SWITCHBOARD OPERATIONS
AT THE CROSSROADS OF STORY AND PLACE
"Please hold while I make that connection..."
We're a site-specific theatre company. We're an experience design company. We're an audio & video design company. We believe that the most interesting stories exist when they collide with the site where they are staged. We believe that a story can create a new lens through which to see a place, and a place can create a new lens through which to see a story.
Executive Producer / Anne E. Kelly
Audio Producer / Nathan McWilliams
OUR TEAM
ANNE E. KELLY
Anne is an experience designer, creative director, and producer. She earned her bachelor's degree in Theatre Arts from Virginia Tech and her master's degree from Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center. Anne spent seven years as a show producer for Walt Disney Imagineering, with a focus on interactive attractions for the parks. Following that, for three years, she led the design of Google's Experience Centers in Tokyo, Sao Paulo, and Dublin -- the physical spaces which showcase Google products and technologies for their most important clients and partners.
NATHAN MCWILLIAMS
Nathan is an audio producer, sound designer, and audio / video engineer. He spent eight years at Walt Disney Imagineering designing audio and video systems for Disney Parks & Resorts, including Shanghai Disneyland and New Fantasyland at Magic Kingdom in Walt Disney World. An avid lindy-hop dancer and DJ, he earned his Bachelor's Degree in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University, with an emphasis in audio engineering.
SERVICES
EXPERIENCE DESIGN
From Blue Sky to Turnover, we conceptualize guest experiences in a story-driven way, focusing on how your messages can manifest with highly media-driven and truly interactive spaces. We develop the necessary tools for communicating the idea, from concept documents and presentations to technical drawing sets.
PRODUCING & PROJECT MANAGEMENT
We're old hands at shepherding a project from the earliest stages over the finish line into delivery and execution. We can help you build your team, develop a strategy and manage a multi-phase design process.
AUDIO & VIDEO ENGINEERING
Starting with the creative intent, we can design an AV system to suit your needs.
SOUND DESIGN
For immersive and location-based settings, as well as traditional proscenium houses, we can coordinate and create all aspects of a soundscape, from music composition and supervision, to foley.
PROJECTS IN DEVELOPMENT
Working at the intersection of story and place, we're taking familiar stories and subverting audience expectations by placing them in unexpected environments which the audience has the agency to explore themselves.
LENI RIEFENSTAHL IS GOING TO TELL YOU THE TRUTH
An original musical by Christie Baugher, Leni Riefenstahl Is Going To Tell You The Truth is the hallucinatory retelling of her own story by the title character, Hitler’s “it girl” propaganda filmmaker, but also arguably the most technically talented female filmmaker of the 20th century. Smacking of Brechtian distancing techniques, Leni and her US Army back-up singers stage her rise to prominence… and lead the audience to wonder -- was she complicit in the deaths of 6 million Jews in the process of creating her art?
THE CRUCIBLE
Based on the events of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, Arthur Miller’s scathing rebuke of McCarthy and the HUAC hearings comes to life for audiences in a completely new staging concept. With the backdrop of a period-appropriate colonial village, and a haunting soundscape composed by Lindsay Pitts of GEMS, the audience will weave in and around the action -- intimate interactions and angry mobs alike, voyeuristically observing the Salem villagers as paranoia and hysteria take hold.
THE OSCAR WILDE PROJECT
A “moveable feast” throughout various locations in Dublin, this narrative follows the life and works of this notorious Victorian writer and aesthete. Characters will guide the audience through pubs, parks, theatre dressing rooms, and hotel lobbies, to experience both Wilde’s works (children’s tales, poetry, drama, and criticism) as well as the inextricable biographical elements of Wilde’s life.
This play will explore themes of subjectivity -- and a society at the breaking point between Victorian hypocrisy and modernism. What Third Rail’s Then She Fell is to the life and works of Lewis Carroll, The Oscar Wilde Project is to this Irish literary legend.
INFORMATION FOR FOREIGNERS
In an age of overreaching government and enemies of the state, never has Griselda Gambaro’s groundbreaking work of site-specific theatre been more relevant to an American audience. Written in 1971 to explore the pain of the Argentine Dirty Wars and the desaparecidos, this play subverts the expectations of theatrical form and the audience. The audience is divided into groups and follows a “guide” through a large house to experience twenty scenes, until the culmination -- witnessed all together.
OUR COUNTRY'S GOOD
“Unexpected situations are often matched by unexpected virtues, are they not?”
Timberlake Wertenbaker’s 1988 play based on the novel The Playmaker by Thomas Keneally -- this work explores the power of theatre to bridge divides between humans. We drop the audience in among convicts in the Botany Bay penal colony in the 1780s and their Royal Marine guards, and a project to “enrich” the inmates by staging a play begins to blur the lines between the captives and the captors. Staged in a site-specific manner in the haunting backdrop of Dublin’s Kilmainham Gaol (built in 1796), the audience moves throughout the space to encounter intimate scenes between prisoners, rehearsals, and the ultimate performance of the play-within-the-play, George Farquhar’s Restoration comedy The Recruiting Officer.