Q&A WITH HAMILTON’S NEW THEATER FACULTY

By Zoe Regner ‘26

The Continental: What did you specialize in or work on before Hamilton?

Prof. Jess Buttery: Here, I’m a production manager, so I’m kind of the eye in the sky kind of person, but professionally, I do lighting design.

Prof. Emily K. Harrison: I’ve been teaching at colleges and universities for the last fifteen years or so, and I run a professional theater company in Boulder, Colorado. So I’m trained mostly as an actor and a director, and I do a lot of devising work, meaning that my company as an ensemble makes a lot of new work together. We present a lot of world and regional premiers in Boulder and Denver.

Prof. Tobin Ost: For the last twenty-plus years, I’ve been working on scenic and costume design for new musicals. There is something very exciting about starting with something that has no prior DNA or no preconceived idea of how it’s going to look or sound. It really makes you proactive in the whole process.

The Continental: What are your values as an educator?

Buttery: A lot of trial and error. We can try and fail, and that’s okay. We’ll try it, and if that doesn’t work, we’ll figure out a different solution or something new, and eventually, we’ll get to an answer.

Harrison: I really value a backand-forth with my students—a collaboration. Certainly there are things I know about because I’ve been to school longer, been on the planet longer, but I don’t know everything. I’m much more interested in a classroom that feels more collaborative, [where] it’s not just me saying ‘this is the thing you need to know.’

Ost: Demystifying theater and design specifically and making it accessible to everyone. I think a lot of people may come to my class and be like ‘I’m not an artist,’ but I’m here to say you don’t have to be an artist in my class. Design is very much communication, and sure, it’s to some degree about what you generate, but it’s equally important [that] you communicate with the audience. What pieces are you utilizing that say something [and] help tell the story?

The Continental: Do you have any advice for students, particularly those in theater?

Buttery: No—everyone that I’ve encountered is super self-motivated, and it’s so important in a post-pandemic world that you are in the room to do theater, and everyone that I’ve encountered is already really good at that. All of these people already show up, and they’re really excited about the work. So no real advice. Just keep on keeping on.

Harrison: So much of the time you never know what your career is going to look like in theater. I think people come out of high school thinking, ‘I want to do big musicals; I want to be on Broadway.’ And Broadway is such a tiny portion of theater happening in the United States, and I’d have to say a lot of the time it’s not even the most interesting theater happening or the most compelling. There are lots of smaller cities across the United States that have great art scenes that do some of the best theater in the world.

Ost: I think we all leave school with this idea that the work you do needs to be pure and the exact thing you studied, but give yourself latitude and breadth to move around a little. What’s important is your trajectory over the course of your whole life, and it’s hard to have that perspective when you’re only one, two, three, four years outside of school. You’ll always be an artist, and you don’t need a job or a lack of a job to tell you that you are or that you aren’t.

The Continental: Any other thoughts about theater?

Buttery: I’m all about theater being a conversation starter. When you’re starting to think about what kind of stories you want to tell and how to start the conversation around topics that might be hard but really relevant, I think theater is a really great tool for that [and for] exploring what it means to be human in the modern world.

Harrison: There’s something that happens when you have people in a room together, witnessing and performing and sharing in a space. Film and television are great, but there’s something for me about having people in the room, having an audience witness and hopefully participate in the process and the performance.

There’s something about that exchange between the audience and the performer that’s magical.

Ost: What’s interesting in theater is that the same production, the same show, can be done by three different directors or theaters and the outcome will always be different. Change one of those ingredients, and you’ll have a different show.