Faculty member designs 4 shows for Summer Theatre

Associate Dean and long-time Drama faculty member, Bill Chesney is not relaxing this summer.  He is designing four out of the five shows in the Lighthouse Festival Theatre's 35th anniversary season.  The premise for the season was to invite back the last five Artistic Directors of the Port Dover summer theatre.  Since Bill has worked with all of them at that theatre since 1994, he was asked to design all the shows.  Much to his wife's chagrin he said yes, except for the last one, as even he needs a little bit of down time during the summer.

The four shows that Bill is designing are all written by Canadian playwrights:

• The Foursome (Norm Foster), directed by Robert More
• Test Drive (Dave Carley), directed by Simon Johnston
• Who's Under Where (Marcia Kash/Douglas Hughes), directed by Simon Joynes
• Trying (Joanna McClelland Glass), directed by Derek Ritschel

Bill has been designing for more than 35 years with his first professional design being for The Good Doctor by Neil Simon in 1976.  It was an homage to playwright Anton Chekhov when Bill was in his graduating year at Ryerson's brand-new theatre school.  Since joining the Department of Drama and Speech Communication in 1995, Bill has continued to design professionally in his "off-time", usually one or two designs a summer.  Bill states:

Prior to working at UWaterloo, Bill was the Academic Coordinator for the Technical Program at Sheridan College, where he also taught scenic painting and design.  In 1993, Prof. Joel Greenberg invited Bill to be a visiting artist with the program and to design one or two productions per year.  The fit was so good that after 2 years Bill became a full-time faculty member with the Department.

In 2007, Bill took on the role of Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies for the Faculty

 of Arts. Because of the enormous amount of work associated with this position, he has not been able to teach as much as he had, but has continued to design for one Department production annually. This fall he will design the set & props for The Importance of Being Earnest.