 Media Credit: Douglas Gilpin Seeing the light - Students perform a scene in Henderson and OBU's joint production of "The Crucible" in the spring of 2007. Theatre professor Doug Gilpin's lighting design for the show has been featured in a textbook.
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Douglas Gilpin, professor of theatre, used to have dreams of being a big actor one day. He performed in various plays at his junior college in Tyler, Texas. His dreams were still flourishing as student at Texas Tech until he met Forrest Newlin, a theatre professor and set designer at his college. Newlin specialized in stage design, was a technical director and taught work-study at Texas Tech. He had been published in an earlier edition of "Scene Design and Stage Lighting," the textbook that Gilpin still uses today. Gilpin, a college student in his twenties, needed money, so he worked for Newlin in work-study and got thrown into a stage lighting job for awhile. When a stage design and construction position came up, he jumped right in. Gilpin received his MFA in design and never looked back. Gilpin now does stage design for all the productions at Henderson, and sometimes serves as technical director, lighting designer or stage director or sometimes all at once.
"It's really neat creating these worlds," Gilpin said.
His 3-D/2-D storytelling set work for "The Winter's Tale" was spotted at a United States Institute for Theatre Technology, Inc. (USITT) national convention in Phoenix by a textbook publisher. The publisher e-mailed Gilpin and asked him to send some photos of his work so they could go into the ninth edition of "Scene Design and Stage Lighting." Gilpin was thrilled to be featured in the same textbook that he once read in college, not to mention the same textbook Newlin was once in.
"[I was] pretty proud. [It was] pretty cool," Gilpin said.
Gilpin sent in 12 pictures of his works, and two were chosen. A hand-sketched layout for the set of the show "Comedy of Errors," a design from The Oklahoma Shakespearean Festival, was published; and a picture taken from his scenic and lighting design in the 2007 Henderson/OBU joint production of "The Crucible" ended up in the textbook as well.
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