This Designer Is Making Some of the Most Innovative Theater Sets in Town
Scene designer Julia Hayes Welch has built sets that include a working kitchen, a bus stop and an island beach
By Gwendolyn Elliott August 17, 2018
This article originally appeared in the September 2018 issue of Seattle magazine.
This article appears in print in the September 2018 issue. Read more from the Fall Arts Preview feature story here. Click here to subscribe.
So much of the theater experience is in the details and behind the scenes: the angle of lighting on a prop, the timing of an entrance. It’s here you’ll find freelance scenic designer Julia Hayes Welch at work, considering the best approach to her next project. At the moment, that involves what’s for dinner.
“Right now, I’m working on Skylight,” she said during a recent phone call, referring to David Hare’s 1995 play about star-crossed lovers that opens ACT–A Contemporary Theatre’s 2018–2019 season this month. “The actors cook dinner together on stage—boiling pasta, sautéing onions—and then [they] eat it, so I have to design a working kitchen.”
It’s a technical challenge, but she’s the woman for it. In the past year alone, Welch, who teaches in the theater department at Pacific Lutheran University and at the University of Washington (where she received her MFA in scenic design), has designed an exploding multimedia set for ArtsWest (An Octoroon); an island beach, complete with sand, seagrasses and working raised garden beds for Onward Ho! Productions (Big Rock); a dismal bus stop of unfulfilled dreams for Seattle Public Theater (Ironbound); and a live action set based on a beloved book and animated film for Book-It Repertory (Howl’s Moving Castle).
“The thing I like about a set is that it can hold a metaphor or poetic gesture that you can’t get as readily from film or TV. When I design a set, I’m looking for a mood or feeling that captures the heart of a story, to balance the realism with some poetry,” Welch says.
By all indications, Seattle’s theater world enthusiastically subscribes to such a vision; Welch’s drama dance card is filled clear through April 2019, with eight local productions down the pike. “[Julia] never fails to bring her keen intelligence, care of story, collaborative spirit and incredible imagination to the table…and God love her, a sense of ‘Let’s do this,’” says Seattle Public Theater co-artistic director Kelly Kitchens. “She says ‘yes’ with a spark in her eye.”
Welch on stage this season:
Skylight, 9/7–9/30; acttheatre.org
Arms and the Man, 10/23–11/18; seattleshakespeare.org
My Ántonia, 11/29–12/30; book-it.org
Follow Us
AANHPI Month: Where to Celebrate, Eat, and Learn Around Seattle
From festivals and museum exhibits to food tours and historic neighborhoods, here are a few ways to mark the month across the region.
Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander Heritage Month—known as AANHPI Month—is observed in the U.S. each May. It began as a weeklong observance in 1978 and expanded to the full month in 1992. Asian, Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities in the United States extend back much further, including to the late 16th century, when…
Black Panther Park in Skyway Becomes First Black Panther Park in the World
The new community garden honors the Black Panther Party’s legacy of food justice and the Skyway neighbors who helped bring it to life.
On a sunny Sunday earlier this month, at the corner of 75th Avenue and Renton Avenue South, the community gathered for the opening of Skyway’s Black Panther Park. Inspired by the Black Panther’s Free Breakfast for School Children program that compelled the federal government to provide breakfast in schools, Black Panther Park is a community…
Rearview Mirror: A Family Coming Apart, SIFF, and My First Fashion Show
Things I did, saw, ate, learned, or read in the past week (or so).
The Family House A house can hold a lot, and Seattle Rep’s Appropriate knows that. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ Tony-winning play, directed here by Timothy McCuen Piggee, drops the Lafayette siblings into their late father’s hoarded, falling-apart Arkansas plantation home for an estate sale, and lets the whole thing crack open from there. The sibling dynamics are…
Studio Sessions: Raili Jänese
The Kirkland painter brings a playful eye to daily life and the little rituals of being human.
Artist Raili Jänese pays close attention to the small stuff. It might be a goose on the move, a rabbit in the yard, or a person lost in the rituals of coffee or cooking. The Estonian-born artist, now based in Kirkland, makes colorful acrylic works that turn everyday behavior—human and animal alike—into something funny and…