Kate Webster has penciled me in to her fat black DayRunner, and I feel like one of the Chosen. Now I know that no matter how busy her day gets, Webster will be there for our interview, for once a scribble enters that scheduling Bible, that scribble becomes law.
She keeps up her DayRunner as though her life depends on it. And in a way, it does. As a Speech junior and artistic co-producer of the 59th Annual Dolphin Show, the largest and most expensive student-run musical in the nation, meetings and schedules are her business. Luckily, they’re also her forte.
It’s an October Sunday around 10 p.m., and Webster starts the design meeting, hurricane speed. She shuffles through scripts, handing them out to the theatrical designers who have assembled for what will soon become a very long design meeting. “The Secret Garden” has been chosen for this year’s Dolphin Show, and (warning: understatement ahead) there’s a lot to do between now and the show’s Jan. 19 opening. Tonight the director, choreographer, costumer and several other members of the design team will go through the script, scene by scene, and figure out how to make the stage as beautiful as the story.
The meeting is informal. The scenic designer is brushing her teeth as she opens the door to the apartment. But Webster is all business, her cell phone epoxied to her ear, tracking down the designers who haven’t yet shown up, leaving messages that sound as sweet as candy but contain just enough of a subliminal “get your ass over here now” missive that several soon rush in, apologetic.
As a producer, Webster’s job includes scheduling and leading meetings, recruiting designers and crew members, handling the show’s substantial budget, and knowing the show backward and forward so she can act as a resource for the director and designers. Tonight her job is to keep the meeting on track, and she takes it seriously. Yes, Webster is all business. That is, until she giggles and announces that she’s brought cookies for everyone.
“You’re so nice. Did you make these, Kate?” someone asks.
“Hell no!” Webster says immediately. She giggles again. Webster’s got one of the all-time great laughs, truly gleeful, and it stands out among the others in the room — just like her long blonde pigtails, Tang-orange shirt and pink socks against this room full of theater people in the requisite dark attire.
Her friend Matt Amador, a Speech junior, said recently that he noticed she wears pale pink and black together a lot, and he thinks that suits her. “The pink because you’re cute,” he tells her slyly, “and the black because … I don’t know … you’re naughty too.”
Several days later, when we sit down for our “appointment,” Webster is cutting up black foam board with precise, nearly surgical incisions, on the floor of her living room. “Should we do this later?” I ask. “When you’re not busy?” She gives me that famous laugh and a highly amused look that says, “And when would that be?” No, we can talk now, Webster says. She can do several things at once. And she proceeds to.
She’s making a model of a stage for her scenic design class, and her rendition of Medea’s palace steps will soon burst forth from this tiny, unfinished black box. Webster adamantly believes that people who want to work in the theater, and the arts in general, should learn to do many jobs well. And, as one would expect from someone as unfailingly straightforward as Webster, she is taking her own advice.
Before she was asked to co-produce the Dolphin Show, in a little over two years at NU, Webster assistant-produced two student shows and was the assistant stage manager for two more. She also stage-managed two university mainstage plays and produced a small student show.
On top of that, she’s co-chair of Vertigo Productions, a cutting-edge campus theater group that produces only student-written and student-adapted plays. She will take a directing class soon, and she’s even completing a minor in business institutions.
If Webster enters a room like a hurricane, she talks like a tornado. When I ask what makes a good producer, she launches into a treatise so impassioned that I want to scrawl it down in its entirety. My hand gets sore.
To succeed in any facet of the arts management world, Webster says, one has “got to find a balance between being an M.B.A.-type person and being a really artsy person.” If you’re too “artsy,” often you can’t divorce yourself from all the creative things you want to do with a show and focus on how to get them done. But if you’re too staunchly business-oriented, you can’t relate to the actors and director and designers, Webster says. That interaction is what she loves most about her many jobs — that and solving problems.
When I express a little skepticism about the creativity of problem-solving, Webster has a definite opinion on that as well: “I don’t know how problem-solving couldn’t be considered creative. You have to think of how to do something in a way that isn’t the normal way.” Her eyes shine, and she bubbles over with the theory that success is a result of your mindset. “If you say, ‘hell yeah, I can produce the fucking Dolphin Show,’ then you’ll fucking be able to do it!” she exclaims, like a motivational speaker with a penchant for profane words. She’s in high gear.
Apparently, high gear isn’t unusual for Webster. Matthew Trombetta, the Music/Weinberg senior who is directing the Dolphin Show this year, says, “Kate is the fastest human being on the planet in terms of getting things done.” After a pause, he adds, “Maybe too fast for her own good, sometimes.”
“Yeah, I get stressed out,” Webster laughs, still fiddling with her foam model on the living room floor. “I put so much of myself into what I’m doing, if it doesn’t go as planned, it’s upsetting. Sometimes I need to go home and cry and talk to my friends.” And suddenly, with Webster’s mention of her friends, the eye of the storm descends upon us. Webster puts down her Exacto knife and just talks. She talks about watching “The Simpsons” and being goofy with her roommates and solving her friends’ perpetual romance problems and she’s calm. I realize that, though she stays on her cell phone almost constantly, more than half the time she’s chatting with a friend, and she never passes up the chance to lend an ear or give advice or savor a juicy tidbit of gossip in favor of work.
Webster twirls a strand of hair and intones, slowly for once, “While it may seem like your whole world right now, you have to remember it’s just a show. I schedule my life knowing that I’m going to waste a little time. I mean, friends still come before the Dolphin Show.”
And with that, DayRunner in hand, she’s off and running. nyou
Medill junior Elisabeth Abbott is an nyou writer. She can be reached at [email protected].
