foremost on my mind right now and eclipses even the challenges of designing productions across the country while teaching and being a parent! What grounds me is the dialogue with my collaborators, students and my children.

Developing ideas with those you share language and trust with is a joy, even when it’s a challenging material or time. I am lucky to work with many long-time collaborators. Many of my projects have had multiple lives during extended development processes across the country, so we really get to know one another. This is meaningful because there is less anxiety about sharing and collaborating when we are in strong relationships. I am therefore freer to experiment while forming scenic ideas leading to more exciting designs.

Tell us about those productions and what makes them special.

Mindplay was originally produced at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles. In 2024 it was remounted at Arena Stage in DC, then the Huntington Theatre in Boston, and now at Greenwich House Theater off-Broadway in NYC. The conceptual and functional design of the set was done at the Geffen and therefore the puzzle left to solve was how it fits within the next venue. There have been numerous small changes that have affected the props and the script along the way. Teams at each venue supported the evolution of the show. The audience in each city plays a huge part in how the show evolves as well. Writer and performer Vinny DePonto has continued to sculpt and heighten the production, not only in response to, but in a partnership with the audiences, deepening the impact of the show. Audiences love it, and that is very rewarding! It was just extended to May 11, 2025 after reaching nearly 200 performances since opening in Los Angeles!

I have worked on Froggy since 2017, twice as a workshop production and a third time as an online exploration during the pandemic, before the recent world premiere at Center Rep in Oakland, CA. The script is a huge multimedia challenge to realize. We were able to take our time to work through several iterations of the set through the various iterations. I designed a production of The Nether, also by Jennifer Haley, at Woolly Mammoth Theatre in DC in 2016, where I met Jared Mezzocchi. Shana Cooper directed that production. Which leads me full circle to The Odyssey, which is also directed by Shana Cooper at A.R.T.

The Odyssey, adapted by Kate Hamill, currently the most produced playwright in the U.S., is a familiar, messy epic. Shana and I have worked together for over 12 years on numerous projects. We recently collaborated with An-Lin Dauber on Metamorphoses (a newly adapted set of Ovid’s version of classic myths) at Seattle Rep in 2023. Annie was the costume designer for The Odyssey. And Paul James Prendergast, the composer and sound designer, is a longtime collaborator whom I met in Los Angeles on one of the first productions I designed back at the old Actors’ Gang space in Hollywood in 2000. During the process we gained new collaborators, including Jeanette Yew and Kate Brehm, who I can’t wait to work with again.

Can you tell us a little more about your professional career?

My career has been on a slow, steady rise since I started designing around 2001. It took me nearly five years to feel confident designing after completing my MFA in 1999. Recently, Tom Buderwitz, a set designer and SDA faculty member, and I took a few students to go see the new opera, The Camp, set designed by Yuri Okahana-Benson. The students remarked that we knew everybody in the room. And yes, the theatre community is like that. Every theatre I am in, there’s a family member there. In Boston, at A.R.T.’s prop shop, I worked with a props artisan who worked on Mindplay a few months earlier. And also in their prop shop one evening, I met a staff member who said, “Oh you’re the set designer of The Lonely Few” when we were introduced! It is magical when that happens. (The Lonely Few was a new musical I designed in L.A. at the Geffen which was remounted off-Broadway in Spring 2024 at MCC.)

Over the years, I have also strayed from theatre designing events, exhibitions and installations. More recently at USC, the Arts in Action program has supported projects such as Peace Pods collaborations, Sacrifice Zone: Los Angeles and events at Scene Shift: The Exhibit. These experiences have expanded my outreach and understanding of set design, allowing me in turn to support students’ varied interests across disciplines.

What is the most rewarding part of teaching?

Students are continually surprising me. They keep me on my toes, reinventing the way I teach this very complex art form each semester. That keeps it fresh for me. Hiring my students is a way of introducing them to the extended theatre family. Working with them in the professional world is the best reward. Many of my students work with me. Just on the productions mentioned above the list includes Victoria Tam (BFA ’13), Effy Yang (BA ’18), Grace Wang (BFA ’17), Cindy Lin (BA Film and Television Production ’14), Lily Lundine (BFA ’22), Jesus Hurtado (BFA ’22), Kate Schaaf (BFA ’24) and Selby Souza (BFA ’14).

What is your favorite advice to give to students?

Listen to and develop your instincts – it will keep your designs uniquely representative of you.

See the world. Go visit as many places as you can. Practice seeing. Foster a sustainable practice.

You’re known for recommending students and alumni to work with you on projects. Why is that important to you?

Teaching on campus is only a part of my job; mentoring students to take their first steps professionally is an extension of that. I didn’t have that experience myself, so it is very important to me to be a mentor. It is rewarding to see our alumni thrive after school and a testament to the strength of our faculty, design and production program at SDA. Plus, gotta grow that family; keep the incoming generation active, the theatre lovers fed and the theatre gods appeased! And lastly, it is important to me to give back to the L.A. theatre community and to recognize it for the thriving hub that it is. For those students whose interests are outside of theatrical design, I can also provide connections that lead in other directions such as the events and exhibitions, TV, film and video game industries.

You are serving as scenic mentor for the student designer on Something Rotten! Can you describe the mentorship process for our designer students during productions?

If I’ve done my job well the previous few years, senior design students only need my mentorship to help them stay on schedule and as a sounding board while navigating the design and communication process on their own.

SDA Spring Musicals are typically designed by our more experienced senior design students. This year, Aarti Patel (BFA ’25) is designing the set for Something Rotten! with Austin Mitchell (BA ’27) serving as their assistant designer. Aarti co-designed the museum exhibition experience Sacrifice Zone: Los Angeles with me last year at the Natural History Museum of L.A. and also participated with me in the Ottobot project in collaboration with the USC Iovine & Young Academy. They are interested in immersive design for live events as well as designing for theatre. Aarti has also been doing an internship designing with a Korean pop up company this year. So this assignment is unique to Aarti’s portfolio – a traditional musical theatre production.

The process for the musical started at the beginning of the Fall semester this year. Aarti met with Scott Faris, Alice M. Pollitt Professor in Stage Management, the director and a full time SDA faculty member many times, conversing about musical theatre. Scott has an amazing background working on Broadway and West End musical theatre as a dancer, stage manager and director. So Aarti was learning about the structure of a musical comedy while starting to design for Something Rotten!. First Aarti sketched storyboards of each scene to plan for the action in the script, thus laying groundwork for Scott and the rest of the team. Aarti and I meet often, but at least weekly, to go over sketches, models and drawings as they are being created. I give input along the way, but I always try my best to let the student design. I do not want to hold up the process trying to achieve perfection. This is a live art form and deadlines must be met despite classwork, midterms, or not fully being done with one element of the process.

A few weeks ago, we started to meet in the Technical Theatre Lab—i.e., SDA’s scene shop—to see the set build underway and discuss details as the shop works from Aarti’s drawings. Aarti has currently been working alongside the scenic painting team as the set pieces go from build to paint before transport to the Bing Theatre. Next will be our “scenic consult” where we get an entire afternoon for the designers and technical directors to play with the set in the theatre on our own to check how it shifts and looks under lights and projections before tech week starts. I will support the process through tech, watching portions of the tech rehearsals and giving input for Aarti to process. I want them to do as much communication with the shops and design team as possible on their own. I do often linger in the background, watching proudly.

Your 2022 book Scene Shift (that you co-authored with alumna Maureen Weiss BFA ‘96) caused a major stir in the world of set design. What are some of the ongoing conversations that have come out of that book?

Glad you asked this! Maureen and I have been on a path since 2019 when our research for the book started taking shape. From the outset we wanted conversation with set designers over anything else. That remains the driving force of our investigations. We started with 13 designers and that grew to 30. That was the core material for the book. We have continued to bring the book and live conversations to New York, L.A., Chicago and at the United States Institute for Theatre Technology, the L.A. Festival of Books and more. Now we embark into the form of podcasts and will release three podcasts together this Spring! The first two are with Narelle Sissons and Marsha Ginsberg. The next conversation is with Tony Award winner David Zinn. Maureen and I discuss his work often and he has not previously been a part of any of our conversations. We are really looking forward to talking with him and hearing what is currently taking focus for him.

What is one thing about set design (or even any theatrical design in general) that you wish audience members knew?

Nothing. I want audiences to relax, anticipate and breathe; to be present and take in the clues around them from the moment they enter a theatre space, or even before they enter. The pathway one traveled to the theatre is actually where your personal time-based experience begins. 

Is there a piece of theatre, or a film or television show that has recently resonated with you?

Too many to talk about! Last April, I saw Enemy of the People on Broadway at Circle in the Square. As an audience member, I was moved by being invited onstage during intermission to have a shot of schnapps from a hidden bar descending to the stage. As a set designer, I was thrilled by how that incongruous and anachronistic bar (covered in logos and branding for the Schnapps itself) was used as a pulpit for the remainder of the performance. The design team bridged historical references with contemporary actions beautifully and impactfully. Ibsen’s text never loses relevance with the support of this production team. It is a play about one man’s integrity to reveal difficult truth, research and facts to his community when this community turns on him, participating in a group mob mentality. I had goosebumps and tears while watching the performance.

Any fun facts we should know about Sibyl Wickersheimer?

I am not necessarily interested in being a fun person. But my job offers a lot of fun moments. I work a lot, and I am skeptical about much lately. I think I used to be fun. What makes me relax or soften is the ability to catch myself smiling at weird little details, when alone in my studio, in a theatre, out in the world with my kids or while jogging in the occasional rain. I try to soak up everything as potential inspiration.