Carla Ritchie, nominated for Confessions of a Paperboy

In an economy where the average home is out of the price range of the average salary, it’s not surprising to imagine miniature houses promenading through the fevered minds of would-be homeowners. For Carla Ritchie, however, there’s more dream than nightmare in the image. Her bank of miniature houses for Ghost River Theatre’s production of Confessions of a Paperboy garnered a Betty Mitchell Award nomination for set design.
    A graduate of the University of Regina’s stage management/technical theatre, Richie’s nomination comes after only her second stint as a set designer with Ghost River. After being offered the opportunity to design the set for Doug Curtis’s As My Mother Lay Dreaming, a coming-of-age drama in 1980s boomtown Calgary, Ritchie’s successful showing led to her nominated design in Confessions, Ghost River’s next production.
    Expanding on director Ron Jenkins’s vision of shoebox houses dominated by the play’s eponymous paperboy, Ritchie envisioned a series of newspaper-covered houses painted in soft colours, illuminated internally by a series of lamps. Inspired by the expressionistic style of Tim Burton’s warped films — bearing no small resemblance to the exaggerated suburbia of Edward Scissorhands — the result was as intensive to create as the set itself was distinctive. “I made a pretty big mess of my kitchen table,” she says. “But it was really interesting.”
    Ritchie’s earliest experiences with design were creating lighting designs for shows in the U of R’s student works festivals. She is best known to the Calgary theatre scene as a stage manager — first appearing as the stage manager for Sage Theatre’s 2005-06 production of Geoffrey Ewart’s Yardies — a profession best known for keeping its professionals out of the spotlight entirely.
    As a stage manager, Ritchie is responsible for preparing the essential minutiae of a performance, from sound and light cues to the prompts that ensure actors make their exits on time, as well as the placement of essential props. It’s a position in the performing arts that’s decidedly private — calling a laundry list of commands only obviously visible to the audience if they fail, all while wearing theatre blacks designed to obscure her presence.
    Despite her reticence to appear on the stage herself, however, Ritchie takes great personal pride in her contributions to local productions, from Sage Theatre to Theatreboom and others. Aspiring towards direction while adding future design work on upcoming productions such as My Name is Rachel Corrie, she sees facilitating the logistics of production as more than simple organization.
    “I like it because you get to be there for the whole thing,” she says. “You’re there from day one, you get to watch an actor go through their process finding their character, see the designers come in — you get to be a fly on the wall. Then, once you get to the show, the stage manager is the driver of the show, makes sure everyone’s ready, and when the show starts, they’re in charge of making sure the show goes on.”
    It’s that creative input (“I’m more of a creator than a conductor,” says Ritchie) that keeps her work as a stage manager interesting, even as she aspires to broaden her skills. With an eye to further training in The Banff Centre’s design programs and a solid reputation in Calgary’s tightly knit theatre community, design and stage management are only the beginning. “Life is just way too interesting to do one thing,” says Ritchie.