The director is shouting. His voice fills the theater as he demands actors to work scenes over and over again. If a mark is missed or a line forgotten, they take it from the top because for Bob McGrath, a show should be nothing less than the best.
McGrath is a faculty member in Virginia Tech’s Department of Theatre Arts and Cinema. An award-winning director who hails from Los Angeles, McGrath made his way to New York, where he embarked on a successful career off-Broadway.
In 2007, he became a member of the Tech faculty. Since then, he has been hard at work bringing some of the intensity he garnered from his New York productions to his shows at Tech and the classes that he teaches.
Originally, McGrath began to earn a reputation around New York as the co-founder and artistic director of Ridge Theater, a premiere avant-garde performance space in New York City.
Ridge Theater hosts productions that try to challenge standard expectations of theater performances by including elements such as a heavy use of multimedia. It was crucial for McGrath that the theater would function as a space to explore the limits of theater.
“I wanted to make theater like a band,” McGrath said. “I tried to give it that energy because when I was young I was really inspired by punk rock. At Carnegie Mellon, I learned all about epic and Brechtian theater. Then I came to New York and was influenced by that.”
The end result of McGrath’s influences was an acclaimed theater and three Obie awards. Obies, or Off-Broadway Theater Awards, are one of the premier theatrical awards in New York.
His drive to create visually innovative and emotionally charged performances was most recently seen in McGrath’s staging of William Shakespeare’s “Othello” in November.
“This is going to be something great,” McGrath said before the show opened to the public.
“At the very least this is a show that aspires to greatness.”
A Bob McGrath production is hallmarked by the extensive and visually stimulating use of projection and multimedia. In “Othello,” sets were created with projections of columns and archways on a screen while occasional videos played over the action.
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