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New Five College Sound Designer Comes to the Valley an Obie Award Winner The sound designer who will join the ranks of theater faculty members in the Five College consortium come fall comes to the valley with a prestigious award to his credit. Robert Kaplowitz, who was appointed this April to be the Five-College Visiting Lecturer in Sound Design, received an Obie Award for Sustained Excellence in Sound Design on May 21 at the 52nd annual ceremony. The Village Voice Obie awards are given each year in to recognize the best Off-Broadway and Off-Off-Broadway work. This year, the ceremony was held at NYU’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts and hosted by Cynthia Nixon and T.R. Knight. Judges includes Village Voice critic Michael Feingold, playwright-director Adam Rapp, writer-director Ain Gordon; New York magazine critic Jeremy McCarter; Anne Dennin, executive director of PS 122; playwright-composer Kirsten Childs; and Village Voice theater critic Alexis Soloski. Kaplowitz was one of three designers honored for a body of work as opposed to a specific production, but the only person in the sound design category. Kaplowitz will fill a new three-year visiting position created this year with the approval of the Five College Deans. As Five College Visiting Lecturer in Sound Design, he will teach at two campuses a year and design one production a year at one of those campuses. His position will be hosted by UMass Amherst’s Department of Theater but shared among all five departments. During the fall semester of 2007, he will forgo designing a production in order to spend time at each theater department getting to know the faculty and staff as well as the shops and theater spaces. In their proposal to the Deans, the theater chairs had argued for the vital importance of sound design and identified it as an area of common need for all five departments of theater as well as for music and dance. The Five College Theater Departments collaborated extensively on this successful search for the new position. Although he will be new to the Valley, Kaplowitz is not entirely unfamiliar with the UMass Amherst Department of Theater: he is the sound designer for Neil LaBute’s current Off-Broadway work, In a Dark, Dark House at Lucille Lortel. Also on the design team is lighting designer Ben Stanton, who is a UMass Amherst alumnus. Kaplowitz and Stanton also collaborated on Soho Rep’s production of Adam Rapp’s The Thugs with yet another UMass Amherst alumnus, David Korins, in the fall. “All of us from the Five College theater departments who interviewed sound designers this spring are thrilled to have recruited someone like Rob Kaplowitz, who is at the very top of his profession. Rob Kaplowitz’ accolades as well as his theatrical accomplishments and passion will add tremendously to the skills and artistic excellence of an already strong 5 college theater community,” said Mark Dean, General Manager at the UMass Amherst Department of Theater and a member of the search committee. Media Contact: Anna-Maria Goossens Page originally created 6/29/07 Home
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