Ruby Kemph

Resident Costume Designer/Costume Shop Manager

This is part 3 of a 3-part series celebrating the woman of T2’s production team. Studies show that most production-related positions lack gender parity—but women make up 50 percent of TheatreSquared’s production staff. In this series, these talented women tell us a little bit about what their job is like and the path that brought them here.

“I think it's fantastic,” Kemph says of the growing number of women on the production staff. “I remember five, seven years ago, sitting at a table for a production meeting, and being one of the only—or maybe the only—women at the table and feeling like I had to make sure that my voice was heard, my presence was known, so that I wouldn't disappear in the conversation. I don't feel like I need to do that anymore.”

Since 2008, Ruby Kemph has been designing costumes for TheatreSquared, first as a freelancer and then as a full time designer and costume shop manager. The combination of the jobs keeps her hopping.

“As the costume shop manager, I oversee everything—costume, hair, makeup, wardrobe,” she explains. “I oversee the day-to-day running of the costume shop. I also take care of all of the scheduling and budgeting.”

This year, you’ve seen her beautiful craftsmanship on stage in A Christmas Carol and The Mountaintop, and you will soon see her over-the-top wrestling attire for The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, opening on April 13.

The artistry displayed in her designs started early in life.

“I come from a very artsy family,” she says. “My mom was a calligrapher, one of my sisters is a tattoo artist, the other one has been a jeweler and a bookbinder. So art has always been part of my life. And sewing has always been a part of my life that I learned from my mom.”

The Fayetteville High School graduate—who studied under beloved FHS drama teacher Warren Rosenaur—loved acting, but the older she got, the more her love for performing faded.

“I found in high school that I couldn't control the stage fright, and I wasn't comfortable on stage,” she says. “I wasn't having any fun, and I wasn't good at it. So I started doing some of the backstage stuff at that point, and I enjoyed it.”

But she didn’t pursue it as a career at first—instead, declaring French her undergrad major. But a part time job at the Walton Arts Center in the wardrobe department led to a class in costume design, which led to a graduate degree in costume design. Kemph found herself saying “Oui” to a career in the theater.

“I feel like it kind of fell into my lap in a way that it combined some of the design and artistic skills that I had been working on for most of my life.”

Kemph and husband Bryce Kemph, T2’s Scene Shop Supervisor and fan favorite on stage, met in graduate school and moved to New York City after graduation. But both kept getting lured back to Fayetteville to either work at or perform with TheatreSquared—leading them to eventually make a permanent move.

Having worked with T2 for around 14 years, Kemph has seen the theater company grown in terms of its goal of inclusive hiring.

“I think it's fantastic,” she says. “I remember five, seven years ago, sitting at a table for a production meeting, and being one of the only—or maybe the only—women at the table and feeling like I had to make sure that my voice was heard, my presence was known, so that I wouldn't disappear in the conversation. I don't feel like I need to do that anymore.”

Meanwhile, Kemph doesn’t regret not pursuing French as a career all those years ago. The job she has now brings her so much personal satisfaction.

“It’s exciting, to do something so over-the-top, and for all of these extra elements to come together and look great and make the actor feel great,” she says of her Chad Deity work. “It’s really fantastic. We had a fitting with Shon this morning, and he was so thrilled. He was telling us how there are certain times when getting into costume for the first time, something clicks for the actor, and he feels like, ‘Yes, this is it. This is my character.’ It might be the costume, it might be the wig, just one of those elements that really helps him get there. And he felt that way today.”

Jenn McClory

Wardrobe Supervisor

As T2’s Wardrobe Supervisor, Jenn McClory’s stays perma-busy. She’s both a designer for the company—responsible for Ann Richards’ early-90s power suits in Ann, as well as the vibrant wedding garb in At the Wedding, for example—and she’s the one responsible for the maintenance of the costumes once a show opens.

But her favorite thing about her job are the quick changes she performs backstage every evening.

“It just gets your adrenaline pumping, to have 30 seconds to do an entire costume change on someone and send them right back out,” she says, glee in her tone. “There's just something satisfying about it every time you do it. It just feels like you've achieved something great.”

Shows run six days a week, with two shows on Saturday, so that schedule leads to some long weeks. McClory, however, says she’s fueled by her passion for the position, as well as by the fact that she has a more flexible schedule these days.

“My son is older—he's in college,” she says. “Before this, I wouldn't have been able to work the hours that I work, especially being a single mom. Now that I don't have to worry about taking care of him, I'm able to pull those hours.”

As a matter of fact, her son is the reason McClory became involved in designing costumes for theater in the first place. A talented thespian, he got involved with the Arkansas Public Theatre, and McClory found herself hanging out at rehearsal, waiting for him to finish. She had already been designing costumes for film, thanks to a project she got involved with through a friend, and when she noticed things on stage she could help with, she volunteered.

“One of the directors at [the APT] asked me if I could help, and I said, ‘Yes, I know how to sew!’ That led to, ‘Hey, this costume doesn’t work. Do you just want me to build a replacement for it?’ Then it turned into me designing shows for them, and here we are, 21 years later, and I’ve made a career of it.”

Before her position at T2, McClory stayed busy constantly, often working on multiple shows at once. Trike Theatre, Arts Live Theatre, the Arts Center of the Ozarks, and Opera Fayetteville were among those clamoring for her services.

“I appreciate the stability,” she says of the change after she started at T2. “Those freelance gigs, that's a one-time fee. I had to take whatever fell into my lap. Having a full-time job in the arts is kind of a dream come true—especially today, with so many theaters struggling after the pandemic. We are all so blessed to be able to work full time in this industry and in this area.”

Costume design is one place in the theatrical world where employment skews female, but McClory says it hasn’t escaped her attention that other, usually male-dominated positions at T2 are routinely being filled by women.

“Whenever I was designing for a lot of other theaters, those production meetings were typically all men,” she says. “When I started working with Trike, I noticed Kassie Misiewicz would always pull in more women, tried to have more women at the table, and that was very refreshing. But it seemed like the technical directors, the sound designers, the set designers were always going to be men. When we build something, people automatically think, ‘Oh, that’s a man’s job.’ But here at T2, on Tiger Style!, we’ve got an all-female crew running the show backstage. That’s kind of lovely to me, because it’s a hard show. There’s a lot of moving furniture, and these badass women are doing that. And to be in these production meetings where there’s a female sound designer, female director, female production manager, costume designers, Jamie Bray as associate technical director and our stage management team is almost all female—that’s pretty incredible. That’s not something that happens at a lot of theaters, from what I’ve seen.”

Rachel Williams

Scenic Painter

“It has been just absolutely phenomenal, working for TheatreSquared,” says Williams. “The amount of inclusivity and camaraderie that I found here has been wonderful.

As the daughter of two emergency room nurses, there might have been the expectation that Rachel Williams would go into a field that was a bit more science-based than theater. But then she explained to her parents how her role as a scenic painter satisfied her passion for both left- and right-brain activities—science, math, and art.

“They were a little surprised but not in any bad sort of way,” she remembers. “They've always been very, very supportive. And it was interesting, because I love the chemistry part of paint, as well—the reactions that are happening and why things combine in certain ways. I called it the ‘mad scientist’ aspect of things. Then they realized that it's a lot of chemistry, and so then they understood it.”

Today, you can find Rachel Williams by looking for a woman dressed in clothing bedazzled by paint of all shades and hues. As T2’s resident scenic painter, she’s rarely without a paintbrush in her hands.

“I am in charge of painting all the scenery, coordinating with other departments to make sure that everything gets finished up on time,” she says. “Looking at timelines, scheduling, labor, and really just everything that involves paint. I deal with a lot of hazardous chemicals. I’m responsible for faux finishes, or any painted scenery. A lot of my job entails making one surface look like it’s made of something else—for example, making MDF plywood look like granite. I’ve done that several times since I’ve gotten here, and it’s a very fun process.”

Williams’ mother was the first person to teach her how to paint; painting on glass was a stress-reliever for her after a pressure-filled day in the ER. Williams’ skill made her imminently useful backstage in her high school theater department; she later formalized her training by attending the North Carolina School of the Arts. There, she studied under high profile scenic artists Susan Crabtree and Howard Jones. Her last year in school, she served as the shop foreman. Williams graduated in May 2021, a year into the pandemic. There weren’t a lot of job notices floating around at that point—most performing arts venues were still trying to figure out how to get back up and running after COVID-19—but T2 was hiring. It was a perfect opportunity for Williams, given her parents had recently relocated to Arkansas.

“It has been just absolutely phenomenal, working for TheatreSquared,” she says. “The amount of inclusivity and camaraderie that I found here has been wonderful. Whenever a problem presents itself, it's not just ignored or pushed off until later. It's, ‘Okay, let's sit down. Let's talk about this. Let's figure out what's going on how can we make this production happen.’ We’re trying to figure out how we can best make the designers’ work come to life, every time, instead of saying, ‘No, we’re going to have to cut that.’ Which is wonderful, because it also keeps our artistic intention out there.”

Emely Zepeda

Production Stage Manager

“Even in my interviews [for this postion], we talked about diversity and inclusion and the importance of their role in the hiring practices of TheatreSquared,” says Zepeda. “They were purposely shifting and wanted to welcome and include as many people as possible from all like walks of life. I think TheatreSquared has made leaps and bounds and is consciously doing so. And I hope they continue.”

Had it not been for Tennessee Williams, T2 Production Stage Manager Emely Zepeda might be working as a clinical psychologist right now. While an undergrad at Binghamton University in New York, Zepeda found herself looking for an extracurricular activity to satisfy a requirement of her scholarship. On a whim, she chose theater and ended up assistant stage managing Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire.

“I tell people that if it had been a different show, it's very likely that I might have just done that one show and checked off the scholarship requirement and gone right back to psychology,” she muses. “But something about Tennessee Williams, the poetry in his language, really, really struck me and stayed with me—even now. He's one of my favorite playwrights, because that first contact with his work was [not only] his understanding of the pain of being human, but also that kind of bittersweet joy that is living life to the fullest and the consequences that can come from that.”

She was hooked—not just on theater, but on the very specific position of stage management. It appealed, she says, to both her artistic side and her organized, detail-oriented, practical side. Still, making the leap to pursuing a career in the arts was difficult for Zepeda.

“My dad worked in construction and my mom was a maid that cleaned houses. They came to the States to give my siblings and I a better life and more opportunities and they instilled in me the importance of hard work, perseverance, an education, and a career where I could take care of myself. Theatre was not exactly a stable path, but once I found it, I fell in love with it and I knew I would do what I had to to make it work and make my parents proud.”

So Zepeda made sure she developed the strongest foundation possible for her future career—and landed a place in the Stage Management MFA program at the Yale School of Drama. From there, she moved to New York City and made a living working as a freelance stage manager. The uncertainty of freelance work was starting to wear on her when the pandemic struck, effectively shutting down theater in NYC. That’s when she saw the T2 ad for a resident stage manager and, on a leap of faith, she picked up and moved to Arkansas.

The job, she says, has been as challenging and fun as she had hoped it would be.

“It’s just kind of a funny question, because I feel like my answer changes depending on the show,” she says with a laugh when asked to describe what her job is like. “Part of who a stage manager is, ideally, is someone that's adaptable and flexible in style, but also in what you do. There's certainly a foundation, a base, and, across the board, a standard of what we do. But depending on whether it’s a musical versus a classic play versus a new play or something that's devised, the details of what we do can vary. I consider myself a communications hub of a sort between what's being developed and found in the rehearsal room, between the actors and director, between the larger production team—the designers and the production staff, the ones together working together to create the vision that was started from before first rehearsal.”

Zepeda says the prevalence of women in traditionally male theater positions has been a welcome change for her.

“I found, whether it was in New Haven or New York, that it felt like a predominantly white, cis male field, whether it was directors or choreographers, designers, artistic directors—people that were in positions of power and authority. It seemed to definitely skew one side. But, even in my interviews [for this postion], we talked about diversity and inclusion and the importance of their role in the hiring practices of TheatreSquared. They were purposely shifting and wanted to welcome and include as many people as possible from all like walks of life. I think TheatreSquared has made leaps and bounds and is consciously doing so. And I hope they continue.”

Women of T2's Production Team Pack a Punch