The Justice

Media Credit: Photo courtesy of Mellopix.com The cast of 'American Idiot' on the set of the play's production at the Berkeley Repertory Theater. Alexandra Friedman '09 helped to design the set in her capacity as an intern there.

Friedman spoke about the perspective she has gained from her professional experiences since graduation during an e-mail interview with justArts.

JustArts: While you were at Brandeis, you were a set-building machine, constructing several sets a semester. Is the professional pace any different than the one you picked up in college? How's the general transition from undergraduate theater to professional theater?

Alexandra Friedman: It really all depends upon what theaters you work at in the professional world. At Berkeley Rep[ertory Theater], where I'm interning now, we do about seven shows a season, so each production gets a lot more time, as well as several dedicated professionals in every department working on it, and a much larger budget. This allows us to generally work 8-5 Monday-Friday, although load-ins, strikes, and certain projects do require more intense schedules sometimes. It's really satisfying to have the time and resources to do the best work we possibly can. It's also truly delightful to work with people who are really passionate about their work ... and to not have to come home and do homework! At the same time, I have recently been working with some other, smaller theater companies in the Bay Area and many of them have very limited budgets, which makes me realize how lucky we are at Brandeis to have the resources we do for student productions. Working on the sets for some of these companies, my task is to spend as little money as humanly possible-so there's a lot of creative scrounging and compromising that has to go on. Also, smaller companies have far fewer full-time employees, so many of their members have other jobs during the day and putting on productions is a labor of love. The short answer is that professional theater runs the gamut in its scope and size, and I think the quality of Brandeis undergraduate theater, as far as production values go, lands somewhere in the middle.

JA: Could you elaborate as to how you managed to end up in Berkeley, Calif., working on the stage adaptation of Green Day's American Idiot?

Continued...

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