THEATRE
From a young obsession with musical theatre to majoring in dramaturgy to working at box offices in downtown Pittsburgh, theatre attached itself to Katie Mae's heart and has no intention of letting go. Katie Mae has fallen in love with directing, worked as Artistic Director for a student theatre organization, and created live sketch comedy shows with others. Katie Mae loves creative conversation, solving creative and logistical problems, and advocating for the experience of audience members.
Sections
Directing
Administrative Work
Dramaturgy
Comedy
Directing
Katie Mae Ryan began directing in college and soon fell in love with it, from the curation of unique actor warmups, to creating a vision with designers, to drawing stage pictures. Comedies, absurdist plays, and unique worlds really excite Katie Mae. Katie Mae has a core principle in their directing work: be as prepared and open as possible. In all of their rehearsals, he has the blocking done to the point of determining eye contact. Also in all of their rehearsals, the blocking changes depending on actor comfort and collaboratively deciding what the most exciting choice is in the room. Katie Mae knows that he's created an effective atmosphere as a director when actors and designers jump to the table with their own ideas.
Katie Mae (center) leads actors in a pre-rehearsal warm-up.
ONE HUNDRED BEES
ONE HUNDRED BEES is an absurdist comedy about the relationship between theatre training and trauma and the inadequacy of mental health resources given to students navigating this relationship by CMU graduate playwright Katie Kirk. It's really funny. And really weird.
Katie Mae got to work with lighting designer Allison McSwain and sound designer Angie Zarrelli on this piece, which was directed over the course of a week for CMU's student theatre festival playground in 2022. The play features the world of a theatre conservatory and a "robot world" that the characters enter every so often. Katie Mae excitedly created these worlds with the designers and actors. Directing this show was a challenge in that Katie Mae also acted in the show. ONE HUNDRED BEES was very well-received. One stranger approached Katie Mae to say that it was the cleanest playground show of the day from a directing standpoint.
Tisbert Sketch Comedy
Katie Mae has directed eight sketches for Tisbert sketch comedy, CMU's sketch comedy group. "Diamond Condom," "Board Game," and "Devised Theatre" can all be viewed on Youtube. For three sketches, Katie Mae also choreographed dance numbers, including a tap routine.
Directing these sketches has given Katie Mae the skills in crafting tension, creating interesting stage positions, and doing worldbuilding exercises and conversations with actors. Because of Tisbert's low tech, the humor primarily comes from the writing, actor delivery, and the staging, giving directors a unique challenge.
Katie Mae leading a rehearsal for a Tisbert sketch.
S'n'Shakespeare Festival
S'n'Shakespeare Festival was Scotch'n'Soda's December slot production in Katie Mae's junior year, when they were the Artistic Director for the student theatre organization. S'n'Shakespeare Festival consisted of 8 10 minute Shakespeare pieces, each with its own director, tech head, and set of actors. As Head Director, Katie Mae served as the director's voice on the production staff.
Through this experience, Katie Mae learned how to navigate the logistics of a massive production.
For six of the eight directors, it was their first time directing. Therefore, Head Director was a large mentorship role that prepared Katie Mae for further directing mentorship down the line. Katie Mae created a google folder of docs with tips on how to direct, linked below.
The False Signature
The False Signature, Katie Mae's first directing venture was a radio play written by CMU dramaturgy student Eliza Hallinan for CMU's 2020 playground festival. The False Signature was also Katie Mae's directorial debut, where they learned how to create a world and communicate that world with a sound designer and actors. The False Signature is a queer romantic comedy involving miscommunication and false identities with the sensibility of a Jane Austen novel.
An online rehearsal forThe False Signature.
Administrative Work
From scheduling meetings to hosting workshops to attending rehearsals to facilitating difficult dialogue, Katie Mae spent much of his junior and senior year working in some sort of administrative capacity. More specifically, Katie Mae served as Artistic Director on the Board of Directors for Scotch'n'Soda. Senior year, Katie Mae continued his work on troupe and served as Director of Artistic Training for Scotch'n'Soda. Since senior year, Katie Mae worked as a box office employee for the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust and Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.
Katie Mae and fellow Scotch'n'Soda board members after a meeting.
Artistic Director
Katie Mae had the honor of serving as Artistic Director of Scotch'n'Soda, CMU's primary student theatre group, their junior year. Their junior year was a particular challenge as it was the first year back in person, and the executive board had to navigate the institutional knowledge lost due to ceasing in-person operations for a year.
Katie Mae had three goals when they began serving as Artistic Director--choose shows that would engage the greater campus community as well as expand the artistry of the members of the organization, build a base of directors for the organization, and make sure that directors felt supported by the executive board.
Five shows were chosen by the board as supervised by Katie Mae: The Rocky Horror Show, S'n'Shakespeare Festival, Eurydice, Rent, and the Disney Channel Cabaret Roulette. With S'n'Shakespeare Festival, Katie Mae trained six directors in their first time directing, and the board chose directing assistants for the other shows. Through Rent, Katie Mae learned how to navigate a show with difficult content from the administrative perspective.
Katie Mae and other board members.
Director of Artistic Training
As Director of Artistic Training for Scotch'n'Soda during their senior year, Katie Mae has organized four workshops, each of which has been successful: a directing for scotch'n'soda workshop, a comedy directing workshop, a simulation workshop where directors and designers created a design workshop, and a choreography workshop. Katie Mae also served as a mentor director for Scotch'n'Soda's February slot show, a play written by CMU students. Katie Mae prepared materials for the following workshops for the spring semester: Dramaturgy, acting, comedy acting, script analysis, and blocking.
CMU students creating blocking plans at a workshop led and organized by Katie Mae.
Box Office
Katie Mae worked for the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust and Pittsburgh Symphony in the months following graduation in the box office. Katie Mae learned how to use Tessitura software, gained experience in phone service, and sold both single tickets and subscriptions. Managing subscriber needs was the most difficult task. Excitingly, through their box office work, Katie Mae joined a union, IATSE-862!
Dramaturgy
Katie Mae has a passion for sharing exciting research with a dramaturgical team, breaking down structure of plays, and helping new writers with their works.
Katie Mae has a writer-centric approach to their new play work. Their intent is to make the play fit the writer's vision, not their own. Their work begins with questions for the author and getting a sense of the author's goals for the piece, and they make dramaturgical suggestions centered about helping the piece reach the author's goals.
Katie Mae putting together a lobby display for the end is the future is now
How Many Others?
Katie Mae was involved in the initial stages of How Many Others? Over the summer of 2022, they worked closely with CMU history professor Michal Friedman to sift through over a hundred in-depth interviews of Ukrainian Jewish people that lived through the wars of the 20th century as well as dozens of diaries from people living through the current war in Ukraine. First semester of Katie Mae's senior year, they helped the play take a creative shape and further organized the interviews and diaries with CMU dramaturgy professor and playwright Kristi Good. The play recently premiered in April of 2022 at Carnegie Mellon University.
Katie Mae giving a pre-show talk describing their research for How May Others?
Burn It Down
A large part of the first semester of Katie Mae's senior year was focused on helping graduate playwright Sharon Lovell by giving dramaturgical advice and supervision over the writing of her thesis show, Burn It Down.
Burn It Down is an exploration of the four Black women that led the 1878 St. Croix Fireburn labor riots: Mary Thomas, Agnes Salomon, Matilda McBean, and Susanna "Bottom Belly" Abramsen. It takes place when the women are in a Danish prison, recounting the stories of the riots in memories as they play out on another part of the stage. It deals with the lasting legacies of racism and labor exploitation in the past and today.
the end is the future is now
the end is the future is now was a unique dramaturgical process, as Katie Mae had to wear multiple hats for the production. The play is a theatrical adaptation of the short stories "The Book of Martha" and "Speech Sounds" by Octavia Butler and "Evidence" by Alexis Pauline-Gumbs. The production shifted between many directors, eventually becoming a collaborative piece devised by the students. Katie Mae facilitated a unified design vision in the absence of director interaction with designers. Katie Mae was also the primary writer for the script, and the script underwent multiple collaborative rewrites throughout the process.
Of course, Katie Mae also did the traditional dramaturgical work, such as the creation of an annotated script and actor website, with their research focusing on afrofuturism.
Hair
The musical Hair was also a production with a lot of unique challenges, as Katie Mae was assigned to be the assistant before the COVID pandemic began. In addition to assisting the dramaturg with research and the curation of actor materials, Katie Mae was able to assist in the active creation of a narrative when most of the songs had to be cut for feasibility purposes. Hair also gave Katie Mae experience in navigating challenging content.
Comedy
Katie Mae wrote their common app essay on how much they love to analyze comedy, so it should have come as less of a surprise the passion they have for directing, writing, and acting in comedy. From their extensive involvement in campus group Tisbert Sketch Comedy to student-taught improv classes to weekly stand-up post-gradutation, no genre excites Katie Mae like comedy.
Katie Mae and Pittsburgh sketch comedy actors after a Fridge Art Sketch Show performance.
Tistroupe
Tistroupe is made up of the core writers and performers of Tisbert Sketch Comedy, CMU's primary sketch comedy group. Members of Tistroupe do not just write, act and direct; they also serve as leaders and representatives for the organization of Tisbert Sketch Comedy. They provide assistance to all Tisbert shows, attend tech weeks, and are encouraged to come to general writing meetings to write with new members.
Through being a member of Tistroupe, Katie Mae has learned technical aspects to theatre in preparation for the final troupe show. Katie Mae has crafted multiple props, created projections, and experimented with sound engineering.
Before joining Tistroupe, they primarily wrote solo sketches, with four solo-written sketches being put on stage. After joining Tistroupe, they've primarily written in a collaborative manner while continuing to foster their ability to solo-write.
As a writer, Katie Mae feels that they are skilled in implementing structure, worldbuilding, subverting situations, undermining pretension, and understanding different comedic styles.
Katie Mae and fellow troupe members in rehearsal.
Class Writing
Katie Mae has written in several of their classes, whether it's a ten minute parody play about lesbian representation, a ten minute silent film comedy about a bank robbery, poetry, or a television pilot about demons solving legal problems in Hell. Attached below are some examples of their class writing.
Standup Comedy
One of the primary ways that Katie Mae has stayed creative after graduation is doing stand-up comedy. Katie Mae performed weekly at different open mic nights around Pittsburgh, being invited to perform at Arcade Comedy's standup lab and for Chipped Ham Comedy at Espresso A Mano. Katie Mae's topics range from family psychodrama to geopolitics to improv puns.