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.
“I saw a show when I was really young that had slide projection and I thought ‘Well, that’s cool. I’ll do that.’ So I’ve always done it,” McGrath said. “It started really small with slide projections, but as
I’ve grown and the technology has grown, our style has grown. It’s just what I do.”
McGrath joined Tech’s faculty during the 2007 school year after responding to a job advertisement posted by the theatre department.
“We were looking for a skilled director who had experience in the theater world and someone who could bring a wealth of world experience to our department,” said Patricia Raun, theatre department head.
McGrath’s extensive theater credits were attractive to Tech’s theatre program due to its geographic isolation from the heart of the theater world, Raun said.
“He brought a no-nonsense approach because he had not been in an academic environment before,” Raun said. “He cuts to the chase quite effectively.”
McGrath now splits his time between New York City and Blacksburg, and the director’s energy and curiosity has become a hit with the students in the theatre program.
“Bob brings a sense of reality to things,” said Bryanna Demerly, a sophomore theatre arts major who has worked with McGrath twice. “He is right up there in your face and if he doesn’t like it he will change it until he gets what he wants.”
McGrath’s straight-shooting director style is appealing, Demerly said, because it enables actors to understand the direction he would like to take the show in.
It is also an approach that has translated to his teaching method.
“As a teacher, he is a lot of fun,” Demerly said. “He’s realistic about this stuff, and he tells it like it is.”
Though McGrath is a busy man, juggling his work between New York and Virginia, it is something that he takes in stride. He wouldn’t have it any other way.
“It’s just, I burn the candle at both ends, really,” he said with a smile.