Prefer to read instead of listen? Here’s the longer version of what we talked about:

Tshana Jamara is one of those people who you think can do everything. She’s a theatre enthusiast with a passion for music, songwriting, dogs, traveling, and British comedy, and I know her as a fantastically talented set and prop artist.

She got her degree in theatre from Emerson, taught and directed high school theatre for nine years. She’s now a worship leader at her church and a marketing coordinator.

When she was young, her family and friends would’ve said she was imaginative. She was always walking around recreating scenes from movies, singing, any artsy type of things, learning instruments, painting, any craft thing that she was given.

She always did little skits here and there at church and school, but got the theatre bug when she went to NYC in 7th grade on a class trip. She saw the Broadway musical Ragtime and was overwhelmed by how they told such a huge, gorgeous story on one stage (Audra McDonald was in the show at this time!). She did high school performances, and around junior high was when she really felt like theatre was a cool thing.

The first show she directed was in grad school. She stepped away from theatre in undergrad, except in senior year when she took a theatre production class in Spanish for her Spanish minor. She then decided to go back to grad school for theatre education at Emerson, and she really loved her courses and directed her first short play.

The play was called “Post-It Notes” (based on another show called “Love Letters”). Her good friend and her husband ended up being in the play – someone dropped out so he filled in. She only had 10 minutes to set up the set before the performance, so she had to really get creative to find a refrigerator, a couch, and other things that she could pull on and off the stage quickly. She wasn’t super confident about directing this show.

She went to grad school with a lot of people who had been doing theatre for years, so comparison was a bit of a problem for her. She hadn’t directed a million shows or been in theatre her entire life, so she was self-conscious about having to learn and figure out how to make it work without professional theatre experience. She really loved directing. It was a short play, and she enjoyed doing it, so she looked for other opportunities even though it was a little scary.

The opportunity to work at the high school – she saw in a school newsletter that they were looking for a director, and she took a chance on it. They ended up hiring her for that and to teach Spanish. With each show she directed, it progressively got better.

“Each one was a learning process, and any time the opportunity arose to do something, I took it.”

Eventually she had people (students, usually) helping her to do the sets, props, lights, etc. She built set pieces in her garage and had to figure out their theatre setup (the students also ate lunch on the stage during this time!). She used construction lights that are used to work on cars because she didn’t have anything else. It was definitely stressful.

“I think looking back now, if I could give myself advice I would say, ask for help. It’s not a sign of weakness to ask for help.”

As a 23-year-old, she didn’t want to ask for help, and wanted to learn to do everything herself. But as she went on, she taught the students to do a lot, and gave them responsibility to learn the different skills besides acting, and by the ninth year was able to sit back and watch the show run with the help of the students.

Talk to everybody – look for opportunities to see theatre, here from someone who works in the industry, teachers, community theaters, etc. At Emerson she was surrounded with other students and professors who had great ideas, but after that, at the high school, there wasn’t anyone there who really did theatre so she had to find opportunities and places to learn. She did a workshop for a week in New York, saw a lot of theatre with her husband, and still gets inspiration from the way shows are staged when she is traveling. She saw Diane Paulus speak at BC, emailed her some questions, and got a response from her assistant. At least try!

“Look for resources and guidance and ideas anywhere you can find them.”

The theatre community is so supportive – most people will offer advice and time when they can. It’s worth it to just go for it and ask your questions.

More people think of community theatre for the performing side, so she had to reach out to friends in grad school to connect about designing and directing. When she meets someone who does something similar to her, she tries to remember them to maybe connect again in the future.

Tshana wasn’t interested in performing for a career, and she had no idea going into undergrad how many different things and how many hours go into the other elements of a show.

She doesn’t know if people realize that there are so few designers and directors in community theatre and that there’s a need. You could use certain designing skills in theatre, even if you don’t have specific theatre experience. In the school she directed at, she found kids who weren’t acting that could use their technical skills to learn how to run lights, create weird props she came up with, make lists, etc. She wanted them to understand that there’s so many things you don’t see that go into theatre. There could be more advertisements for the little jobs and production aspects where help is needed.

Performing was something she did to understand more of what the actors she was directing were going through. She hates asking them to do things that she hadn’t done herself. She wanted to understand how to teach them about getting the jitters out before auditions, how to learn lines, and other aspects, based on her own experience.

She deconstructed umbrellas, hung them upside-down, and attached paper-mache birds to them so they looked like they could spin in the air – this is the kind of creativity that Tshana uses for sets and props. Performing, on the other hand, is a whole different skill set. It definitely fulfills her in two different ways.

She wants to know that what she sets out to do, that people recognize, but she doesn’t need the center of attention. There is the validation of seeing people’s faces when they walk into a room and see the set. She wants people to think about and understand the weight of the topics of shows she directs, so they react in the way that she intends from the outset.

She’s been to South America, Europe, Rwanda, and those travel experiences influenced her because she’s always learning. She sees things she’s never seen before and understands different perspectives of the world, hearing different stories. She thinks about these when she goes to read and understand a show.

She uses those experiences to learn more. She soaks up theatre whenever she goes to England. Their theatre is well put-together and very creative, sometimes off-the-wall.

She might see a new different architecture style, and can use those pictures later in design ideas.

“Scripts that might seem very surface-level, because of different experiences I’ve had, I can look at it in a different way.”

When she has a free day, she might sit down with a guitar and learn how to play. She could destress when she was younger by playing piano. Learning helps her get frustration out. She’s been doing some more songwriting in the last few years. She did a little online competition for herself to write a song or a portion of something every month, and she’d be sitting in her room the night of the deadline trying to come up with something. She likes crocheting and painting and other things. Artsy things fill her up when she has too much going on.

She’s definitely tried a lot of different things. Sometimes they’re good for one time and she’s done with it.

“It’s important to dive into things that you’re passionate about – continue to find opportunities to grow in that and to learn, as long as it’s something that you enjoy doing. Also, it’s important to continue growing and looking for things that you might be interested in.”

Theatre wasn’t something she thought about doing until grad school. It was mostly just things that came up.

“If an opportunity comes up to try something new, go for it. You might hate it, but you’re gonna learn from that experience, and understand what you like and what you don’t like.”

Setting aside a few minutes, even monthly, just going for it is the best way.

“You have to work at it. It’s not something that just pops up. You have to set aside some time in order to pursue things you’re interested in…even 10 minutes a day.”

She wants to continue with songwriting. She’s always had ideas for plays and writing things, so she wants to write a play by doing it in 10 minutes a day. She has experiences she thinks she could write about someday. Right now she’s in a good place with her job, but in her spare time, she didn’t realize how much she enjoyed designing sets and props until she had to scale back on them, so she’d enjoy picking those up again when the opportunities come up.