This is part 2 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.

Emily Davis

Props Assistant

If you’ve been in The Commons on the first floor of the T2 building lately, you’ve no doubt taken notice of the gorgeous, long, counter-height live edge table that’s sitting parallel to the box office. That lovely example of craftsmanship was seen in the fall show Designing Women and the tabletop is the work of T2 props assistant Emily Davis.

“That was my first show here,” she notes. “So it was really nice to have a project through which I could kind of prove myself. It’s especially nice that it's out in the lobby now!”

Davis started out in theater acting, but when she took a stage craft class in college, it changed her life.

“I started volunteering in the scene shop, and I realized—‘Oh, I really like building things.’ And then I took a model making class, and I thought, ‘Oh, I really like building smaller, more detailed things.’ The natural marrying of the two was props. So I started volunteering in the prop shop, and I thought, ‘Okay, yes, absolutely.’ I was really digging it.”

An internship right after college graduation was cut short by the pandemic, so Davis headed home to spend some time with her parents, building things for various family members. Then she saw the T2 job listing and jumped on it.

“My favorite part about props is building them—using the saws, 3D printing. But also solving the problems of how to reliably create magic on the stage that makes people say, ‘Whoa, how did they do that?’ Problem solving those kinds of moments is really fun.”

Recently, Davis had to produce just that kind of magic in T2’s production of The Mountaintop, when she made flowers literally grow out of the stage.

“We stuffed flowers into PVC pipes, and then we used dowels inside of them to push them up, out of the carpet,” she explains, a magician revealing her craft. “There was a whole pulley system [created by Brodie Jasch] in the trap room under the stage, and the rope went all the way up to backstage so that they could control it from there—so they didn't have to go out to the trap and push anything up physically.”

In that same production, Davis cut out hundreds of fabric circles and painstakingly sewed each of them onto bedspreads in order to create a stunningly accurate portrayal of the room at Memphis’ Lorraine Motel—a project born out of a determination to show reverance for the location where Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spent his last night.

“We just wanted to make sure we did an authentic, good job, because it was a real place that means so much,” she says.

While training to pursue her current career, Davis has had beneficial mentors, but she has also experienced the sting of sexism in the male-dominated field. In one internship experience, she found herself one of two women on a staff of more than a dozen men.

“I thought I was going to be getting to build scenic pieces, but what I found it to be was pretty much being a tool monkey for the carpenters who were in the staff positions,” she says. “’Go get me a nail gun,’ ‘Go get me a hammer.’ I thought, ‘This is not what I wanted at all.’”

Since working at T2, however, she’s gotten used to working side-by-side with women in technical and production positions.

“When I first got here and was introduced everyone, I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, there's so many women—this is so strange,’” she says with a laugh. “But, you know, in a good way.”

Sophia deGuzman

Props Technician

“But so much of what we build is also influenced by our own life experiences,” says deGuzman. “Theater is not just one person working alone, making this art. It’s a community, a large group of people all coming together and bringing their different talents and skills and life experiences to influence and flourish and create what we put on stage.”

As a T2 Props Technician, Sophia de Guzman says she “needs to know a little bit of everything.”

“I primarily work in the prop shop as a props artisan, which means that I am one of the people who is building and sourcing everything and anything that we need for the shows at TheatreSquared,” she says. “But I will occasionally help out other departments. For example, The Elaborate Entrance of Chad Deity, for props, is a fairly simple show. So I've switched over to helping out in the scene shop, because there's a lot that they need extra hands for occasionally, as we load in the show and get everything all set up.”

deGuzman started performing in theater in elementary school, but something was missing. A random class in tech production solved this problem: If she loved theater, but didn’t love being on the stage, she could be behind the stage. At the University of Wisconsin, she found her official career path when she studied under Sandy Strawn, a standout in the field of props. The program required deGuzman to become proficient in carpentry, sewing, and lighting.

You know the saying ‘Jack of all trades, master of none, certainly better than master of one?” she asks. “At a moment's notice, if you need me to build a couple of flats in the scene shop, boom, I'm there. If you need me to sew something in the costume shop for someone, boom, I'm there. And that’s just really what drew me to props.”

High profile internships at the Pacific Conservatory Theatre and the Actors Theatre of Louisville followed, signifying deGuzman’s career was on the right track—until COVID-19 stopped her momentum, as it did for so many theater professionals. Her internship was cancelled, and she moved back home with her parents until she could figure out her next move. Happily, that turned out to be to T2, where she was first offered a six-month production crew contract. It was quite a leap of faith to take, but deGuzman packed her bags and moved to Fayetteville, confident in her decision.

“During the interview process, TheatreSquared really seemed like a company that truly cared a lot about the people working there,” she says. “I knew a lot of theater professionals who were very secure in their positions but who were still put on furlough during COVID-19. During my interviews, I asked TheatreSquared what their company's reaction to COVID was, in regards to the employees. Hearing that everyone who was on permanent staff were kept on, that T2 did not furlough anyone but kept paying them even if they weren’t working as fully at the time—that was the moment of, ‘Oh, okay, so you guys really do care about your workers.’”

deGuzman’s decision soon paid off when she was hired full time after her contract ran out. It’s no wonder, given she arrived in town on a Sunday and showed up for work bright and early Monday morning and started building set pieces for Matilda.

More recently, she was on the team that designed the props for The Mountaintop, creating a unit from Memphis’ Lorraine Motel that looked so authentic, you could have sworn you were looking at a photograph from 1969. deGuzman employed her sewing skills to replicate the cushions for a chair that was a direct replica of the one in Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s last motel room. She also made the bedside tables.

“This is a very, very minor detail, but it really showcases how much attention to detail that we gave that set,” she says. “There were two beds on the stage, and the box springs in the original motel room were this white and blue floral pattern. You only see that for two seconds on stage, but we felt it was really important for the authenticity that we were trying to go for and the attention to detail. So we got a little bit of fabric, and we stapled and sewed the fabric onto the side of the box spring in order to give it that same pattern, that same look. The director, Vicki Washington, thanked us and was overjoyed. It's all the minor little details that most people might not even fully register or recognize, but if you don't have them, it can really change or affect how the show was presented.”

deGuzman says another aspect of working with T2 that has made it such a good working environment is its inclusive hiring practices.

“It is a really welcoming and incredible thing, because it's just bringing so many more people and talent [forward] that, otherwise, have not been given the ability or the voice to work in these fields, to pursue their passions, and to tell and share their stories,” she says. “Because that's the other thing about everyone backstage— it’s the designers’ key vision and the directors’ vision that we are creating. But so much of what we build is also influenced by our own life experiences. Theater is not just one person working alone, making this art. It’s a community, a large group of people all coming together and bringing their different talents and skills and life experiences to influence and flourish and create what we put on stage. Especially at TheatreSquared, I feel very fortunate as an Asian trans woman, who has been given this opportunity to showcase and be recognized for the skills and abilities that I have to bring to the stage—because it’s always been a concern for so long. How many jobs am I going to potentially miss out on because of who I am?

“TheatreSquared is a really wonderful theater that is actively looking at themselves and thinking, ‘How can we do better?’ It's a really wonderful place that I'm really glad that I've gotten the opportunity to be a part of and share in all these wonderful stories.”

Emily Johnson

Production Technician

“Getting to come to TheatreSquared and work on an all-female lighting team has been really amazing,” says Emily Johnson. “And it's comfortable. I don't feel like I'm competing with anybody. I don't feel like I have to prove myself. I think TheaterSquared is setting a precedent for other theaters to kind of catch up with.”

T2 Production Technician Emily Johnson was just a child when she was first introduced to theater through the Southern Delaware School of the Arts. In addition to core subjects like math, science, and English, students also took classes in dance, vocal and instrumental music, and theater.

“It was so much fun,” she says. “It was so cool. Once you got to seventh and eighth grade, you got to pick an elective that you focused on, and one of the electives was unicycling and juggling. This literally sounds like a teen movie, but there would be kids on unicycles riding down the hallway.”

That focus on the arts fell by the wayside when the family moved from Delaware to Oklahoma, where sports took Johnson’s focus. But a high school experience with mock trials—improvising as a witness in a trial—was the gateway back into it. Soon, she found herself performing on stage again.

But by senior year, I realized that I didn’t like the attention,” she says. “It was nerve-wracking to have everyone looking at me. So when I went to college, I was very tech-focused.”

A job at a ‘roadhouse’, a venue similar to the Walton Arts Center, followed graduation, but Johnson was restless. She had spent many summers at band camp at the University of Arkansas and had always had a fondness for Fayetteville. So she packed up and moved here. She had applied for several jobs at T2 when Production Manager Kat Wepler called to see if she would be interested in a run crew position for At the Wedding. It was a temporary position, but Johnson saw it as a way to get her foot in the door for something more permanent.

“After At the Wedding, Kat said, ‘Hey, can you do lighting stuff?’” Johnson remembers. “And I could, so I came in and started doing that. And then Matilda was right around the corner, so she asked me if I if I knew anything about sound. Sound was one of my primary focuses in school, so I said, ‘Yeah, I can do sound.’ When she realized that I had all these skills, she was said, ‘Okay, well, we're gonna keep her.’”

Johnson says being a woman in a position that, traditionally, has been male-dominated, has not always been easy.

“I've worked in several southern states where it was really odd for to have a woman Production Technician,” she says. “There were times where I was told, ‘No, I don't want you to run my light board or, ‘No, I don't want you to mix the show for me,’ solely because I was young, and I was a woman. Getting to come to TheatreSquared and work on an all-female lighting team has been really amazing. And it's comfortable. I don't feel like I'm competing with anybody. I don't feel like I have to prove myself. I think TheaterSquared is setting a precedent for other theaters to kind of catch up with.”

T2's Talented Staff Breaks Barriers, Builds Theatrical Worlds